Motivational Quotes

Ideas

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

- Victor Hugo

Best Quotes about Ideas

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

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

John Cage

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

Oliver Wendell Holmes

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

Saunders, Richard

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

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

Einstein, Albert

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

Keynes, John Maynard

Labor gives birth to ideas.

Rohn, Jim

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

Hill, Napoleon

10.

Do not follow the ideas of others, but learn to listen to the voice within yourself. Your body and mind will become clear and you will realize the unity of all things.

Dogen

11.

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

Eliot, George

12.

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

13.

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

Rivarol, Antoine

14.

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

Mann, Thomas

15.

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

Block, Henry

16.

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

Rohn, Jim

17.

What you need is an idea.

Lear, William P.

18.

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

19.

The best ideas are common property.

Seneca

20.

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

21.

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

Chartier, Alain

22.

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

23.

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

Rickover, Hyman G.

24.

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

25.

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

26.

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

Ernst, Morris L.

27.

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

Cotvos

28.

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

Victor Hugo

29.

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

30.

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

31.

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

Howard Aiken

32.

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

Emile Chartier

33.

Good ideas are a dime a dozen, bad ones are free.

Horton, Doug

34.

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

Marquis, Don

35.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

36.

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

Alfred North Whitehead

37.

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

38.

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

39.

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.

40.

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

Hector Berlioz

41.

Never hesitate to steal a good idea.

Neuharth, Al

42.

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

43.

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

44.

Great ideas originate in the muscles.

Edison, Thomas A.

45.

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

46.

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

47.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

48.

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

Jim Hightower

49.

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

Koysis, Ted

50.

If you want to kill any idea in the world today, get a committee working on it.