Motivational Quotes

Ideas

The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.

- Keynes, John Maynard

Best Quotes about Ideas

Greater than the tread of mighty armies is an idea whose time has come.

Hugo, Victor

Ideas can be life-changing. Sometimes all you need to open the door is just one more good idea.

Rohn, Jim

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

Howard Aiken

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

An idea is a point of departure and no more. As soon as you elaborate it, it becomes transformed by thought.

Picasso, Pablo

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

Concepts, like individuals, have their histories and are just as incapable of withstanding the ravages of time as are individuals. But in and through all this they retain a kind of homesickness for the scenes of their childhood.

Kierkegaard, S°ren

A powerful idea communicates some of its strength to him who challenges it.

Proust, Marcel

An idea discovered is much better possessed.

Young

10.

Such as take lodgings in a head that's to be let unfurnished.

Butler, Samuel

11.

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

12.

A handsome parson is fit for nothing but ti put ideas into the young woman's heads.

Judith Brocklehurst

13.

A new idea is first condemned as ridiculous and then dismissed as trivial, until finally, it becomes what everybody knows.

James, William

14.

Ideas control the world.

Garfield, James A.

15.

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

Jim Hightower

16.

We are governed not by armies, but by ideas.

Caird, Mona

17.

No one has ever had an idea in a dress suit.

Sir Frederick G. Banting

18.

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

Brown, Les

19.

An idea is a feat of association, and the height of it is a good metaphor.

Frost, Robert

20.

Ideas are, in truth, force.

James, Henry

21.

An idea is a putting truth in check-mate.

Gasset, Jose Ortega Y

22.

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

23.

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

24.

Never hesitate to steal a good idea.

Neuharth, Al

25.

There are only two kinds of scholars; those who love ideas and those who hate them.

Emile Chartier

26.

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

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.

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

Oliver Wendell Holmes

29.

The ideas of a time are like the clothes of a season: they are as arbitrary, as much imposed by some superior will which is seldom explicit. They are utilitarian and political, the instruments of smooth-running government.

Lewis, Wyndham

30.

Every new idea is an impossibility until it is born.

Brown, Ron

31.

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

John Cage

32.

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

Horton, Doug

33.

It is ideas, not vested interests, which are dangerous for good or evil.

Keynes, John Maynard

34.

You look at any giant corporation, and I mean the biggies, and they all started with a guy with an idea, doing it well.

Robbins, Irvine

35.

Ideas are fatal to caste.

Forster, Edward M.

36.

An idea is not responsible for the people who believe in it.

Marquis, Don

37.

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

Chartier, Alain

38.

It doesn't matter how new an idea is: what matters is how new it becomes.

Canetti, Elias

39.

It is by acts and not by ideas that people live.

Anatole France

40.

Ideas too are a life and a world.

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

41.

In every great time there is some one idea at work which is more powerful than any other, and which shapes the events of the time and determines their ultimate issues.

Bacon, Francis

42.

Mere words are cheap and plenty enough, but ideas that rouse and set multitudes thinking come as gold for the mines.

Penny, A. Owen

43.

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

Twain, Mark

44.

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

45.

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

Alfred North Whitehead

46.

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

Chamfort, Sebastien-Roch Nicolas De

47.

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

Glasgow, Arnold H.

48.

Ideas are the roots of creation.