Motivational Quotes

Ideas

Everything begins with an idea.

- Nightingale, Earl

Best Quotes about Ideas

Ideas move fast when their time comes.

Heilbrun, Carolyn

Ideas won't work unless you do.

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

Hortense Calisher

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

Penny, A. Owen

We are governed not by armies, but by ideas.

Caird, Mona

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

Whitehead, Alfred North

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

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

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

10.

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

Bovee, Christian Nevell

11.

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

12.

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

P. B. Medawar

13.

It first appeared like a crazy idea. It turned out he had a great idea.

Munro, J. Richard

14.

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

Samuel Goldwyn

15.

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

Anatole France

16.

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

17.

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

Saunders, Richard

18.

Greater than the tread of mighty armies is an idea whose time has come.

Hugo, Victor

19.

Ideas are the roots of creation.

Dimnet, Ernest

20.

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

Chartier, Alain

21.

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

Pound, Ezra

22.

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

23.

Nothing dies harder than a bad idea.

Cameron, Julie

24.

There are more ideas on earth than intellectuals imagine. And these ideas are more active, stronger, more resistant, more passionate than politicians think. We have to be there at the birth of ideas, the bursting outward of their force: not in books expressing them, but in events manifesting this force, in struggles carried on around ideas, for or against them. Ideas do not rule the world. But it is because the world has ideas... that it is not passively ruled by those who are its leaders or those who would like to teach it, once and for all, what it must think.

Foucault, Michel

25.

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.

26.

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

27.

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

28.

A crank is someone with a new idea -- until it catches on.

Twain, Mark

29.

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

William O. Douglas

30.

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

Koysis, Ted

31.

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

32.

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

33.

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.

34.

A man is not necessarily intelligent because he has plenty of ideas, any more than he is a good general because he has plenty of soldiers.

Chamfort, Sebastien-Roch Nicolas De

35.

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

Rivarol, Antoine

36.

It's a pretty good idea to be of good cheer but not all the time. Just at the most unexpected times.

37.

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

38.

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

39.

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

John Cage

40.

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

41.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

42.

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

43.

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

Rickover, Hyman G.

44.

A single idea, if it is right, saves us the labor of an infinity of experiences.

Maritain, Jacques

45.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

46.

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

47.

Long is the road from conception to completion.

Moliere

48.

Ideas can be life-changing. Sometimes all you need to open the door is just one more good idea.

Rohn, Jim

49.

Ideas control the world.

Garfield, James A.

50.

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