Ideas Quotes and Sayings

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

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

Communism is like prohibition, it’s a good idea but it won’t work.
Will Rogers

When a truth is necessary, the reason for it can be found by analysis, that is, by resolving it into simpler ideas and truths until the primary ones are reached.
Gottfried Leibniz

To get a big company moving fast, especially on a many-headed opportunity like the Internet, you have to have hundreds of people participating and coming up with ideas.
Bill Gates

To the indefinite, uncertain mind of the American radical the most contradictory ideas and methods are possible. The result is a sad chaos in the radical movement, a sort of intellectual hash, which has neither taste nor character.
Emma Goldman

Certainly, travel is more than the seeing of sights; it is a change that goes on, deep and permanent, in the ideas of living.
Miriam Beard

You sit at the board and suddenly your heart leaps. Your hand trembles to pick up the piece and move it. But what chess teaches you is that you must sit there calmly and think about whether it’s really a good idea and whether there are other, better ideas.
Stanley Kubrick

If there is dissatisfaction with the status quo, good. If there is ferment, so much the better. If there is restlessness, I am pleased. Then let there be ideas, and hard thought, and hard work. If man feels small, let man make himself bigger.
Hubert H. Humphrey

And people laugh at me because I use big words. But if you have big ideas you have to use big words to express them, haven’t you?
Lucy Maud Montgomery

Share knowledge and ideas Tell someone about a great book that you read so they can benefit from it too. Teach a new concept or idea that you’ve learned.
Steve Brunkhorst

If anyone has a new idea in this country, there are twice as many people who keep putting a man with a red flag in front of it.
Prince Philip

Some people are aware of another sort of thinking which… leads to those simple ideas that are obvious only after they have been thought of… the term ‘lateral thinking’ has been coined to describe this orther sort of thinking; ‘vertical thinking’ is used to denote the conventional logical process.
Edward De Bono

When you write down your ideas you automatically focus your full attention on them. Few if any of us can write one thought and think another at the same time. Thus a pencil and paper make excellent concentration tools.
Michael Leboeuf

A society made up of individuals who were all capable of original thought would probably be unendurable. The pressure of ideas would simply drive it frantic.
H. L. Mencken

It is not of the essence of mathematics to be conversant with the ideas of number and quantity.
George Boole

Drawing is putting a line round an idea.
Henri Matisse

We must reject the idea.. well-intentioned, but dead wrong.. that the primary path to greatness in the social sectors is to become “more like a business.” Most businesses.. like most of anything else in life.. fall somewhere between mediocre and good.
Jim Collins

The half hour between waking and rising has all my life proved propitious to any task which was exercising my invention… It was always when I first opened my eyes that the desired ideas thronged upon me.
Sir Walter Scott

A writer of fiction lives in fear. Each new day demands new ideas and he can never be sure whether he is going to come up with them or not.
Roald Dahl

Do not worry about the incarnation of ideas.
Vissarion Belinsky

I constantly try to reinvent my sensibilities and my ideas. I enjoy some of the satisfaction that I get when I feel good about what I’ve done. But the process is quite lonely and quite painful.
Vincent Gallo

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

Journalist: a person without any ideas but with an ability to express them; a writer whose skill is improved by a deadline: the more time he has, the worse he writes.
Karl Kraus

There is a lot more young Indian entrepreneurs can do if they are given the money. They have the idea, and I would just like to help them realise it.
Kerry Packer

Whenever I attempt to frame a simple idea of time, abstracted from the succession of ideas in my mind, which flows uniformly, and is participated by all beings, I am lost and embrangled in inextricable difficulties.
George Berkeley

His life has been spent in devotion to ideas. The passions of his brain have consumed the passions of his body.
Sherwood Anderson

We don’t want to push our ideas on to customers, we simply want to make what they want.
Laura Ashley

If you make people think they’re thinking, they’ll love you. If you really make them think, they’ll hate you.
Don Marquis

I said to myself, I have things in my head that are not like what anyone has taught me - shapes and ideas so near to me - so natural to my way of being and thinking that it hasn’t occurred to me to put them down. I decided to start anew, to strip away what I had been taught.
Georgia O’Keeffe