Motivational Quotes

Ideas

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

- Picasso, Pablo

Best Quotes about Ideas

It's easy to come up with new ideas; the hard part is letting go of what worked for you two years ago, but will soon be out-of-date.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

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

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

Picasso, Pablo

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

Howard Aiken

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

Walter Bagehot

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

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

Mann, Thomas

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

Koysis, Ted

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

Williamson, Marianne

10.

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

Chamfort, Sebastien-Roch Nicolas De

11.

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

12.

Little words hurt big ideas.

Newton, Howard W.

13.

An idea is worth nothing if it has no champion.

14.

Ideas won't work unless you do.

15.

What you need is an idea.

Lear, William P.

16.

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

William O. Douglas

17.

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

Whitehead, Alfred North

18.

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

Hodges, Job E.

19.

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

20.

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

21.

It is ideas, not vested interests, which are dangerous for good or evil.

Keynes, John Maynard

22.

We are governed not by armies, but by ideas.

Caird, Mona

23.

All achievements, all earned riches, have their beginning in an idea.

Hill, Napoleon

24.

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

25.

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

Pound, Ezra

26.

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

27.

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

Penny, A. Owen

28.

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

29.

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

Edison, Thomas A.

30.

Great people talk about ideas. Small people talk about other people.

Gibson, Tobias S.

31.

Ideas are, in truth, force.

James, Henry

32.

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

Block, Henry

33.

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

34.

Good ideas are not adopted automatically. They must be driven into practice with courageous patience.

Hyman Rickover

35.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

36.

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

Harris, Sidney J.

37.

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

38.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

39.

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

40.

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

Frost, Robert

41.

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

42.

Ideas are fatal to caste.

Forster, Edward M.

43.

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

Saunders, Richard

44.

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

Everson, Ray D.

45.

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

Einstein, Albert

46.

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

Hugo, Victor

47.

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

Brown, Les

48.

Very simple ideas lie within the reach only of complex minds

Gourmont, Remy De

49.

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

50.

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

Mason, Ken