Motivational Quotes

Ideas

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

- Rickover, Hyman G.

Best Quotes about Ideas

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

John Cage

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

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

Canetti, Elias

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

Simpson, E. L.

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

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

Horton, Doug

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

Picasso, Pablo

When patterns are broken, new worlds can emerge.

Kupferberg, Tuli

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.

10.

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.

11.

An invasion of armies can be resisted, but not an idea whose time has come.

Victor Hugo

12.

Ideas... they have the power

Hill, Napoleon

13.

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

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

14.

A good idea plus capable men cannot fail; it is better than money in the bank.

Berry, John

15.

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

Brown, Les

16.

It's very good for an idea to be commonplace. The important thing is that a new idea should develop out of what is already there so that it soon becomes an old acquaintance. Old acquaintances aren't by any means always welcome, but at least one can't be mistaken as to who or what they are.

Fitzgerald, Penelope

17.

Very simple ideas lie within the reach only of complex minds

Gourmont, Remy De

18.

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

19.

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

Bridgman, P. W.

20.

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

Walter Bagehot

21.

Everything begins with an idea.

Nightingale, Earl

22.

Go out and buy yourself a five-cent pencil and a ten-cent notebook and begin to write down some million-dollar ideas for yourself.

Grinde, Bob

23.

A single idea, if it is right, saves us the labor of an infinity of experiences.

Maritain, Jacques

24.

We like to test things... no matter how good an idea sounds, test it first.

Block, Henry

25.

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

Brande, Dorothea

26.

To love an idea is to love it a little more than one should.

Rostand, Jean

27.

Every new idea is an impossibility until it is born.

Brown, Ron

28.

Nothing dies harder than a bad idea.

Cameron, Julie

29.

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

30.

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

Marquis, Don

31.

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

Einstein, Albert

32.

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

Keynes, John Maynard

33.

Ideas are, in truth, force.

James, Henry

34.

An idea is worth nothing if it has no champion.

35.

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

36.

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

Alfred North Whitehead

37.

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

William O. Douglas

38.

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.

39.

Ideas control the world.

Garfield, James A.

40.

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

Samuel Goldwyn

41.

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

Gibson, Tobias S.

42.

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

43.

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

Hector Berlioz

44.

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

Oliver Wendell Holmes

45.

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

Nelson, George

46.

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