Motivational Quotes

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

Best Quotes about Ideas

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.

There is no adequate defense, except stupidity, against the impact of a new idea.

Bridgman, P. W.

Ideas too are a life and a world.

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

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

Hugo, Victor

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

Long is the road from conception to completion.

Moliere

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

Whitehead, Alfred North

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

Anatole France

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

Block, Henry

10.

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

11.

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

Cotvos

12.

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

13.

What you need is an idea.

Lear, William P.

14.

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

Avery, Milton

15.

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

Harris, Sidney J.

16.

It's easy to come up with new ideas; the hard part is letting go of what worked for you two years ago, but will soon be out-of-date.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

17.

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

18.

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

19.

Nothing dies harder than a bad idea.

Cameron, Julie

20.

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

Gibson, Tobias S.

21.

Labor gives birth to ideas.

Rohn, Jim

22.

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

Bovee, Christian Nevell

23.

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

24.

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

Victor Hugo

25.

The best ideas are common property.

Seneca

26.

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

Kettering, Charles F.

27.

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

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.

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.

30.

Little words hurt big ideas.

Newton, Howard W.

31.

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

Hodges, Job E.

32.

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

Keynes, John Maynard

33.

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.

34.

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

35.

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

Penny, A. Owen

36.

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

Picasso, Pablo

37.

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

38.

Every new idea is an impossibility until it is born.

Brown, Ron

39.

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

Canetti, Elias

40.

An idea discovered is much better possessed.

Young

41.

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

42.

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

Rohn, Jim

43.

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

Eliot, George

44.

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

Rickover, Hyman G.

45.

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

Emile Chartier

46.

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

47.

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

48.

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

49.

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

Ernst, Morris L.

50.

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