Motivational Quotes

Ideas

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

- Walter Bagehot

Best Quotes about Ideas

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

Gibson, Tobias S.

Ideas are, in truth, force.

James, Henry

It first appeared like a crazy idea. It turned out he had a great idea.

Munro, J. Richard

If a man had as many ideas during the day as he does when he has insomnia, he would make a fortune.

Niblack, Griff

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

The best ideas are common property.

Seneca

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

Everything begins with an idea.

Nightingale, Earl

Think for thyself one good idea, but known to be thine own, is better than a thousand gleaned from fields by others sown.

Wilson, Alexander

10.

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

Picasso, Pablo

11.

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

Chamfort, Sebastien-Roch Nicolas De

12.

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

Walter Bagehot

13.

Ideas won't work unless you do.

14.

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

15.

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

Bachelard, Gaston

16.

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

17.

Great ideas originate in the muscles.

Edison, Thomas A.

18.

The best way to have a good idea is to have a lot of ideas.

Pauling, Linus

19.

A pile of rocks ceases to be a rock when somebody contemplates it with the idea of a cathedral in mind.

Saint-Exupery, Antoine De

20.

Ideas are the roots of creation.

Dimnet, Ernest

21.

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

Rorty, Richard

22.

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

23.

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.

24.

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

P. B. Medawar

25.

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

26.

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

Oliver Wendell Holmes

27.

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

28.

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

29.

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

Avery, Milton

30.

The idea that is not dangerous is not worthy of being called an idea at all.

Hubbard, Elbert

31.

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

32.

Ideas are invented only as correctives to the past. Through repeated rectification of this kind one may hope to disengage an idea that is valid.

Bachelard, Gaston

33.

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

34.

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

35.

Labor gives birth to ideas.

Rohn, Jim

36.

Nothing dies harder than a bad idea.

Cameron, Julie

37.

Long is the road from conception to completion.

Moliere

38.

Many ideas are good for a limited time -- not forever.

Townsend, Robert

39.

If you have the same ideas as everybody else but have them one week earlier than everyone else then you will be hailed as a visionary. But if you have them five years earlier you will be named a lunatic.

Jones, Barry

40.

What you need is an idea.

Lear, William P.

41.

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

Eliot, George

42.

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

43.

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

44.

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

Judith Brocklehurst

45.

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

Maritain, Jacques

46.

Little words hurt big ideas.

Newton, Howard W.

47.

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

Harris, Sidney J.

48.

Every new idea is an impossibility until it is born.

Brown, Ron

49.

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

50.

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

Ernst, Morris L.