Motivational Quotes

Ideas

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

- Rorty, Richard

Best Quotes about Ideas

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

Frost, Robert

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

An idea is not responsible for the people who believe in it.

Marquis, Don

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

Berry, John

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

Hortense Calisher

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

Rivarol, Antoine

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

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

Ernst, Morris L.

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

Emile Chartier

10.

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

Bunche, Ralph

11.

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

Harris, Sidney J.

12.

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

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

13.

An idea is the only level which moves the world.

Corey, Arthur F.

14.

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

Anatole France

15.

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

Everson, Ray D.

16.

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

17.

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

Sutton, Percy

18.

Ideas are fatal to caste.

Forster, Edward M.

19.

Ideas control the world.

Garfield, James A.

20.

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.

21.

Great ideas originate in the muscles.

Edison, Thomas A.

22.

The best ideas are common property.

Seneca

23.

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

Walter Bagehot

24.

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

Chartier, Alain

25.

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

26.

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

Judith Brocklehurst

27.

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

28.

There is one thing stronger than all the armies in the world, and that is an idea whose time has come.

Hugo, Victor

29.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

30.

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

Nelson, George

31.

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

Gibson, Tobias S.

32.

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

Canetti, Elias

33.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

34.

An idea discovered is much better possessed.

Young

35.

Some people entertain ideas; others put them to work.

36.

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

37.

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

Avery, Milton

38.

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

39.

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

Cotvos

40.

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.

41.

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

42.

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

Maritain, Jacques

43.

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

44.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

45.

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

46.

Ideas not coupled with action never become bigger than the brain cells they occupied.

Glasgow, Arnold H.

47.

Long is the road from conception to completion.