Motivational Quotes

Ideas

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

- Rorty, Richard

Best Quotes about Ideas

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

Bachelard, Gaston

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

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

Proust, Marcel

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

Mann, Thomas

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

Samuel Goldwyn

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.

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

Rorty, Richard

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

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

Cotvos

10.

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

11.

Man's mind, stretched by a new idea, never goes back to its original dimensions.

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

12.

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.

13.

Great ideas originate in the muscles.

Edison, Thomas A.

14.

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

Alfred North Whitehead

15.

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

Sir Frederick G. Banting

16.

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

17.

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

William O. Douglas

18.

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

Rivarol, Antoine

19.

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

Maritain, Jacques

20.

Labor gives birth to ideas.

Rohn, Jim

21.

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

22.

Some people entertain ideas; others put them to work.

23.

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

Howard Aiken

24.

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

Picasso, Pablo

25.

Everything begins with an idea.

Nightingale, Earl

26.

Ideas won't work unless you do.

27.

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

Hugo, Victor

28.

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

Anatole France

29.

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

Saunders, Richard

30.

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

31.

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

32.

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

Sutton, Percy

33.

Ideas move fast when their time comes.

Heilbrun, Carolyn

34.

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

Keynes, John Maynard

35.

An invasion of armies can be resisted, but not an idea whose time has come.

Victor Hugo

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.

Ideas can be life-changing. Sometimes all you need to open the door is just one more good idea.

Rohn, Jim

38.

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

39.

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

Koysis, Ted

40.

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

Jim Hightower

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.

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

43.

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

Brande, Dorothea

44.

An idea is a putting truth in check-mate.

Gasset, Jose Ortega Y

45.

When patterns are broken, new worlds can emerge.

Kupferberg, Tuli

46.

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

Berry, John

47.

The best ideas are common property.

Seneca

48.

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

Mason, Ken

49.

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

50.

An idea is worth nothing if it has no champion.