Motivational Quotes

Ideas

When an idea reaches critical mass there is no stopping the shift its presence will induce.

- Williamson, Marianne

Best Quotes about Ideas

To love an idea is to love it a little more than one should.

Rostand, Jean

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

Niblack, Griff

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

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

John Steinbeck

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

Kettering, Charles F.

Never hesitate to steal a good idea.

Neuharth, Al

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

Hugo, Victor

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

Munro, J. Richard

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

Edison, Thomas A.

10.

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

Saunders, Richard

11.

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

12.

Many ideas grow better when transplanted into another mind than in the one where they sprung up.

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

13.

Ideas are, in truth, force.

James, Henry

14.

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

15.

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

16.

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

William O. Douglas

17.

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

Einstein, Albert

18.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

19.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

20.

Everything begins with an idea.

Nightingale, Earl

21.

Ideas too are a life and a world.

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

22.

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

23.

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

P. B. Medawar

24.

Man's mind, once stretched by a new idea, never regains its original dimensions.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

25.

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

26.

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

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.

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

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

29.

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

Walter Bagehot

30.

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.

31.

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

32.

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

33.

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

Mason, Ken

34.

The best ideas are common property.

Seneca

35.

When an idea reaches critical mass there is no stopping the shift its presence will induce.

Williamson, Marianne

36.

Man's mind, stretched by a new idea, never goes back to its original dimensions.

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

37.

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

Brown, Les

38.

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

Anatole France

39.

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

Pound, Ezra

40.

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

Lynch, David

41.

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

Hill, Napoleon

42.

Nothing is more dangerous than an idea, when you only have one.

Chartier, Alain

43.

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

44.

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

45.

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

46.

You have to hatch ideas -- and then hitch them.

Everson, Ray D.

47.

Ideas move fast when their time comes.

Heilbrun, Carolyn

48.

Labor gives birth to ideas.