Motivational Quotes

Ideas

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

- Hubbard, Elbert

Best Quotes about Ideas

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

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

Every new idea is an impossibility until it is born.

Brown, Ron

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

Whitehead, Alfred North

It is the nature of thought to find its way into action.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

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

Lynch, David

Not the one who has many ideas, but the one who has a single conviction may become a great person.

Cotvos

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

Hector Berlioz

The difference between people and ideas is... only superficial.

Rorty, Richard

10.

Long is the road from conception to completion.

Moliere

11.

Brain cells create ideas. Stress kills brain cells. Stress is not a good idea.

Saunders, Richard

12.

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

13.

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

14.

To have a great idea, have a lot of them.

Edison, Thomas A.

15.

There are only two kinds of scholars; those who love ideas and those who hate them.

Emile Chartier

16.

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

Rivarol, Antoine

17.

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

Glasgow, Arnold H.

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.

A new idea is like a child. It's easier to conceive than to deliver.

Koysis, Ted

20.

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

21.

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

22.

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

23.

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

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

24.

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

Penny, A. Owen

25.

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

26.

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

Horton, Doug

27.

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

28.

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

Hodges, Job E.

29.

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

30.

An idea discovered is much better possessed.

Young

31.

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

Anatole France

32.

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

James, William

33.

Very simple ideas lie within the reach only of complex minds

Gourmont, Remy De

34.

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.

35.

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

P. B. Medawar

36.

There is no adequate defense, except stupidity, against the impact of a new idea.

Bridgman, P. W.

37.

Good ideas and innovations must be driven into existence by courageous patience.

Rickover, Hyman G.

38.

So long as new ideas are created, sales will continue to reach new highs.

Brande, Dorothea

39.

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

Bunche, Ralph

40.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

41.

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

42.

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

Einstein, Albert

43.

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

44.

People find ideas a bore because they do not distinguish between live ones and stuffed ones on a shelf.

Pound, Ezra

45.

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

William O. Douglas

46.

Ideas... they have the power

Hill, Napoleon

47.

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