Motivational Quotes

Ideas

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

- Rickover, Hyman G.

Best Quotes about Ideas

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

Victor Hugo

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

Chamfort, Sebastien-Roch Nicolas De

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

John Steinbeck

Ideas won't work unless you do.

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

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

A man is not necessarily intelligent because he has plenty of ideas, any more than he is a good general because he has plenty of soldiers.

Chamfort, Sebastien-Roch Nicolas De

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

Maritain, Jacques

Never hesitate to steal a good idea.

Neuharth, Al

10.

Some people entertain ideas; others put them to work.

11.

To have a great idea, have a lot of them.

Edison, Thomas A.

12.

When patterns are broken, new worlds can emerge.

Kupferberg, Tuli

13.

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

Pound, Ezra

14.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

15.

Ideas that enter the mind under fire remain there securely and for ever.

Trotsky, Leon

16.

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

17.

Little words hurt big ideas.

Newton, Howard W.

18.

The ideas dictate everything, you have to be true to that or you're dead.

Lynch, David

19.

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

Pauling, Linus

20.

A new idea is first condemned as ridiculous and then dismissed as trivial, until finally, it becomes what everybody knows.

James, William

21.

Ideas are fatal to caste.

Forster, Edward M.

22.

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

Saunders, Richard

23.

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

24.

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

25.

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

Emile Chartier

26.

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

Ernst, Morris L.

27.

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

Bunche, Ralph

28.

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

Samuel Goldwyn

29.

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

30.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

31.

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

Gibson, Tobias S.

32.

An idea is a feat of association, and the height of it is a good metaphor.

Frost, Robert

33.

Ideas... they have the power

Hill, Napoleon

34.

Very simple ideas lie within the reach only of complex minds

Gourmont, Remy De

35.

Every new idea is an impossibility until it is born.

Brown, Ron

36.

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

Bovee, Christian Nevell

37.

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

38.

I'm not impressed with the power of a corporate president. I am impressed with the power of ideas.

Mason, Ken

39.

Take the obvious, add a cupful of brains, a generous pinch of imagination, a bucketful of courage and daring, stir well and bring to a boil.

Baruch, Bernard M.

40.

It's very good for an idea to be commonplace. The important thing is that a new idea should develop out of what is already there so that it soon becomes an old acquaintance. Old acquaintances aren't by any means always welcome, but at least one can't be mistaken as to who or what they are.

Fitzgerald, Penelope

41.

Ideas are the roots of creation.

Dimnet, Ernest

42.

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

43.

Ideas too are a life and a world.

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

44.

Such as take lodgings in a head that's to be let unfurnished.

Butler, Samuel

45.

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

Canetti, Elias

46.

Ideas control the world.

Garfield, James A.

47.

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

48.

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

Simpson, E. L.

49.

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

Brown, Les

50.

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