Motivational Quotes

Ideas

The best ideas are common property.

- Seneca

Best Quotes about Ideas

An idea is worth nothing if it has no champion.

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

Anatole France

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

Keynes, John Maynard

Human life is driven forward by its dim apprehension of notions too general for its existing language.

Whitehead, Alfred North

Ideas are the roots of creation.

Dimnet, Ernest

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

Ideas are fatal to caste.

Forster, Edward M.

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

Townsend, Robert

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

Victor Hugo

10.

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

John Steinbeck

11.

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

12.

Brain cells create ideas. Stress kills brain cells. Stress is not a good idea.

Saunders, Richard

13.

Ideas move fast when their time comes.

Heilbrun, Carolyn

14.

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

Mann, Thomas

15.

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

Rostand, Jean

16.

Mere words are cheap and plenty enough, but ideas that rouse and set multitudes thinking come as gold for the mines.

Penny, A. Owen

17.

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

Chamfort, Sebastien-Roch Nicolas De

18.

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

Rickover, Hyman G.

19.

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

Howard Aiken

20.

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

Everson, Ray D.

21.

Ideas control the world.

Garfield, James A.

22.

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

Alfred North Whitehead

23.

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

Berry, John

24.

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

25.

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

26.

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

27.

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

Oliver Wendell Holmes

28.

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.

29.

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

30.

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

31.

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

Pound, Ezra

32.

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

33.

An idea discovered is much better possessed.

Young

34.

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

Hill, Napoleon

35.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

36.

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

John Cage

37.

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

38.

Nothing dies harder than a bad idea.

Cameron, Julie

39.

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

Hugo, Victor

40.

When an idea reaches critical mass there is no stopping the shift its presence will induce.

Williamson, Marianne

41.

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

Rohn, Jim

42.

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

43.

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

44.

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

45.

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

46.

Every new idea is an impossibility until it is born.

Brown, Ron

47.

Everything begins with an idea.

Nightingale, Earl

48.

Ideas won't work unless you do.

49.

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

Harris, Sidney J.