Motivational Quotes

Ideas

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

- Bachelard, Gaston

Best Quotes about Ideas

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

Emile Chartier

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

Bachelard, Gaston

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

Simpson, E. L.

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

Alfred North Whitehead

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

Bunche, Ralph

Great ideas originate in the muscles.

Edison, Thomas A.

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

You look at any giant corporation, and I mean the biggies, and they all started with a guy with an idea, doing it well.

Robbins, Irvine

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

10.

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

Anatole France

11.

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

Hortense Calisher

12.

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

13.

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

Gibson, Tobias S.

14.

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

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

15.

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

Victor Hugo

16.

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

17.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

18.

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

19.

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

Butler, Samuel

20.

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

21.

Ideas lose themselves as quickly as quail, and one must wing them the minute they rise out of the grass, or they are gone.

Kennedy, Thomas F.

22.

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

23.

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

24.

Some people entertain ideas; others put them to work.

25.

Ideas move fast when their time comes.

Heilbrun, Carolyn

26.

An idea is worth nothing if it has no champion.

27.

Good ideas are a dime a dozen, bad ones are free.

Horton, Doug

28.

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

Proust, Marcel

29.

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

30.

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.

31.

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

Hugo, Victor

32.

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

Avery, Milton

33.

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

34.

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

Rickover, Hyman G.

35.

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

Williamson, Marianne

36.

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

37.

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

Eliot, George

38.

An idea is not responsible for the people who believe in it.

Marquis, Don

39.

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

Frost, Robert

40.

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

Jim Hightower

41.

An idea is a putting truth in check-mate.

Gasset, Jose Ortega Y

42.

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

43.

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

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

46.

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

47.

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

Everson, Ray D.

48.

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

Canetti, Elias

49.

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

50.

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