Motivational Quotes

Ideas

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

- Anatole France

Best Quotes about Ideas

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

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

Chartier, Alain

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

Williamson, Marianne

Ideals are like stars: you will not succeed in touching them with your hands, but like the seafaring man on the ocean desert of waters, you choose them as your guides, and following them, you reach your destiny.

Carl Schurz

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

Lynch, David

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

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

Some people entertain ideas; others put them to work.

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

10.

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

Bunche, Ralph

11.

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

12.

An idea is worth nothing if it has no champion.

13.

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

Howard Aiken

14.

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

William O. Douglas

15.

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

James, William

16.

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.

17.

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

18.

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

19.

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

Hubbard, Elbert

20.

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

Emile Chartier

21.

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

22.

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

Canetti, Elias

23.

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

John Steinbeck

24.

Not the one who has many ideas, but the one who has a single conviction may become a great person.

Cotvos

25.

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

26.

An idea is the only level which moves the world.

Corey, Arthur F.

27.

Lots of people know a good thing the minute the other fellow sees it first.

Hodges, Job E.

28.

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

Nelson, George

29.

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

Proust, Marcel

30.

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

Pound, Ezra

31.

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

Eliot, George

32.

Ideas control the world.

Garfield, James A.

33.

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

Rorty, Richard

34.

Nothing dies harder than a bad idea.

Cameron, Julie

35.

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

36.

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.

37.

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

Mann, Thomas

38.

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

Samuel Goldwyn

39.

Very simple ideas lie within the reach only of complex minds

Gourmont, Remy De

40.

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

Victor Hugo

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.

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

43.

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

Brande, Dorothea

44.

An idea discovered is much better possessed.

Young

45.

Ideas too are a life and a world.

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

46.

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

47.

There is no adequate defense, except stupidity, against the impact of a new idea.

Bridgman, P. W.

48.

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

49.

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

Judith Brocklehurst

50.

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