Motivational Quotes

Ideas

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

- Chamfort, Sebastien-Roch Nicolas De

Best Quotes about Ideas

In every great time there is some one idea at work which is more powerful than any other, and which shapes the events of the time and determines their ultimate issues.

Bacon, Francis

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

P. B. Medawar

Ideas... they have the power

Hill, Napoleon

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

Bridgman, P. W.

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

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

Cotvos

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

Ernst, Morris L.

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

Ideas are fatal to caste.

Forster, Edward M.

10.

Little words hurt big ideas.

Newton, Howard W.

11.

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

12.

Ideas won't work unless you do.

13.

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

Hortense Calisher

14.

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

Canetti, Elias

15.

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

16.

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

Pound, Ezra

17.

An idea is worth nothing if it has no champion.

18.

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

Oliver Wendell Holmes

19.

Ideas move fast when their time comes.

Heilbrun, Carolyn

20.

Ideas too are a life and a world.

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

21.

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

22.

Long is the road from conception to completion.

Moliere

23.

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

Brown, Les

24.

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

Victor Hugo

25.

Ideas are, in truth, force.

James, Henry

26.

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

Howard Aiken

27.

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

James, William

28.

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

Rorty, Richard

29.

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

Hubbard, Elbert

30.

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

31.

A crank is someone with a new idea -- until it catches on.

Twain, Mark

32.

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

33.

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

Proust, Marcel

34.

When patterns are broken, new worlds can emerge.

Kupferberg, Tuli

35.

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

William O. Douglas

36.

If you pray for only one thing, .let it be for an idea.

Sutton, Percy

37.

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

Eliot, George

38.

A single idea, if it is right, saves us the labor of an infinity of experiences.

Maritain, Jacques

39.

Never hesitate to steal a good idea.

Neuharth, Al

40.

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

Gibson, Tobias S.

41.

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

42.

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

Bovee, Christian Nevell

43.

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

44.

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

45.

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

46.

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

Avery, Milton

47.

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

48.

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

Whitehead, Alfred North

49.

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.

50.

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