Browse through our collection of quotes tagged with 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.
Michel Foucault
Ideas are fatal to caste.
E. M. Forster
Ideas are a capital that bears interest only in the hands of talent.
Antoine Rivarol
Great people talk about ideas. Small people talk about other people.
Tobias S. Gibson
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
An idea is a putting truth in check-mate.
Jos
It seems to me what is called for is an exquisite balance between two conflicting needs: the most skeptical scrutiny of all hypotheses that are served up to us and at the same time a great openness to new ideas . . . If you are only skeptical, then no new ideas make it through to you . . . On the other hand, if you are open to the point of gullibility and have not an ounce of skeptical sense in you, then you cannot distinguish the useful ideas from the worthless ones.
Carl Sagan
Good ideas and innovations must be driven into existence by courageous patience.
Hyman Rickover
Nothing is more dangerous than an idea, when it is the only idea we have.
Henri AlbanFournier, Liberspropo
There never was an idea started that woke up men out of their stupid indifference but its originator was spoken of as a crank.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
New ideas come into this world somewhat like falling meteors, with a flash and an explosion, and perhaps somebody
Sarah Bernhardt, The Art of the
An idea is a point of departure and no more. As soon as you elaborate it, it becomes transformed by thought.
Pablo Picasso, Quoted in: Jaime
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, Marlow, in Lord J
The value of an idea has nothing whatsoever to do with the sincerity of the man who expresses it. Indeed, the probabilities are that the more insincere the man is, the more purely intellectual will the idea be, as in that case it will not be coloured by either his wants, his desires, or his prejudices.
Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dori
People find ideas a bore because they do not distinguish between live ones and stuffed ones on a shelf.
Ezra Pound, Guide to Kulchur, pt
A man may die, nations may rise and fall, but an idea lives on. Ideas have endurance without death.
John Fitzgerald Kennedy, Address
No idea is so antiquated that it was not once modern. No idea is so modern that it will not some day be antiquated... To seize the flying thought before it escapes us is our only touch with reality.
Ellen Glasgow
To love an idea is to love it a little more than one should.
Jean Rostand, Carnets d'un Biolo
Eureka! I've got it.
Archimedes
Human life is driven forward by its dim apprehension of notions too general for its existing language.
Alfred North Whitehead
