Ideas Quotes and Sayings

Inherited ideas are a curious thing, and interesting to observe and examine.
Mark Twain

Opportunity ideas do not lie around waiting to be discovered. Such ideas need to be produced.
Edward de Bono

You cannot put a rope around the neck of an idea: you cannot put an idea up against a barrack-square wall and riddle it with bullets: you cannot confine it in the strongest prison cell that your slaves could ever build.
Sean O’Casey

The real Antichrist is he who turns the wine of an original idea into the water of mediocrity.
Eric Hoffer

Ideas must be put to the test. That’s why we make things, otherwise they would be no more than ideas. There is often a huge difference between an idea and its realisation. I’ve had what I thought were great ideas that just didn’t work.
Andy Goldsworthy

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

So many new ideas are at first strange and horrible, though ultimately valuable that a very heavy responsibility rests upon those who would prevent their dissemination.
J. B. S. Haldane

We can’t change anything until we get some fresh ideas, until we begin to see things differently.
James Hillman

Ideas are one thing and what happens is another.
John Cage

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

Like stones rolling down hills, fair ideas reach their objectives despite all obstacles and barriers. It may be possible to speed or hinder them, but impossible to stop them.
Jose Marti

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

If I were required to guess off-hand, and without collusion with higher minds, what is the bottom cause of the amazing material and intellectual advancement of the last fifty years, I should guess that it was the modern-born and previously non-existent disposition on the part of men to believe that a new idea can have value.
Mark Twain

An original idea. That can’t be too hard. The library must be full of them.
Stephen Fry

The world moves, and ideas that were once good are not always good.
Dwight D. Eisenhower

Big ideas are so hard to recognize, so fragile, so easy to kill. Don’t forget that, all of you who don’t have them.
John Elliott

There are no new ideas. There are only new ways of making them felt.
Audre Lorde

We all are learning, modifying, or destroying ideas all the time. Rapid destruction of your ideas when the time is right is one of the most valuable qualities you can acquire. You must force yourself to consider arguments on the other side.
Charlie Munger

Just as our eyes need light in order to see, our minds need ideas in order to conceive.
Napoleon Hill

The biggest problem is not to let people accept new ideas, but to let them forget the old ones.
John Maynard Keynes

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

We know that the nature of genius is to provide idiots with ideas twenty years later.
Louis Aragon

We must have courage to bet on our ideas, to take the calculated risk, and to act. Everyday living requires courage if life is to be effective and bring happiness.
Maxwell Maltz

Ideas are a dime a dozen. People who implement them are priceless.
Mary Kay Ash

I don’t think anything changes until ideas change. The usual American viewpoint is to believe that something is wrong with the person.
James Hillman

The enemy of the conventional wisdom is not ideas but the march of events.
Galbraith

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

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

Good ideas are the backbone of good government.
Brian Schweitzer

You don’t need to have a 100-person company to develop that idea.
Larry Page