Motivational Quotes

Ideas

Every new idea is an impossibility until it is born.

- Brown, Ron

Best Quotes about Ideas

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

Kettering, Charles F.

When patterns are broken, new worlds can emerge.

Kupferberg, Tuli

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

Canetti, Elias

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

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

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

Bunche, Ralph

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

Ideas too are a life and a world.

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

A new idea is like a child. It's easier to conceive than to deliver.

Koysis, Ted

10.

To have a great idea, have a lot of them.

Edison, Thomas A.

11.

Ideas move fast when their time comes.

Heilbrun, Carolyn

12.

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

13.

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

Rickover, Hyman G.

14.

Ideas... they have the power

Hill, Napoleon

15.

Ideas are, in truth, force.

James, Henry

16.

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

Whitehead, Alfred North

17.

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

Hyman Rickover

18.

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

19.

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

20.

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

John Cage

21.

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

22.

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

Glasgow, Arnold H.

23.

Great ideas originate in the muscles.

Edison, Thomas A.

24.

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

William O. Douglas

25.

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

Howard Aiken

26.

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

27.

Very simple ideas lie within the reach only of complex minds

Gourmont, Remy De

28.

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

P. B. Medawar

29.

An idea discovered is much better possessed.

Young

30.

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

31.

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

Bachelard, Gaston

32.

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

33.

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

34.

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

Oliver Wendell Holmes

35.

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

John Steinbeck

36.

Labor gives birth to ideas.

Rohn, Jim

37.

There are well-dressed foolish ideas, just as there are will-dressed fools.

Chamfort, Sebastien-Roch Nicolas De

38.

Little words hurt big ideas.

Newton, Howard W.

39.

The best ideas are common property.

Seneca

40.

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

Hector Berlioz

41.

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

42.

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.

43.

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

44.

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

Trotsky, Leon

45.

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

Brown, Les

46.

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

47.

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

48.

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

Rivarol, Antoine

49.

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

Victor Hugo

50.

It is the nature of thought to find its way into action.

Bovee, Christian Nevell