Motivational Quotes

Ideas

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

- Rorty, Richard

Best Quotes about Ideas

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

Very simple ideas lie within the reach only of complex minds

Gourmont, Remy De

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

Hyman Rickover

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

Bunche, Ralph

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

Hugo, Victor

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

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

Rorty, Richard

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

William O. Douglas

An idea is a putting truth in check-mate.

Gasset, Jose Ortega Y

10.

It first appeared like a crazy idea. It turned out he had a great idea.

Munro, J. Richard

11.

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

Twain, Mark

12.

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

13.

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

14.

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

15.

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

16.

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

Simpson, E. L.

17.

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

James, William

18.

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

Avery, Milton

19.

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

Brande, Dorothea

20.

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

Jim Hightower

21.

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

Walter Bagehot

22.

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

Judith Brocklehurst

23.

Every revolutionary idea seems to evoke three stages of reaction. They may be summed up by the phrases: (1) It's completely impossible. (2) It's possible, but it's not worth doing. (3) I said it was a good idea all along.

Clarke, Arthur C.

24.

Ideas are, in truth, force.

James, Henry

25.

A pile of rocks ceases to be a rock when somebody contemplates it with the idea of a cathedral in mind.

Saint-Exupery, Antoine De

26.

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

Lynch, David

27.

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

28.

Never hesitate to steal a good idea.

Neuharth, Al

29.

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

30.

An idea is worth nothing if it has no champion.

31.

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

Howard Aiken

32.

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

Maritain, Jacques

33.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

34.

The world moves, and ideas that were good once are not always good.

35.

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

Keynes, John Maynard

36.

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

37.

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.

38.

Some people entertain ideas; others put them to work.

39.

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

Oliver Wendell Holmes

40.

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

Bachelard, Gaston

41.

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

Pauling, Linus

42.

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

Samuel Goldwyn

43.

Little words hurt big ideas.

Newton, Howard W.

44.

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

John Cage

45.

Nothing dies harder than a bad idea.

Cameron, Julie

46.

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.

47.

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

48.

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

49.

Ideas control the world.

Garfield, James A.

50.

What you need is an idea.

Lear, William P.