Motivational Quotes

Ideas

Ideas move fast when their time comes.

- Heilbrun, Carolyn

Best Quotes about Ideas

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

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

An idea discovered is much better possessed.

Young

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

Chartier, Alain

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

Avery, Milton

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.

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

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

Keynes, John Maynard

An idea is worth nothing if it has no champion.

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

Hyman Rickover

10.

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

11.

Great ideas originate in the muscles.

Edison, Thomas A.

12.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

13.

An idea is a putting truth in check-mate.

Gasset, Jose Ortega Y

14.

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

Everson, Ray D.

15.

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

Penny, A. Owen

16.

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

Victor Hugo

17.

But how shall I get ideas? Keep your wits open! Observe! Observe! Study! Study! But above all, Think! Think! And when a noble image is indelibly impressed upon the mind -- Act!

Marden, Orison Swett

18.

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

Samuel Goldwyn

19.

Never hesitate to steal a good idea.

Neuharth, Al

20.

Many ideas are good for a limited time -- not forever.

Townsend, Robert

21.

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

22.

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

Lynch, David

23.

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

24.

Ideas won't work unless you do.

25.

We like to test things... no matter how good an idea sounds, test it first.

Block, Henry

26.

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

Proust, Marcel

27.

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

Oliver Wendell Holmes

28.

Ideas... they have the power

Hill, Napoleon

29.

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

30.

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

Anatole France

31.

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

Butler, Samuel

32.

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

P. B. Medawar

33.

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

Rivarol, Antoine

34.

What you need is an idea.

Lear, William P.

35.

When patterns are broken, new worlds can emerge.

Kupferberg, Tuli

36.

Every new idea is an impossibility until it is born.

Brown, Ron

37.

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

38.

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

Sir Frederick G. Banting

39.

Very simple ideas lie within the reach only of complex minds

Gourmont, Remy De

40.

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

41.

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

42.

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

43.

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

Munro, J. Richard

44.

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

James, William

45.

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

Canetti, Elias

46.

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