Motivational Quotes

Ideas

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

Best Quotes about Ideas

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

Brown, Les

Nothing dies harder than a bad idea.

Cameron, Julie

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

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

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

Brande, Dorothea

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

Samuel Goldwyn

What you need is an idea.

Lear, William P.

The idea is in my head to put it down is nothing.

Avery, Milton

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

Hector Berlioz

10.

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

11.

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

12.

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

13.

Little words hurt big ideas.

Newton, Howard W.

14.

We are governed not by armies, but by ideas.

Caird, Mona

15.

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

16.

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

William O. Douglas

17.

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

18.

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

19.

Once I thought ideas were exceptions not the rule. That is not so. Ideas are so plentiful that they ride by on air. You've only to reach out and snatch one...

Mckeun, Rod

20.

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

Koysis, Ted

21.

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

Hodges, Job E.

22.

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.

23.

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

Anatole France

24.

An idea is a putting truth in check-mate.

Gasset, Jose Ortega Y

25.

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

John Steinbeck

26.

Many ideas are good for a limited time -- not forever.

Townsend, Robert

27.

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

Lynch, David

28.

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

Chartier, Alain

29.

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

Maritain, Jacques

30.

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

31.

The simple joy of taking an idea into one's own hands and giving it proper form, that's exciting.

Nelson, George

32.

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

33.

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

Hortense Calisher

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.

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

Whitehead, Alfred North

36.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

37.

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

38.

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

Rorty, Richard

39.

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

40.

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

Harris, Sidney J.

41.

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

42.

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

43.

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

Einstein, Albert

44.

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

Simpson, E. L.

45.

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

Picasso, Pablo

46.

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