Motivational Quotes

Ideas

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

Best Quotes about Ideas

We are governed not by armies, but by ideas.

Caird, Mona

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

Nothing dies harder than a bad idea.

Cameron, Julie

Some people entertain ideas; others put them to work.

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

Gibson, Tobias S.

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

Hortense Calisher

Ideas too are a life and a world.

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

Whenever I hear people talking about liberal ideas, I am always astounded that men should love to fool themselves with empty sounds. An idea should never be liberal; it must be vigorous, positive, and without loose ends so that it may fulfill its divine mission and be productive. The proper place for liberality is in the realm of the emotions.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

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

Simpson, E. L.

10.

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

11.

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

Canetti, Elias

12.

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

13.

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

14.

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

Ernst, Morris L.

15.

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

16.

Ideas are fatal to caste.

Forster, Edward M.

17.

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

Victor Hugo

18.

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

19.

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

20.

Very simple ideas lie within the reach only of complex minds

Gourmont, Remy De

21.

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

Hector Berlioz

22.

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

Rohn, Jim

23.

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

Picasso, Pablo

24.

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

Brown, Les

25.

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

Oliver Wendell Holmes

26.

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

Harris, Sidney J.

27.

Ideas are, in truth, force.

James, Henry

28.

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

James, William

29.

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

30.

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

31.

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

Judith Brocklehurst

32.

Ideas move fast when their time comes.

Heilbrun, Carolyn

33.

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

Anatole France

34.

One of the greatest pains to human nature is the pain of a new idea.

Walter Bagehot

35.

Ideas won't work unless you do.

36.

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

Hugo, Victor

37.

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

Howard Aiken

38.

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

Hubbard, Elbert

39.

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

40.

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

Twain, Mark

41.

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

Niblack, Griff

42.

So many new ideas are at first strange and horrible, though ultimately valuable that a very heavy responsibility rests upon those who would prevent their dissemination.

J. B. S. Haldane

43.

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.

44.

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

Chartier, Alain

45.

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

46.

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

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

47.

An idea discovered is much better possessed.

Young

48.

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

49.

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

Lynch, David

50.

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

Butler, Samuel