Ideas Quotes

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.

Alfred North Whitehead

It's easy to come up with new ideas; the hard part is letting go of what worked for you two years ago, but will soon be out-of-date.

Roger von Oech

Every new idea is an impossibility until it is born.

Ron Brown

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

A. Owen Penny

Ideas move fast when their time comes.

Carolyn Heilbrun

In all affairs, love, religion, politics, or business, it's a healthy idea, now and then, to hang a question mark on things you have long taken for granted

Bertrand Russell

To compel a man to furnish funds for the propagation of ideas he disbelieves and abhors is sinful and tyrannical.

Thomas Jefferson

All great ideas are dangerous.

Oscar Wilde

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

Job E. Hodges

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

John Kane

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

Sir Peter Medawar

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...

Rod Mckeun

What greater flood can there be than the flood of ideas? How quickly they submerge all that they set out to destroy, how rapidly do they create terrifying depths?

Victor Hugo

I do my precalc homework, and then when I'm done I actually sit with the textbook for like three hours and try to understand what I just did. That's the kind of weekend it is--the kind where you have so much time you go past the answers and start looking into the ideas.

John Green

Labor gives birth to ideas.

Jim Rohn

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

The whole visible world is only an imperceptible atom in the ample bosom of nature. No idea approaches it.

Blaise Pascal

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

Thomas Mann

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

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

Benjamin Disraeli