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

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

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

James, William

An idea discovered is much better possessed.

Young

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

Hodges, Job E.

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

Everson, Ray D.

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

Bridgman, P. W.

Little words hurt big ideas.

Newton, Howard W.

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

Einstein, Albert

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

10.

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

Whitehead, Alfred North

11.

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

Cotvos

12.

Ideas won't work unless you do.

13.

An idea is worth nothing if it has no champion.

14.

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

Picasso, Pablo

15.

An idea is a putting truth in check-mate.

Gasset, Jose Ortega Y

16.

Nothing dies harder than a bad idea.

Cameron, Julie

17.

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

Anatole France

18.

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

Saunders, Richard

19.

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

20.

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

21.

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

Chartier, Alain

22.

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

23.

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

Harris, Sidney J.

24.

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

25.

Ideas control the world.

Garfield, James A.

26.

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

27.

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

Walter Bagehot

28.

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

29.

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

Butler, Samuel

30.

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

31.

Never hesitate to steal a good idea.

Neuharth, Al

32.

Man's fear of ideas is probably the greatest dike holding back human knowledge and happiness.

Ernst, Morris L.

33.

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

Hugo, Victor

34.

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

Brown, Les

35.

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

Williamson, Marianne

36.

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

37.

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

38.

What you need is an idea.

Lear, William P.

39.

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

40.

If you want to kill any idea in the world today, get a committee working on it.

Kettering, Charles F.

41.

The best way to have a good idea is to have a lot of ideas.

Pauling, Linus

42.

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

43.

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

Victor Hugo

44.

When patterns are broken, new worlds can emerge.

Kupferberg, Tuli

45.

Labor gives birth to ideas.

Rohn, Jim

46.

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

47.

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

48.

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

Jim Hightower

49.

The human mind treats a new idea the same way the body treats a strange protein; it rejects it.

P. B. Medawar

50.

So many new ideas are at first strange and horrible, though ultimately valuable that a very heavy responsibility rests upon those who would prevent their dissemination.

J. B. S. Haldane