Motivational Quotes

Ideas

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

- Harris, Sidney J.

Best Quotes about Ideas

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

Rickover, Hyman G.

Do not follow the ideas of others, but learn to listen to the voice within yourself. Your body and mind will become clear and you will realize the unity of all things.

Dogen

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

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

Hector Berlioz

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 a putting truth in check-mate.

Gasset, Jose Ortega Y

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

Sir Frederick G. Banting

Ideas move fast when their time comes.

Heilbrun, Carolyn

Ideas too are a life and a world.

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

10.

Take the obvious, add a cupful of brains, a generous pinch of imagination, a bucketful of courage and daring, stir well and bring to a boil.

Baruch, Bernard M.

11.

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

12.

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

13.

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

Anatole France

14.

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

Hugo, Victor

15.

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

Rivarol, Antoine

16.

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

Trotsky, Leon

17.

Ideas are fatal to caste.

Forster, Edward M.

18.

When patterns are broken, new worlds can emerge.

Kupferberg, Tuli

19.

Ideas won't work unless you do.

20.

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

Hill, Napoleon

21.

Everything begins with an idea.

Nightingale, Earl

22.

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

23.

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

24.

An idea discovered is much better possessed.

Young

25.

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

26.

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

Saunders, Richard

27.

The idea that is not dangerous is not worthy of being called an idea at all.

Hubbard, Elbert

28.

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

29.

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

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

30.

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

31.

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

John Steinbeck

32.

Whenever I hear people talking about liberal ideas, I am always astounded that men should love to fool themselves with empty sounds. An idea should never be liberal; it must be vigorous, positive, and without loose ends so that it may fulfill its divine mission and be productive. The proper place for liberality is in the realm of the emotions.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

33.

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

34.

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

Hortense Calisher

35.

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

Munro, J. Richard

36.

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

Oliver Wendell Holmes

37.

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

38.

Every new idea is an impossibility until it is born.

Brown, Ron

39.

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

40.

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

Chartier, Alain

41.

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

Howard Aiken

42.

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

Bachelard, Gaston

43.

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

44.

Concepts, like individuals, have their histories and are just as incapable of withstanding the ravages of time as are individuals. But in and through all this they retain a kind of homesickness for the scenes of their childhood.

Kierkegaard, S°ren

45.

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

46.

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

Avery, Milton

47.

What you need is an idea.

Lear, William P.

48.

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