Motivational Quotes

Ideas

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

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

It's easy to come up with new ideas; the hard part is letting go of what worked for you two years ago, but will soon be out-of-date.

Oech, Roger Von

Ideas control the world.

Garfield, James A.

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

Glasgow, Arnold H.

The best ideas are common property.

Seneca

An idea is not responsible for the people who believe in it.

Marquis, Don

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

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

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

Sir Frederick G. Banting

10.

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

John Steinbeck

11.

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

Chamfort, Sebastien-Roch Nicolas De

12.

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

13.

Ideas are, in truth, force.

James, Henry

14.

Ideas... they have the power

Hill, Napoleon

15.

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

Berry, John

16.

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

Alfred North Whitehead

17.

When patterns are broken, new worlds can emerge.

Kupferberg, Tuli

18.

Nothing is more dangerous than an idea, when you only have one.

Chartier, Alain

19.

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

Horton, Doug

20.

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

21.

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

Rohn, Jim

22.

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

23.

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

Hugo, Victor

24.

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

25.

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

Proust, Marcel

26.

An idea is a point of departure and no more. As soon as you elaborate it, it becomes transformed by thought.

Picasso, Pablo

27.

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

28.

Lots of people know a good thing the minute the other fellow sees it first.

Hodges, Job E.

29.

There is one thing stronger than all the armies in the world, and that is an idea whose time has come.

Hugo, Victor

30.

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

Hubbard, Elbert

31.

An idea is a feat of association, and the height of it is a good metaphor.

Frost, Robert

32.

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

Anatole France

33.

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

34.

An idea discovered is much better possessed.

Young

35.

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

Williamson, Marianne

36.

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

37.

Every new idea is an impossibility until it is born.

Brown, Ron

38.

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.

39.

Getting an idea should be like sitting down on a pin. It should make you jump up and do something.

Simpson, E. L.

40.

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

Rivarol, Antoine

41.

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

Mason, Ken

42.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

43.

Never hesitate to steal a good idea.

Neuharth, Al

44.

Little words hurt big ideas.

Newton, Howard W.

45.

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

46.

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

47.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

48.

To love an idea is to love it a little more than one should.

Rostand, Jean

49.

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

Bunche, Ralph

50.

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