Motivational Quotes

Ideas

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

- Cotvos

Best Quotes about Ideas

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

John Steinbeck

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

Hubbard, Elbert

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

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

Williamson, Marianne

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

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

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

P. B. Medawar

There are only two kinds of scholars; those who love ideas and those who hate them.

Emile Chartier

I'm not impressed with the power of a corporate president. I am impressed with the power of ideas.

Mason, Ken

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

Butler, Samuel

10.

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

11.

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

Ernst, Morris L.

12.

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

13.

All achievements, all earned riches, have their beginning in an idea.

Hill, Napoleon

14.

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

15.

Long is the road from conception to completion.

Moliere

16.

Very simple ideas lie within the reach only of complex minds

Gourmont, Remy De

17.

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

18.

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

Chamfort, Sebastien-Roch Nicolas De

19.

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

Judith Brocklehurst

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.

It is ideas, not vested interests, which are dangerous for good or evil.

Keynes, John Maynard

22.

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

James, William

23.

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

24.

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

Einstein, Albert

25.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

26.

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

27.

So long as new ideas are created, sales will continue to reach new highs.

Brande, Dorothea

28.

It is a lesson which all history teaches wise men, to put trust in ideas, and not in circumstances.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

29.

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

Trotsky, Leon

30.

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

Everson, Ray D.

31.

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

32.

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

Cotvos

33.

An idea is a putting truth in check-mate.

Gasset, Jose Ortega Y

34.

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

Munro, J. Richard

35.

Labor gives birth to ideas.

Rohn, Jim

36.

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

Harris, Sidney J.

37.

I had a monumental idea this morning, but I didn't like it.

Samuel Goldwyn

38.

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.

39.

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

40.

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

Rorty, Richard

41.

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

Hugo, Victor

42.

The vitality of thought is in adventure. Ideas won't keep. Something must be done about them.

Alfred North Whitehead

43.

Ideas can be life-changing. Sometimes all you need to open the door is just one more good idea.