Motivational Quotes

Ideas

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

- Rorty, Richard

Best Quotes about Ideas

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

An idea is the only level which moves the world.

Corey, Arthur F.

Everything begins with an idea.

Nightingale, Earl

If you are possessed by an idea, you find it expressed everywhere, you even smell it.

Mann, Thomas

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

P. B. Medawar

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

William O. Douglas

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

Lynch, David

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

Gibson, Tobias S.

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

10.

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

Glasgow, Arnold H.

11.

It's easy to come up with new ideas; the hard part is letting go of what worked for you two years ago, but will soon be out-of-date.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

12.

Ideas won't work unless you do.

13.

Ideas move fast when their time comes.

Heilbrun, Carolyn

14.

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

15.

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

Picasso, Pablo

16.

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

Walter Bagehot

17.

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.

18.

Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen.

John Steinbeck

19.

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

Judith Brocklehurst

20.

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

Brown, Les

21.

Little words hurt big ideas.

Newton, Howard W.

22.

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

23.

Labor gives birth to ideas.

Rohn, Jim

24.

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.

25.

If you want to kill any idea in the world today, get a committee working on it.

Kettering, Charles F.

26.

We are governed not by armies, but by ideas.

Caird, Mona

27.

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

Hortense Calisher

28.

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

29.

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

Pound, Ezra

30.

Ideas are fatal to caste.

Forster, Edward M.

31.

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

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

32.

What you need is an idea.

Lear, William P.

33.

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

34.

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

35.

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

36.

Ideas are the roots of creation.

Dimnet, Ernest

37.

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

Koysis, Ted

38.

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

Townsend, Robert

39.

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

40.

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

Trotsky, Leon

41.

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

42.

Nothing is more dangerous than an idea, when you only have one.

Chartier, Alain

43.

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

44.

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

45.

It's a pretty good idea to be of good cheer but not all the time. Just at the most unexpected times.

46.

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

Anatole France

47.

He was distinguished for ignorance; for he had only one idea, and that was wrong.

Disraeli, Benjamin

48.

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

Oliver Wendell Holmes