Motivational Quotes

Ideas

Never hesitate to steal a good idea.

- Neuharth, Al

Best Quotes about Ideas

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

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

Howard Aiken

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

Jim Hightower

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

Hyman Rickover

Ideals are like stars: you will not succeed in touching them with your hands, but like the seafaring man on the ocean desert of waters, you choose them as your guides, and following them, you reach your destiny.

Carl Schurz

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

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

Horton, Doug

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.

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

10.

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

11.

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

Berry, John

12.

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

13.

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

Rorty, Richard

14.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

15.

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

16.

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

Victor Hugo

17.

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

Glasgow, Arnold H.

18.

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

Bridgman, P. W.

19.

Some people entertain ideas; others put them to work.

20.

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

Walter Bagehot

21.

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

Bovee, Christian Nevell

22.

We are governed not by armies, but by ideas.

Caird, Mona

23.

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

Keynes, John Maynard

24.

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

25.

The best ideas are common property.

Seneca

26.

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

27.

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

Samuel Goldwyn

28.

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

29.

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

Canetti, Elias

30.

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

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

31.

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

Einstein, Albert

32.

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

Picasso, Pablo

33.

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

34.

Labor gives birth to ideas.

Rohn, Jim

35.

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

Kettering, Charles F.

36.

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

Rickover, Hyman G.

37.

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

38.

Ideas are the roots of creation.

Dimnet, Ernest

39.

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

Chamfort, Sebastien-Roch Nicolas De

40.

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

41.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

42.

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

Proust, Marcel

43.

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

Alfred North Whitehead

44.

Ideas won't work unless you do.

45.

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

46.

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

Mason, Ken

47.

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

48.

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

49.

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

Cotvos

50.

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

Whitehead, Alfred North