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

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

John Steinbeck

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

Brande, Dorothea

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

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

Harris, Sidney J.

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

Labor gives birth to ideas.

Rohn, Jim

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

Hector Berlioz

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

Einstein, Albert

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

10.

Long is the road from conception to completion.

Moliere

11.

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

Whitehead, Alfred North

12.

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

Lynch, David

13.

An idea is a feat of association, and the height of it is a good metaphor.

Frost, Robert

14.

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

15.

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

Chamfort, Sebastien-Roch Nicolas De

16.

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

Sir Frederick G. Banting

17.

Ideas move fast when their time comes.

Heilbrun, Carolyn

18.

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

Bridgman, P. W.

19.

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

Emile Chartier

20.

We are governed not by armies, but by ideas.

Caird, Mona

21.

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

Victor Hugo

22.

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

Anatole France

23.

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

24.

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

25.

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

Koysis, Ted

26.

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

William O. Douglas

27.

An idea is a putting truth in check-mate.

Gasset, Jose Ortega Y

28.

Some people entertain ideas; others put them to work.

29.

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

Judith Brocklehurst

30.

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

Glasgow, Arnold H.

31.

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

Keynes, John Maynard

32.

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

Everson, Ray D.

33.

Little words hurt big ideas.

Newton, Howard W.

34.

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

35.

Ideas lose themselves as quickly as quail, and one must wing them the minute they rise out of the grass, or they are gone.

Kennedy, Thomas F.

36.

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

37.

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

Gibson, Tobias S.

38.

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

John Cage

39.

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

40.

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.

41.

An idea is the only level which moves the world.

Corey, Arthur F.

42.

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

Alfred North Whitehead

43.

The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.

Keynes, John Maynard

44.

Man's fear of ideas is probably the greatest dike holding back human knowledge and happiness.

Ernst, Morris L.

45.

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

Canetti, Elias

46.

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

47.

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

48.

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

49.

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

50.

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

Picasso, Pablo