Motivational Quotes

Ideas

Good ideas and innovations must be driven into existence by courageous patience.

- Rickover, Hyman G.

Best Quotes about Ideas

To love an idea is to love it a little more than one should.

Rostand, Jean

Great ideas originate in the muscles.

Edison, Thomas A.

Everything begins with an idea.

Nightingale, Earl

You look at any giant corporation, and I mean the biggies, and they all started with a guy with an idea, doing it well.

Robbins, Irvine

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

Anatole France

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

Canetti, Elias

There is no adequate defense, except stupidity, against the impact of a new idea.

Bridgman, P. W.

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

Whenever I hear people talking about liberal ideas, I am always astounded that men should love to fool themselves with empty sounds. An idea should never be liberal; it must be vigorous, positive, and without loose ends so that it may fulfill its divine mission and be productive. The proper place for liberality is in the realm of the emotions.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

10.

Every new idea is an impossibility until it is born.

Brown, Ron

11.

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

Walter Bagehot

12.

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

Einstein, Albert

13.

What you need is an idea.

Lear, William P.

14.

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

15.

An idea is the only level which moves the world.

Corey, Arthur F.

16.

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

Trotsky, Leon

17.

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

Proust, Marcel

18.

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

19.

Long is the road from conception to completion.

Moliere

20.

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

P. B. Medawar

21.

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

James, William

22.

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

23.

Ideas are refined and multiplied in the commerce of minds. In their splendor, images effect a very simple communion of souls.

Bachelard, Gaston

24.

Ideas are a capital that bears interest only in the hands of talent.

Rivarol, Antoine

25.

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

Keynes, John Maynard

26.

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

John Cage

27.

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

28.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

29.

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

30.

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

Sutton, Percy

31.

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

Chamfort, Sebastien-Roch Nicolas De

32.

Some people entertain ideas; others put them to work.

33.

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

34.

Not just in commerce but in the world of ideas too our age is putting on a veritable clearance sale. Everything can be had so dirt cheap that one begins to wander whether in the end anyone will want to make a bid.

Kierkegaard, S°ren

35.

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

Sir Frederick G. Banting

36.

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

37.

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

Maritain, Jacques

38.

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.

39.

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

Koysis, Ted

40.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

41.

Ideas lose themselves as quickly as quail, and one must wing them the minute they rise out of the grass, or they are gone.

Kennedy, Thomas F.

42.

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

Saunders, Richard

43.

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

Hector Berlioz

44.

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

Hortense Calisher

45.

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

Hugo, Victor

46.

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

47.

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

48.

An idea discovered is much better possessed.

Young

49.

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

Simpson, E. L.

50.

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