Ideas Quotes

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

Samuel Goldwyn

Ideas... they have the power

Napoleon Hill

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

Thomas Alva Edison

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

Ralph Bunche

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.

Sebastian Roch Nicolas Chamfort

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

Sebastian Roch Nicolas Chamfort

When I have an idea, I turn down the flame, as if it were a little alcohol stove, as low as it will go. Then it explodes and that is my idea.

Ernest Hemingway

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

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

Henry Block

Old ideas give way slowly; for they are more than abstract logical forms and categories, they are habits, predispositions, deeply ingrained attitudes of diversion and preference.

John Dewey, The Influence of Dar

Ideas, as distinguished from events, are never unprecedented.

Hannah Arendt

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

Marcel Proust

In laying hands upon the sacred ark of absolute permanency, in treating the forms that had been regarded as types of fixity and perfection as originating and passing away, the Origin of Species introduced a mode of thinking that in the end was bound to transform the logic of knowledge, and hence the treatment of morals, politics, and religion.

John Dewey

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

I tell you that as long as I can conceive something better than myself I cannot be easy unless I am striving to bring it into existence or clearing the way for it.

George Bernard Shaw

An idea, like a ghost, must be spoken to a little before it will explain itself.

Charles Dickens

Apart from the representational content of an idea there is another component: its force and vivacity, its impetus.

David Hume, Treatise of Human Na

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.

Soren Kierkegaard

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.

Soren Kierkegaard

Don't express your ideas too clearly. Most people think little of what they understand, and venerate what they do not.

Baltasar Gracian, The Art of Wor