Motivational Quotes

Ideas

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.

Best Quotes about Ideas

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

Judith Brocklehurst

Ideas move fast when their time comes.

Heilbrun, Carolyn

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

Bridgman, P. W.

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

Proust, Marcel

Very simple ideas lie within the reach only of complex minds

Gourmont, Remy De

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.

Some people entertain ideas; others put them to work.

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

It first appeared like a crazy idea. It turned out he had a great idea.

Munro, J. Richard

10.

Ideas are fatal to caste.

Forster, Edward M.

11.

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

12.

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

13.

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

14.

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

15.

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

16.

No one has ever had an idea in a dress suit.

Sir Frederick G. Banting

17.

An idea is a putting truth in check-mate.

Gasset, Jose Ortega Y

18.

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

Sutton, Percy

19.

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

Kettering, Charles F.

20.

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

Avery, Milton

21.

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

Einstein, Albert

22.

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

Hector Berlioz

23.

Nothing dies harder than a bad idea.

Cameron, Julie

24.

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

25.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

26.

A good idea plus capable men cannot fail; it is better than money in the bank.

Berry, John

27.

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

Glasgow, Arnold H.

28.

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

Eliot, George

29.

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

30.

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

Saunders, Richard

31.

Ideas are, in truth, force.

James, Henry

32.

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

Victor Hugo

33.

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

34.

Greater than the tread of mighty armies is an idea whose time has come.

Hugo, Victor

35.

Many ideas are good for a limited time -- not forever.

Townsend, Robert

36.

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

Bachelard, Gaston

37.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

38.

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

39.

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

40.

If you are possessed by an idea, you find it expressed everywhere, you even smell it.

Mann, Thomas

41.

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

Whitehead, Alfred North

42.

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

43.

The best ideas are common property.

Seneca

44.

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

Butler, Samuel

45.

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

Rivarol, Antoine

46.

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

47.

Great ideas originate in the muscles.

Edison, Thomas A.

48.

The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.

Keynes, John Maynard

49.

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

50.

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

Maritain, Jacques