Motivational Quotes

Ideas

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

- Marquis, Don

Best Quotes about Ideas

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

Trotsky, Leon

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

There is no adequate defense, except stupidity, against the impact of a new idea.

Bridgman, P. W.

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

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

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

Bunche, Ralph

A great idea is usually original to more than one discoverer. Great ideas come when the world needs them. Great ideas surround the world's ignorance and press for admission.

Phelps, Elizabeth Stuart

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

Glasgow, Arnold H.

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

Brande, Dorothea

10.

Whenever I hear people talking about liberal ideas, I am always astounded that men should love to fool themselves with empty sounds. An idea should never be liberal; it must be vigorous, positive, and without loose ends so that it may fulfill its divine mission and be productive. The proper place for liberality is in the realm of the emotions.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

11.

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

Sir Frederick G. Banting

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.

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

Frost, Robert

14.

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

15.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

16.

It is not always by plugging away at a difficulty and sticking to it that one overcomes it; often it is by working on the one next to it. Some things and some people have to be approached obliquely, at an angle.

Gide, Andre

17.

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

18.

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

19.

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

Everson, Ray D.

20.

Ideas move fast when their time comes.

Heilbrun, Carolyn

21.

Very simple ideas lie within the reach only of complex minds

Gourmont, Remy De

22.

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

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

23.

The idea is in my head to put it down is nothing.

Avery, Milton

24.

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

Hyman Rickover

25.

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

P. B. Medawar

26.

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.

27.

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

28.

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

29.

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

Twain, Mark

30.

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

Hector Berlioz

31.

Ideas are, in truth, force.

James, Henry

32.

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

Koysis, Ted

33.

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

James, William

34.

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

35.

The ideas dictate everything, you have to be true to that or you're dead.

Lynch, David

36.

Labor gives birth to ideas.

Rohn, Jim

37.

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

Harris, Sidney J.

38.

I had a monumental idea this morning, but I didn't like it.

Samuel Goldwyn

39.

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

Howard Aiken

40.

What you need is an idea.

Lear, William P.

41.

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

Whitehead, Alfred North

42.

Lots of people know a good thing the minute the other fellow sees it first.

Hodges, Job E.

43.

Ideas are fatal to caste.

Forster, Edward M.

44.

Man's fear of ideas is probably the greatest dike holding back human knowledge and happiness.

Ernst, Morris L.

45.

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

Simpson, E. L.

46.

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

Canetti, Elias

47.

Ideas control the world.

Garfield, James A.

48.

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

Proust, Marcel

49.

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

50.

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

Sutton, Percy