Motivational Quotes

Ideas

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

- Alfred North Whitehead

Best Quotes about Ideas

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.

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

Emile Chartier

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

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

Jim Hightower

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

Walter Bagehot

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

Ideas... they have the power

Hill, Napoleon

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

Saunders, Richard

This is my answer to the gap between ideas and action - I will write it out.

Hortense Calisher

10.

Ideas move fast when their time comes.

Heilbrun, Carolyn

11.

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

12.

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

13.

It's easy to come up with new ideas; the hard part is letting go of what worked for you two years ago, but will soon be out-of-date.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

14.

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

Whitehead, Alfred North

15.

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

William O. Douglas

16.

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

John Steinbeck

17.

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

Maritain, Jacques

18.

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

Anatole France

19.

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

Harris, Sidney J.

20.

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

Alfred North Whitehead

21.

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

22.

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

P. B. Medawar

23.

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

Bovee, Christian Nevell

24.

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

Block, Henry

25.

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

Glasgow, Arnold H.

26.

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

Rivarol, Antoine

27.

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

Keynes, John Maynard

28.

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

Marquis, Don

29.

Never hesitate to steal a good idea.

Neuharth, Al

30.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

31.

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

32.

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

Avery, Milton

33.

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

Einstein, Albert

34.

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

Gibson, Tobias S.

35.

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

John Cage

36.

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

37.

Good ideas are not adopted automatically. They must be driven into practice with courageous patience.

Hyman Rickover

38.

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

39.

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

40.

People find ideas a bore because they do not distinguish between live ones and stuffed ones on a shelf.

Pound, Ezra

41.

Ideas are, in truth, force.

James, Henry

42.

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

Mann, Thomas

43.

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