Motivational Quotes

Ideas

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

- John Cage

Best Quotes about Ideas

The ideas I stand for are not mine. I borrowed them from Socrates. I swiped them from Chesterfield. I stole them from Jesus. And I put them in a book. If you don't like their rules, whose would you use?

Carnegie, Dale

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

Rickover, Hyman G.

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

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

Harris, Sidney J.

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

Whitehead, Alfred North

Go out and buy yourself a five-cent pencil and a ten-cent notebook and begin to write down some million-dollar ideas for yourself.

Grinde, Bob

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

Bunche, Ralph

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

Kettering, Charles F.

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

10.

Ideas move fast when their time comes.

Heilbrun, Carolyn

11.

I'm not impressed with the power of a corporate president. I am impressed with the power of ideas.

Mason, Ken

12.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

13.

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

14.

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

Lynch, David

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.

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

Hyman Rickover

17.

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

18.

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

19.

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

Keynes, John Maynard

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.

A handsome parson is fit for nothing but ti put ideas into the young woman's heads.

Judith Brocklehurst

22.

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

Bachelard, Gaston

23.

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

24.

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

Gibson, Tobias S.

25.

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

Cotvos

26.

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

Howard Aiken

27.

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

28.

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

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.

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

Chartier, Alain

31.

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

32.

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.

33.

There is one thing stronger than all the armies in the world, and that is an idea whose time has come.

Hugo, Victor

34.

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

Hortense Calisher

35.

We are governed not by armies, but by ideas.

Caird, Mona

36.

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

Townsend, Robert

37.

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

Jim Hightower

38.

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

39.

An idea is worth nothing if it has no champion.

40.

Nothing dies harder than a bad idea.

Cameron, Julie

41.

Very simple ideas lie within the reach only of complex minds

Gourmont, Remy De

42.

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

43.

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

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

44.

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

Pound, Ezra

45.

Ideas won't work unless you do.

46.

Some people entertain ideas; others put them to work.

47.

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

Butler, Samuel

48.

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

John Cage

49.

The ideas of a time are like the clothes of a season: they are as arbitrary, as much imposed by some superior will which is seldom explicit. They are utilitarian and political, the instruments of smooth-running government.

Lewis, Wyndham

50.

Everything begins with an idea.

Nightingale, Earl