Motivational Quotes

Ideas

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

- Walter Bagehot

Best Quotes about Ideas

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

Harris, Sidney J.

Many ideas grow better when transplanted into another mind than in the one where they sprung up.

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

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

James, William

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

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

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

Penny, A. Owen

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

Rivarol, Antoine

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

Canetti, Elias

Such as take lodgings in a head that's to be let unfurnished.

Butler, Samuel

10.

An idea is the only level which moves the world.

Corey, Arthur F.

11.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

12.

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

13.

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

14.

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

15.

Ideas control the world.

Garfield, James A.

16.

Everything begins with an idea.

Nightingale, Earl

17.

To have a great idea, have a lot of them.

Edison, Thomas A.

18.

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

19.

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

Einstein, Albert

20.

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

21.

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

Jim Hightower

22.

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

Simpson, E. L.

23.

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

Brown, Les

24.

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

Nelson, George

25.

Labor gives birth to ideas.

Rohn, Jim

26.

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

Glasgow, Arnold H.

27.

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

28.

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

Anatole France

29.

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

30.

An idea is a feat of association, and the height of it is a good metaphor.

Frost, Robert

31.

I'm not impressed with the power of a corporate president. I am impressed with the power of ideas.

Mason, Ken

32.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

33.

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

Rorty, Richard

34.

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

Pound, Ezra

35.

There are only two kinds of scholars; those who love ideas and those who hate them.

Emile Chartier

36.

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

Sir Frederick G. Banting

37.

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

Proust, Marcel

38.

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

Samuel Goldwyn

39.

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

40.

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

Lynch, David

41.

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

42.

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

Hill, Napoleon

43.

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

44.

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.

45.

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

Picasso, Pablo

46.

Harold, like the rest of us, had many impressions which saved him the trouble of distinct ideas.

Eliot, George

47.

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

John Steinbeck

48.

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

Mann, Thomas

49.

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

50.

Nothing dies harder than a bad idea.

Cameron, Julie