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

The best ideas are common property.

Seneca

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

Rorty, Richard

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

Ideas are fatal to caste.

Forster, Edward M.

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

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

But how shall I get ideas? Keep your wits open! Observe! Observe! Study! Study! But above all, Think! Think! And when a noble image is indelibly impressed upon the mind -- Act!

Marden, Orison Swett

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

Anatole France

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

Butler, Samuel

10.

Our greatest lack is not money for any undertaking, but rather ideas, If the ideas are good, cash will somehow flow to where it is needed.

Schuller, Robert H.

11.

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

12.

Harold, like the rest of us, had many impressions which saved him the trouble of distinct ideas.

Eliot, George

13.

Very simple ideas lie within the reach only of complex minds

Gourmont, Remy De

14.

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

15.

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

Oliver Wendell Holmes

16.

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

Trotsky, Leon

17.

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

18.

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

P. B. Medawar

19.

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

20.

We are governed not by armies, but by ideas.

Caird, Mona

21.

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

Niblack, Griff

22.

Ideas are, in truth, force.

James, Henry

23.

Ideas too are a life and a world.

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

24.

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

25.

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

Emile Chartier

26.

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

27.

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

Berry, John

28.

Never hesitate to steal a good idea.

Neuharth, Al

29.

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.

30.

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

31.

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

Maritain, Jacques

32.

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.

33.

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

Jim Hightower

34.

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

Brown, Les

35.

Ideas move fast when their time comes.

Heilbrun, Carolyn

36.

Some people entertain ideas; others put them to work.

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.

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

Alfred North Whitehead

39.

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

Whitehead, Alfred North

40.

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

41.

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

42.

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

43.

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

44.

To have a great idea, have a lot of them.

Edison, Thomas A.

45.

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

Brande, Dorothea

46.

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

Howard Aiken

47.

Concepts, like individuals, have their histories and are just as incapable of withstanding the ravages of time as are individuals. But in and through all this they retain a kind of homesickness for the scenes of their childhood.

Kierkegaard, S°ren

48.

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

Frost, Robert

49.

An idea is worth nothing if it has no champion.

50.

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

Hubbard, Elbert