Motivational Quotes

Ideas

Little words hurt big ideas.

- Newton, Howard W.

Best Quotes about Ideas

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

Anatole France

A mind once stretched by a new idea never regains its original dimensions.

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

Man's mind, stretched by a new idea, never goes back to its original dimensions.

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

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

Bachelard, Gaston

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

Bridgman, P. W.

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

Bunche, Ralph

Everything begins with an idea.

Nightingale, Earl

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

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

Twain, Mark

10.

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

James, William

11.

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

12.

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

Simpson, E. L.

13.

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

Marquis, Don

14.

The difference between people and ideas is... only superficial.

Rorty, Richard

15.

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

Harris, Sidney J.

16.

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

17.

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

18.

Ideas... they have the power

Hill, Napoleon

19.

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

20.

The point, simply, is that we are doing more rediscovering these days than discovering coming anew upon truths that ignorant people refused to examine, over the centuries, because the wise people who held custody of the fundamental truths of nature were unpopular.

Williamson, John

21.

An idea is a putting truth in check-mate.

Gasset, Jose Ortega Y

22.

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.

23.

They come into being not through demonstration but through revelation, through the medium of powerful personalities.

Einstein, Albert

24.

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

Hugo, Victor

25.

An idea discovered is much better possessed.

Young

26.

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

27.

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

Proust, Marcel

28.

Every new idea is an impossibility until it is born.

Brown, Ron

29.

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

30.

The simple joy of taking an idea into one's own hands and giving it proper form, that's exciting.

Nelson, George

31.

Once I thought ideas were exceptions not the rule. That is not so. Ideas are so plentiful that they ride by on air. You've only to reach out and snatch one...

Mckeun, Rod

32.

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

33.

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

34.

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

35.

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

Brown, Les

36.

Ideas control the world.

Garfield, James A.

37.

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

38.

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

Hugo, Victor

39.

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

40.

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

Ernst, Morris L.

41.

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

John Cage

42.

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

Pound, Ezra

43.

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

Everson, Ray D.

44.

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

Lynch, David

45.

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

46.

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

Hortense Calisher

47.

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

Glasgow, Arnold H.

48.

Ideas too are a life and a world.

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

49.

An idea is the only level which moves the world.