Motivational Quotes

Ideas

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

- Hill, Napoleon

Best Quotes about Ideas

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

Harris, Sidney J.

What you need is an idea.

Lear, William P.

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

An idea is the only level which moves the world.

Corey, Arthur F.

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

Bunche, Ralph

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

William O. Douglas

They come into being not through demonstration but through revelation, through the medium of powerful personalities.

Einstein, Albert

An idea discovered is much better possessed.

Young

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

Horton, Doug

10.

Ideas too are a life and a world.

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

11.

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

Townsend, Robert

12.

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

Jim Hightower

13.

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

Hugo, Victor

14.

Great ideas originate in the muscles.

Edison, Thomas A.

15.

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

16.

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

17.

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

P. B. Medawar

18.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

19.

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

20.

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

Nelson, George

21.

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

Gibson, Tobias S.

22.

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

23.

Ideas are refined and multiplied in the commerce of minds. In their splendor, images effect a very simple communion of souls.

Bachelard, Gaston

24.

An idea is a putting truth in check-mate.

Gasset, Jose Ortega Y

25.

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

Maritain, Jacques

26.

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

Sir Frederick G. Banting

27.

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

28.

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

Hector Berlioz

29.

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

Picasso, Pablo

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 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

32.

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

33.

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

Hyman Rickover

34.

Labor gives birth to ideas.

Rohn, Jim

35.

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

Glasgow, Arnold H.

36.

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

Keynes, John Maynard

37.

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

Everson, Ray D.

38.

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

39.

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

40.

The best ideas are common property.

Seneca

41.

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.

42.

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

Williamson, Marianne

43.

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

44.

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

Hill, Napoleon

45.

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

46.

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

Hodges, Job E.

47.

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

48.

Some people entertain ideas; others put them to work.

49.

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

John Cage