Motivational Quotes

Ideas

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

- Holmes, Oliver Wendell

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.

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

Every new idea is an impossibility until it is born.

Brown, Ron

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

James, William

The best ideas are common property.

Seneca

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

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

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

Alfred North Whitehead

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

10.

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

11.

An idea is worth nothing if it has no champion.

12.

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

Brown, Les

13.

Greater than the tread of mighty armies is an idea whose time has come.

Hugo, Victor

14.

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

Rohn, Jim

15.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

16.

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

Jim Hightower

17.

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

Maritain, Jacques

18.

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

19.

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

Block, Henry

20.

Once I thought ideas were exceptions not the rule. That is not so. Ideas are so plentiful that they ride by on air. You've only to reach out and snatch one...

Mckeun, Rod

21.

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

Mann, Thomas

22.

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

Hodges, Job E.

23.

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

Canetti, Elias

24.

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

John Steinbeck

25.

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

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.

Nothing dies harder than a bad idea.

Cameron, Julie

28.

Our greatest lack is not money for any undertaking, but rather ideas, If the ideas are good, cash will somehow flow to where it is needed.

Schuller, Robert H.

29.

No one has ever had an idea in a dress suit.

Sir Frederick G. Banting

30.

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

Williamson, Marianne

31.

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

Glasgow, Arnold H.

32.

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

Penny, A. Owen

33.

A powerful idea communicates some of its strength to him who challenges it.

Proust, Marcel

34.

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

35.

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

Judith Brocklehurst

36.

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

37.

Ideas are, in truth, force.

James, Henry

38.

Ideas won't work unless you do.

39.

Ideas are fatal to caste.

Forster, Edward M.

40.

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

Anatole France

41.

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

42.

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

43.

We are governed not by armies, but by ideas.

Caird, Mona

44.

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

45.

But how shall I get ideas? Keep your wits open! Observe! Observe! Study! Study! But above all, Think! Think! And when a noble image is indelibly impressed upon the mind -- Act!

Marden, Orison Swett

46.

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

Munro, J. Richard

47.

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

Edison, Thomas A.

48.

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

49.

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

50.

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

Bovee, Christian Nevell