Motivational Quotes

Ideas

Great ideas originate in the muscles.

- Edison, Thomas A.

Best Quotes about Ideas

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

Nothing dies harder than a bad idea.

Cameron, Julie

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

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

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

An idea discovered is much better possessed.

Young

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

Ernst, Morris L.

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

Twain, Mark

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

Picasso, Pablo

10.

We are governed not by armies, but by ideas.

Caird, Mona

11.

Everything begins with an idea.

Nightingale, Earl

12.

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

13.

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

Saunders, Richard

14.

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

Hugo, Victor

15.

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

John Steinbeck

16.

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

17.

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

Whitehead, Alfred North

18.

Ideas control the world.

Garfield, James A.

19.

Get your ideas on paper and study them. Do not let them go to waste!

Brown, Les

20.

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

P. B. Medawar

21.

Very simple ideas lie within the reach only of complex minds

Gourmont, Remy De

22.

An idea is the only level which moves the world.

Corey, Arthur F.

23.

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

Eliot, George

24.

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

25.

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

26.

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

27.

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

28.

Ideas won't work unless you do.

29.

The greatest achievements of the human mind are generally received with distrust.

Schopenhauer, Arthur

30.

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

31.

Ideas move fast when their time comes.

Heilbrun, Carolyn

32.

Getting an idea should be like sitting down on a pin. It should make you jump up and do something.

Simpson, E. L.

33.

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

34.

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

35.

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

Nelson, George

36.

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

Judith Brocklehurst

37.

Ideas are the roots of creation.

Dimnet, Ernest

38.

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

39.

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

Hubbard, Elbert

40.

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

41.

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

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

42.

If you want to get across an idea, wrap it up in a person.

Bunche, Ralph

43.

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

44.

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.

45.

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

Gibson, Tobias S.

46.

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

Hortense Calisher

47.

An idea is a putting truth in check-mate.

Gasset, Jose Ortega Y

48.

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