Quotes about ideas

Don't worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you'll have to ram them down people's throats.

— Howard Aiken

Eureka! I've got it.

— Archimedes

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

— Milton Avery

An idea is never given to you without you being given the power to make it reality. You must, nevertheless, suffer for it.

— Richard Bach

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.

— Gaston Bachelard

Ideas are refined and multiplied in the commerce of minds. In their splendor, images effect a very simple communion of souls.

— Gaston Bachelard

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.

— Francis Bacon

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.

— Bernard M. Baruch

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. -

— Henry Ward Beecher

A good idea plus capable men cannot fail; it is better than money in the bank.

— John Berry

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

— Henry Block

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

— Christian Nevell Bovee

The most important thing in science is not so much to obtain new facts as to discover new ways of thinking about them.

— Sir William Bragg

So long as new ideas are created, sales will continue to reach new highs.

— Dorothea Brande

It is useless to send armies against ideas.

— George Brandes

There is no adequate defense, except stupidity, against the impact of a new idea.

— P. W. Bridgman

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

— Les Brown

Every new idea is an impossibility until it is born.

— Ron Brown

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

— Ralph Bunche

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

— Samuel Butler

We are governed not by armies, but by ideas.

— Mona Caird

Nothing dies harder than a bad idea.

— Julie Cameron

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

— Elias Canetti

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?

— Dale Carnegie

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.

— Sebastien-Roch Nicolas De Chamfort

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

— Sebastien-Roch Nicolas De Chamfort

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

— Alain Chartier

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.

— Arthur C. Clarke

The wise only possess ideas; the greater part of mankind are possessed by them.

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge

People will accept your ideas much more readily if you tell them Benjamin Franklin said it first.

— David H Comins

Hang ideas! They are tramps, vagabonds, knocking at the back-door of your mind, each taking a little of your substance, each carrying away some crumb of that belief in a few simple notions you must cling to if you want to live decently and would like to die easy!

— Joseph Conrad

An idea is the only level which moves the world.

— Arthur F. Corey

Not the one who has many ideas, but the one who has a single conviction may become a great person.

— Cotvos

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.

— Midge Decter

Ideas are the roots of creation.

— Ernest Dimnet

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

— Benjamin Disraeli

Do not follow the ideas of others, but learn to listen to the voice within yourself. Your body and mind will become clear and you will realize the unity of all things.

— Dogen

Neither man or nation can exist without a sublime idea.

— Fyodor Dostoevsky

The value of an idea lies in the using of it.

— Thomas A. Edison

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

— Thomas A. Edison

Great ideas originate in the muscles.

— Thomas A. Edison

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

— Albert Einstein

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

— George Eliot

We are prisoners of ideas.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

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

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Ideas must work through the brains and the arms of good and brave men, or they are no better than dreams.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

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. --

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

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

— Morris L. Ernst

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

— Ray D. Everson

Men who accomplish great things in the industrial world are the ones who have faith in the money producing power of ideas.

— Charles Fillmore

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.

— Penelope Fitzgerald

Ideas are fatal to caste.

— Edward M. Forster

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.

— Michel Foucault

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

— Robert Frost

Ideas control the world.

— James A. Garfield

An idea is a putting truth in check-mate.

— Jose Ortega Y Gasset

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

— Tobias S. Gibson

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.

— Andre Gide

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

— Arnold H. Glasgow

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.

— Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

Daring ideas are like chessmen moved forward. They may be beaten, but they may start a winning game.

— Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

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

— Samuel Goldwyn

Very simple ideas lie within the reach only of complex minds

— Remy De Gourmont

Go out and buy yourself a five-cent pencil and a ten-cent notebook and begin to write down some million-dollar ideas for yourself.

— Bob Grinde

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

— Sidney J. Harris

Ideas move fast when their time comes.

— Carolyn Heilbrun

Ideas... they have the power

— Napoleon Hill

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

— Napoleon Hill

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

— Job E. Hodges

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

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

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

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

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

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

A new and valid idea is worth more than a regiment and fewer men can furnish the former than command the latter.

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

Good ideas are a dime a dozen, bad ones are free.

— Doug Horton

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

— Elbert Hubbard

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

— Victor Hugo

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

— Victor Hugo

Great ideas need landing gear as well as wings.

— C. O. Jackson

Ideas are, in truth, force.

— Henry James

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

— William James

An idea, to be suggestive, must come to the individual with the force of revelation.

— William James

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.

— Barry Jones

The public interest is best served by the free exchange of ideas.

— John Kane

Ideas lose themselves as quickly as quail, and one must wing them the minute they rise out of the grass, or they are gone.

— Thomas F. Kennedy

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

— Charles F. Kettering

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.

— John Maynard Keynes

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

— John Maynard Keynes

The difficulty lies, not in the new ideas, but in escaping from the old ones, which ramify, for those brought up as most of us have been, into every corner of our minds.

— John Maynard Keynes

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.

— Søren Kierkegaard

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.

— Søren Kierkegaard

A new idea is like a child. It's easier to conceive than to deliver.

— Ted Koysis

When patterns are broken, new worlds can emerge.

— Tuli Kupferberg

What you need is an idea.

— William P. Lear

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.

— Wyndham Lewis

Ideas too are a life and a world.

— Georg C. Lichtenberg

The thinker dies, but his thoughts are beyond the reach of destruction. Men are mortal, but ideas are immortal.

— William Lippmann

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

— David Lynch

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

— Thomas Mann

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!

— Orison Swett Marden

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

— Jacques Maritain