Motivational Quotes

Ideas

Great ideas originate in the muscles.

- Edison, Thomas A.

Best Quotes about Ideas

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

What you need is an idea.

Lear, William P.

Ideas too are a life and a world.

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

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

Bunche, Ralph

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

Mason, Ken

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

Mann, Thomas

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

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

Gibson, Tobias S.

Great ideas originate in the muscles.

Edison, Thomas A.

10.

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

Hector Berlioz

11.

Long is the road from conception to completion.

Moliere

12.

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

13.

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

14.

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

Rohn, Jim

15.

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

Koysis, Ted

16.

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

17.

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

Hill, Napoleon

18.

The best ideas are common property.

Seneca

19.

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

20.

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

Penny, A. Owen

21.

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.

22.

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

Howard Aiken

23.

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

Cotvos

24.

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

Williamson, Marianne

25.

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

26.

Some people entertain ideas; others put them to work.

27.

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

Horton, Doug

28.

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

Lynch, David

29.

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

Everson, Ray D.

30.

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.

31.

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

William O. Douglas

32.

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

Hyman Rickover

33.

Do something. If it doesn't work, do something else. No idea is too crazy.

Jim Hightower

34.

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

Whitehead, Alfred North

35.

Our greatest lack is not money for any undertaking, but rather ideas, If the ideas are good, cash will somehow flow to where it is needed.

Schuller, Robert H.

36.

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

37.

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

Hubbard, Elbert

38.

An idea is a putting truth in check-mate.

Gasset, Jose Ortega Y

39.

An idea is worth nothing if it has no champion.

40.

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

John Cage

41.

Ideas control the world.

Garfield, James A.

42.

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

Anatole France

43.

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

Hortense Calisher

44.

Do not follow the ideas of others, but learn to listen to the voice within yourself. Your body and mind will become clear and you will realize the unity of all things.

Dogen

45.

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

46.

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

Nelson, George

47.

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

James, William

48.

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

Eliot, George

49.

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