Motivational Quotes

Ideas

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

- P. B. Medawar

Best Quotes about Ideas

So many new ideas are at first strange and horrible, though ultimately valuable that a very heavy responsibility rests upon those who would prevent their dissemination.

J. B. S. Haldane

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

Rorty, Richard

To die for an idea; it is unquestionably noble. But how much nobler it would be if men died for ideas that were true!

H. L. Mencken

The idea that is not dangerous is not worthy of being called an idea at all.

Hubbard, Elbert

Man's mind, once stretched by a new idea, never regains its original dimensions.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

Long is the road from conception to completion.

Moliere

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

Victor Hugo

Labor gives birth to ideas.

Rohn, Jim

Ideas are, in truth, force.

James, Henry

10.

An idea is not responsible for the people who believe in it.

Marquis, Don

11.

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

12.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

13.

The best ideas are common property.

Seneca

14.

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

Hector Berlioz

15.

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

16.

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

Canetti, Elias

17.

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

18.

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

Kettering, Charles F.

19.

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

20.

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

Horton, Doug

21.

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

22.

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

Pound, Ezra

23.

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

Everson, Ray D.

24.

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

Proust, Marcel

25.

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

26.

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

27.

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

Glasgow, Arnold H.

28.

Never hesitate to steal a good idea.

Neuharth, Al

29.

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

Emile Chartier

30.

Lots of people know a good thing the minute the other fellow sees it first.

Hodges, Job E.

31.

What you need is an idea.

Lear, William P.

32.

An idea is a putting truth in check-mate.

Gasset, Jose Ortega Y

33.

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

Mason, Ken

34.

The world moves, and ideas that were good once are not always good.

35.

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.

36.

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

37.

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

38.

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

39.

We like to test things... no matter how good an idea sounds, test it first.

Block, Henry

40.

Little words hurt big ideas.

Newton, Howard W.

41.

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

42.

Ideas too are a life and a world.

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

43.

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

Einstein, Albert

44.

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

45.

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

Penny, A. Owen

46.

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

Bunche, Ralph

47.

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

James, William

48.

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

William O. Douglas

49.

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

50.

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

Brown, Les