Motivational Quotes

Ideas

So many new ideas are at first strange and horrible, though ultimately valuable that a very heavy responsibility rests upon those who would prevent their dissemination.

- J. B. S. Haldane

Best Quotes about Ideas

If you are possessed by an idea, you find it expressed everywhere, you even smell it.

Mann, Thomas

An idea is a putting truth in check-mate.

Gasset, Jose Ortega Y

Ideas that enter the mind under fire remain there securely and for ever.

Trotsky, Leon

Ideas are fatal to caste.

Forster, Edward M.

I can't understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I'm frightened of the old ones.

John Cage

Good ideas and innovations must be driven into existence by courageous patience.

Rickover, Hyman G.

Not the one who has many ideas, but the one who has a single conviction may become a great person.

Cotvos

When patterns are broken, new worlds can emerge.

Kupferberg, Tuli

It first appeared like a crazy idea. It turned out he had a great idea.

Munro, J. Richard

10.

Nothing dies harder than a bad idea.

Cameron, Julie

11.

If you pray for only one thing, .let it be for an idea.

Sutton, Percy

12.

If a man had as many ideas during the day as he does when he has insomnia, he would make a fortune.

Niblack, Griff

13.

Everyone is a genius at least once a year. The real geniuses simply have their bright ideas closer together.

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

14.

The human mind treats a new idea the same way the body treats a strange protein; it rejects it.

P. B. Medawar

15.

Man's mind, once stretched by a new idea, never regains its original dimensions.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

16.

Ideas lose themselves as quickly as quail, and one must wing them the minute they rise out of the grass, or they are gone.

Kennedy, Thomas F.

17.

We are not to make the ideas of contentment and aspiration quarrel, for God made them fast friends. A man may aspire, and yet be quite content until it is time to raise; and both flying and resting are but parts of one contentment. The very fruit of the gospel is aspiration. It is to the heart what spring is to the earth, making every root, and bud, and bough desire to be more. -

Beecher, Henry Ward

18.

Ideas won't work unless you do.

19.

There are more ideas on earth than intellectuals imagine. And these ideas are more active, stronger, more resistant, more passionate than politicians think. We have to be there at the birth of ideas, the bursting outward of their force: not in books expressing them, but in events manifesting this force, in struggles carried on around ideas, for or against them. Ideas do not rule the world. But it is because the world has ideas... that it is not passively ruled by those who are its leaders or those who would like to teach it, once and for all, what it must think.

Foucault, Michel

20.

An idea is never given to you without you being given the power to make it reality. You must, nevertheless, suffer for it.

Bach, Richard

21.

A new idea is like a child. It's easier to conceive than to deliver.

Koysis, Ted

22.

So long as new ideas are created, sales will continue to reach new highs.

Brande, Dorothea

23.

All opening moves were the same, like in chess. You don't have to come up with anything new, there's no point, because you're both after the same thing anyway. The game soon finds its own way and it's only at that point that you need a strategy.

Paolo Giordano

24.

A crank is someone with a new idea -- until it catches on.

Twain, Mark

25.

Ideas are, in truth, force.

James, Henry

26.

I'm not impressed with the power of a corporate president. I am impressed with the power of ideas.

Mason, Ken

27.

To die for an idea; it is unquestionably noble. But how much nobler it would be if men died for ideas that were true!

H. L. Mencken

28.

Our greatest lack is not money for any undertaking, but rather ideas, If the ideas are good, cash will somehow flow to where it is needed.

Schuller, Robert H.

29.

Great ideas originate in the muscles.

Edison, Thomas A.

30.

Go out and buy yourself a five-cent pencil and a ten-cent notebook and begin to write down some million-dollar ideas for yourself.

Grinde, Bob

31.

Not just in commerce but in the world of ideas too our age is putting on a veritable clearance sale. Everything can be had so dirt cheap that one begins to wander whether in the end anyone will want to make a bid.

Kierkegaard, S°ren

32.

The vitality of thought is in adventure. Ideas won't keep. Something must be done about them.

Alfred North Whitehead

33.

Human life is driven forward by its dim apprehension of notions too general for its existing language.

Whitehead, Alfred North

34.

Little words hurt big ideas.

Newton, Howard W.

35.

Sometimes the best, and only effective, way to kill an idea is to put it into practice.

Harris, Sidney J.

36.

A single idea, if it is right, saves us the labor of an infinity of experiences.

Maritain, Jacques

37.

Good ideas are not adopted automatically. They must be driven into practice with courageous patience.

Hyman Rickover

38.

He was distinguished for ignorance; for he had only one idea, and that was wrong.

Disraeli, Benjamin

39.

An invasion of armies can be resisted, but not an idea whose time has come.

Victor Hugo

40.

Ideas are refined and multiplied in the commerce of minds. In their splendor, images effect a very simple communion of souls.

Bachelard, Gaston

41.

You have to hatch ideas -- and then hitch them.

Everson, Ray D.

42.

Good ideas are a dime a dozen, bad ones are free.

Horton, Doug

43.

I said to myself, I have things in my head that are not like what anyone has taught me - shapes and ideas so near to me - so natural to my way of being and thinking that it hasn't occurred to me to put them down. I decided to start anew, to strip away what I had been taught.

Georgia O'Keeffe

44.

Ideas control the world.

Garfield, James A.

45.

Ideals are like stars: you will not succeed in touching them with your hands, but like the seafaring man on the ocean desert of waters, you choose them as your guides, and following them, you reach your destiny.

Carl Schurz

46.

This is my answer to the gap between ideas and action - I will write it out.

Hortense Calisher

47.

Ideas are invented only as correctives to the past. Through repeated rectification of this kind one may hope to disengage an idea that is valid.

Bachelard, Gaston

48.

All achievements, all earned riches, have their beginning in an idea.

Hill, Napoleon

49.

The world moves, and ideas that were good once are not always good.

50.

Ideas are powerful things, requiring not a studious contemplation but an action, even if it is only an inner action. Their acquisition obligates each man in some way to change his life, even if it is only his inner life. They demand to be stood for. They dictate where a man must concentrate his vision. They determine his moral and intellectual priorities. They provide him with allies and make him enemies. In short, ideas impose an interest in their ultimate fate which goes far beyond the realm of the merely reasonable.

Decter, Midge