Motivational Quotes

Ideas

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

- Hyman Rickover

Best Quotes about Ideas

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

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

Kettering, Charles F.

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

P. B. Medawar

Labor gives birth to ideas.

Rohn, Jim

A mind once stretched by a new idea never regains its original dimensions.

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

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

Lynch, David

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

Avery, Milton

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

Cotvos

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

Anatole France

10.

An idea is the only level which moves the world.

Corey, Arthur F.

11.

An idea is never given to you without you being given the power to make it reality. You must, nevertheless, suffer for it.

Bach, Richard

12.

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

Hector Berlioz

13.

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

Keynes, John Maynard

14.

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

James, William

15.

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

16.

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.

17.

An idea discovered is much better possessed.

Young

18.

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

Whitehead, Alfred North

19.

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

Bachelard, Gaston

20.

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

21.

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

Gibson, Tobias S.

22.

Everything begins with an idea.

Nightingale, Earl

23.

The vitality of thought is in adventure. Ideas won't keep. Something must be done about them.

Alfred North Whitehead

24.

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

Walter Bagehot

25.

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.

26.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

27.

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

Samuel Goldwyn

28.

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

29.

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

Hill, Napoleon

30.

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

Hortense Calisher

31.

A great idea is usually original to more than one discoverer. Great ideas come when the world needs them. Great ideas surround the world's ignorance and press for admission.

Phelps, Elizabeth Stuart

32.

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

33.

The best ideas are common property.

Seneca

34.

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

35.

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

Brown, Les

36.

Great ideas originate in the muscles.

Edison, Thomas A.

37.

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

Einstein, Albert

38.

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

39.

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

Koysis, Ted

40.

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

Bridgman, P. W.

41.

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

42.

Very simple ideas lie within the reach only of complex minds

Gourmont, Remy De

43.

Every new idea is an impossibility until it is born.

Brown, Ron

44.

A good idea plus capable men cannot fail; it is better than money in the bank.

Berry, John

45.

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

Proust, Marcel

46.

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

Rickover, Hyman G.

47.

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

48.

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

49.

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

John Steinbeck

50.

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

Nelson, George