Motivational Quotes

Ideas

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

- Bridgman, P. W.

Best Quotes about Ideas

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

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

Brown, Les

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

Hodges, Job E.

The best ideas are common property.

Seneca

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

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

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

Marquis, Don

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

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

10.

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

Anatole France

11.

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

Canetti, Elias

12.

Ideas move fast when their time comes.

Heilbrun, Carolyn

13.

Never hesitate to steal a good idea.

Neuharth, Al

14.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

15.

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

16.

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

Hubbard, Elbert

17.

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

Rivarol, Antoine

18.

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

19.

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

Horton, Doug

20.

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

21.

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

Rickover, Hyman G.

22.

We like to test things... no matter how good an idea sounds, test it first.

Block, Henry

23.

Ideas are fatal to caste.

Forster, Edward M.

24.

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

Bachelard, Gaston

25.

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.

26.

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

27.

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

Nelson, George

28.

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

29.

If a man had as many ideas during the day as he does when he has insomnia, he would make a fortune.

Niblack, Griff

30.

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

Pound, Ezra

31.

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

Judith Brocklehurst

32.

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

Williamson, Marianne

33.

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

Bridgman, P. W.

34.

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

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

35.

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

Lynch, David

36.

We are not to make the ideas of contentment and aspiration quarrel, for God made them fast friends. A man may aspire, and yet be quite content until it is time to raise; and both flying and resting are but parts of one contentment. The very fruit of the gospel is aspiration. It is to the heart what spring is to the earth, making every root, and bud, and bough desire to be more. -

Beecher, Henry Ward

37.

When patterns are broken, new worlds can emerge.

Kupferberg, Tuli

38.

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

39.

I can't understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I'm frightened of the old ones.

John Cage

40.

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

Simpson, E. L.

41.

Some people entertain ideas; others put them to work.

42.

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

P. B. Medawar

43.

Good ideas are not adopted automatically. They must be driven into practice with courageous patience.

Hyman Rickover

44.

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

Walter Bagehot

45.

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

Penny, A. Owen

46.

Everything begins with an idea.

Nightingale, Earl

47.

An idea is the only level which moves the world.

Corey, Arthur F.

48.

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

Glasgow, Arnold H.

49.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

50.

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