Motivational Quotes

Ideas

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

- Proust, Marcel

Best Quotes about Ideas

Ideas are the roots of creation.

Dimnet, Ernest

It's easy to come up with new ideas; the hard part is letting go of what worked for you two years ago, but will soon be out-of-date.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

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

Judith Brocklehurst

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

Sir Frederick G. Banting

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

Howard Aiken

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

Many ideas are good for a limited time -- not forever.

Townsend, Robert

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

Pauling, Linus

Labor gives birth to ideas.

Rohn, Jim

10.

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

Koysis, Ted

11.

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

Alfred North Whitehead

12.

We are governed not by armies, but by ideas.

Caird, Mona

13.

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

Chamfort, Sebastien-Roch Nicolas De

14.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

15.

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

Rohn, Jim

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.

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

Hyman Rickover

18.

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

Simpson, E. L.

19.

When patterns are broken, new worlds can emerge.

Kupferberg, Tuli

20.

The vitality of thought is in adventure. Ideas won't keep. Something must be done about them. When the idea is new, its custodians have fervor, live for it, and if need be, die for it.

Whitehead, Alfred North

21.

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

Rorty, Richard

22.

But how shall I get ideas? Keep your wits open! Observe! Observe! Study! Study! But above all, Think! Think! And when a noble image is indelibly impressed upon the mind -- Act!

Marden, Orison Swett

23.

Ideas control the world.

Garfield, James A.

24.

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

25.

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

Harris, Sidney J.

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.

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

28.

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

29.

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

Ernst, Morris L.

30.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

31.

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

32.

Everything begins with an idea.

Nightingale, Earl

33.

The way to combat noxious ideas is with other ideas. The way to combat falsehoods is with truth.

William O. Douglas

34.

The best ideas are common property.

Seneca

35.

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

Pound, Ezra

36.

It is the nature of thought to find its way into action.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

37.

Ideas are a capital that bears interest only in the hands of talent.

Rivarol, Antoine

38.

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

39.

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

P. B. Medawar

40.

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

41.

Do not follow the ideas of others, but learn to listen to the voice within yourself. Your body and mind will become clear and you will realize the unity of all things.

Dogen

42.

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

Hector Berlioz

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.

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

45.

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

Bridgman, P. W.

46.

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

47.

An idea discovered is much better possessed.

Young

48.

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

Hill, Napoleon

49.

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

50.

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