Motivational Quotes

Ideas

Ideas move fast when their time comes.

- Heilbrun, Carolyn

Best Quotes about Ideas

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

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

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.

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

Hill, Napoleon

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

Ideas too are a life and a world.

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

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

Kettering, Charles F.

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

John Steinbeck

A pile of rocks ceases to be a rock when somebody contemplates it with the idea of a cathedral in mind.

Saint-Exupery, Antoine De

10.

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

Harris, Sidney J.

11.

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

Maritain, Jacques

12.

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

Gibson, Tobias S.

13.

An idea discovered is much better possessed.

Young

14.

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

15.

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.

16.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

17.

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

18.

Long is the road from conception to completion.

Moliere

19.

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

20.

The vitality of thought is in adventure. Ideas won't keep. Something must be done about them. When the idea is new, its custodians have fervor, live for it, and if need be, die for it.

Whitehead, Alfred North

21.

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

22.

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

Picasso, Pablo

23.

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

John Cage

24.

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

Rostand, Jean

25.

We are not to make the ideas of contentment and aspiration quarrel, for God made them fast friends. A man may aspire, and yet be quite content until it is time to raise; and both flying and resting are but parts of one contentment. The very fruit of the gospel is aspiration. It is to the heart what spring is to the earth, making every root, and bud, and bough desire to be more. -

Beecher, Henry Ward

26.

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

Victor Hugo

27.

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

28.

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

Glasgow, Arnold H.

29.

I said to myself, I have things in my head that are not like what anyone has taught me - shapes and ideas so near to me - so natural to my way of being and thinking that it hasn't occurred to me to put them down. I decided to start anew, to strip away what I had been taught.

Georgia O'Keeffe

30.

Little words hurt big ideas.

Newton, Howard W.

31.

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

Jim Hightower

32.

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

Keynes, John Maynard

33.

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

Avery, Milton

34.

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

35.

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

Trotsky, Leon

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.

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

Penny, A. Owen

38.

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

Ernst, Morris L.

39.

The best way to have a good idea is to have a lot of ideas.

Pauling, Linus

40.

Very simple ideas lie within the reach only of complex minds

Gourmont, Remy De

41.

Everything begins with an idea.

Nightingale, Earl

42.

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

Howard Aiken

43.

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

44.

An idea is worth nothing if it has no champion.

45.

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

46.

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

47.

Great ideas originate in the muscles.

Edison, Thomas A.

48.

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

Hubbard, Elbert

49.

An idea is the only level which moves the world.

Corey, Arthur F.

50.

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