Motivational Quotes

Ideas

If you want to kill any idea in the world today, get a committee working on it.

- Kettering, Charles F.

Best Quotes about Ideas

People find ideas a bore because they do not distinguish between live ones and stuffed ones on a shelf.

Pound, Ezra

Great people talk about ideas. Small people talk about other people.

Gibson, Tobias S.

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

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

Every composer knows the anguish and despair occasioned by forgetting ideas which one had no time to write down.

Hector Berlioz

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

Trotsky, Leon

Nothing is more dangerous than an idea, when you only have one.

Chartier, Alain

When patterns are broken, new worlds can emerge.

Kupferberg, Tuli

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

If you want to get across an idea, wrap it up in a person.

Bunche, Ralph

10.

Many ideas grow better when transplanted into another mind than in the one where they sprung up.

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

11.

If you have the same ideas as everybody else but have them one week earlier than everyone else then you will be hailed as a visionary. But if you have them five years earlier you will be named a lunatic.

Jones, Barry

12.

Do something. If it doesn't work, do something else. No idea is too crazy.

Jim Hightower

13.

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

Horton, Doug

14.

It is a lesson which all history teaches wise men, to put trust in ideas, and not in circumstances.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

15.

Long is the road from conception to completion.

Moliere

16.

Never hesitate to steal a good idea.

Neuharth, Al

17.

Ideas are, in truth, force.

James, Henry

18.

The best ideas are common property.

Seneca

19.

The greatest achievements of the human mind are generally received with distrust.

Schopenhauer, Arthur

20.

Ideas won't work unless you do.

21.

There is one thing stronger than all the armies in the world, and that is an idea whose time has come.

Hugo, Victor

22.

Don't worry about people stealing an idea. If it's original, you will have to ram it down their throats.

Howard Aiken

23.

A man is not necessarily intelligent because he has plenty of ideas, any more than he is a good general because he has plenty of soldiers.

Chamfort, Sebastien-Roch Nicolas De

24.

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

Rickover, Hyman G.

25.

The most important thing in science is not so much to obtain new facts as to discover new ways of thinking about them.

Bragg, Sir William

26.

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

Bachelard, Gaston

27.

One of the greatest pains to human nature is the pain of a new idea.

Walter Bagehot

28.

Ideas are the roots of creation.

Dimnet, Ernest

29.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

30.

In Texas, years ago, almost all of the oil came from surface operations. Then someone got the idea that there were greater sources of supply deeper down. A well was drilled five thousand feet deep. The result? A gusher. Too many of us operate on the surface. We never go deep enough to find supernatural resources. The result is, we never operate at our best. More time and investment is involved to go deep but a gusher will pay off.

Montapert, Alfred A.

31.

The ideas I stand for are not mine. I borrowed them from Socrates. I swiped them from Chesterfield. I stole them from Jesus. And I put them in a book. If you don't like their rules, whose would you use?

Carnegie, Dale

32.

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

33.

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

34.

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

Whitehead, Alfred North

35.

Getting an idea should be like sitting down on a pin. It should make you jump up and do something.

Simpson, E. L.

36.

There is no prosperity, trade, art, city, or great material wealth of any kind, but if you trace it home, you will find it rooted in a thought of some individual man. --

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

37.

Get your ideas on paper and study them. Do not let them go to waste!

Brown, Les

38.

It's easy to come up with new ideas; the hard part is letting go of what worked for you two years ago, but will soon be out-of-date.

Oech, Roger Von

39.

Ideas not coupled with action never become bigger than the brain cells they occupied.

Glasgow, Arnold H.

40.

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

Oliver Wendell Holmes

41.

The best way to have a good idea is to have a lot of ideas.

Pauling, Linus

42.

Think for thyself one good idea, but known to be thine own, is better than a thousand gleaned from fields by others sown.

Wilson, Alexander

43.

If you want to kill any idea in the world today, get a committee working on it.

Kettering, Charles F.

44.

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.

45.

Ideas move fast when their time comes.

Heilbrun, Carolyn

46.

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

47.

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

48.

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

Hill, Napoleon

49.

Every revolutionary idea seems to evoke three stages of reaction. They may be summed up by the phrases: (1) It's completely impossible. (2) It's possible, but it's not worth doing. (3) I said it was a good idea all along.

Clarke, Arthur C.

50.

There are well-dressed foolish ideas, just as there are will-dressed fools.

Chamfort, Sebastien-Roch Nicolas De