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

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

James, William

It is a lesson which all history teaches wise men, to put trust in ideas, and not in circumstances.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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

Pound, Ezra

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

John Steinbeck

Ideas won't work unless you do.

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

Cotvos

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

Ernst, Morris L.

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

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

10.

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

11.

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

Brown, Les

12.

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

13.

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

14.

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

John Cage

15.

Some people entertain ideas; others put them to work.

16.

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

17.

If a man had as many ideas during the day as he does when he has insomnia, he would make a fortune.

Niblack, Griff

18.

Great ideas originate in the muscles.

Edison, Thomas A.

19.

If you are possessed by an idea, you find it expressed everywhere, you even smell it.

Mann, Thomas

20.

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

21.

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

22.

What you need is an idea.

Lear, William P.

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.

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

Sir Frederick G. Banting

25.

Ideas that enter the mind under fire remain there securely and for ever.

Trotsky, Leon

26.

When an idea reaches critical mass there is no stopping the shift its presence will induce.

Williamson, Marianne

27.

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

Chamfort, Sebastien-Roch Nicolas De

28.

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

Twain, Mark

29.

If you pray for only one thing, .let it be for an idea.

Sutton, Percy

30.

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

31.

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

Einstein, Albert

32.

Getting an idea should be like sitting down on a pin. It should make you jump up and do something.

Simpson, E. L.

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.

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

Butler, Samuel

35.

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

Bunche, Ralph

36.

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

Frost, Robert

37.

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

38.

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

Penny, A. Owen

39.

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

Maritain, Jacques

40.

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

41.

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

Mason, Ken

42.

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

Judith Brocklehurst

43.

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

44.

Every new idea is an impossibility until it is born.

Brown, Ron

45.

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

Oliver Wendell Holmes

46.

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

Walter Bagehot

47.

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

48.

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

Bovee, Christian Nevell

49.

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

Hubbard, Elbert

50.

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

Kettering, Charles F.