Motivational Quotes

Ideas

Human life is driven forward by its dim apprehension of notions too general for its existing language.

- Whitehead, Alfred North

Best Quotes about Ideas

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

Emile Chartier

Ideas won't work unless you do.

An idea is the only level which moves the world.

Corey, Arthur F.

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

Bachelard, Gaston

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

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

Mere words are cheap and plenty enough, but ideas that rouse and set multitudes thinking come as gold for the mines.

Penny, A. Owen

Labor gives birth to ideas.

Rohn, Jim

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

Kettering, Charles F.

10.

An idea is a putting truth in check-mate.

Gasset, Jose Ortega Y

11.

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

12.

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

Glasgow, Arnold H.

13.

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

14.

Ideas control the world.

Garfield, James A.

15.

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

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

16.

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

17.

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

Munro, J. Richard

18.

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

Ernst, Morris L.

19.

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

20.

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

Sutton, Percy

21.

Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen.

John Steinbeck

22.

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

23.

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

Hill, Napoleon

24.

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

Saunders, Richard

25.

It's a pretty good idea to be of good cheer but not all the time. Just at the most unexpected times.

26.

It is the nature of thought to find its way into action.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

27.

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

Howard Aiken

28.

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

Gibson, Tobias S.

29.

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

Marquis, Don

30.

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

31.

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

Niblack, Griff

32.

Every new idea is an impossibility until it is born.

Brown, Ron

33.

We are not to make the ideas of contentment and aspiration quarrel, for God made them fast friends. A man may aspire, and yet be quite content until it is time to raise; and both flying and resting are but parts of one contentment. The very fruit of the gospel is aspiration. It is to the heart what spring is to the earth, making every root, and bud, and bough desire to be more. -

Beecher, Henry Ward

34.

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

Hector Berlioz

35.

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

Mann, Thomas

36.

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

Nelson, George

37.

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

Hubbard, Elbert

38.

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

Cotvos

39.

A crank is someone with a new idea -- until it catches on.

Twain, Mark

40.

Lots of people know a good thing the minute the other fellow sees it first.

Hodges, Job E.

41.

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.

42.

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

43.

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

44.

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

Proust, Marcel

45.

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

46.

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

47.

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

48.

So many new ideas are at first strange and horrible, though ultimately valuable that a very heavy responsibility rests upon those who would prevent their dissemination.

J. B. S. Haldane

49.

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

Samuel Goldwyn

50.

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

John Cage