Ideas Quotes

If you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange these apples then you and I will still each have one apple. But if you have an idea and I have an idea and we exchange these ideas, then each of us will have two ideas.

George Bernard Shaw

All the really good ideas I ever had came to me while I was milking a cow.

Grant Wood

Mathematics is a vast adventure in ideas; its history reflects some of the noblest thoughts of countless generations.

Dirk Struik, A Concise History of Mathematics, vol. I

Ideas pull the trigger, but instinct loads the gun.

Don Marquis

Ideas are the factors that lift civilization. They create revolutions. There is more dynamite in an idea than in many bombs.

Bishop Vincent

The best way to have a good idea is to have lots of ideas.

Linus Pauling

Familiarity may breed contempt in some areas of human behavior, but in the field of social ideas it is the touchstone of acceptability.

J. William Galbraith

The thinker dies, but his thoughts are beyond the reach of destruction. Men are mortal but ideas are immortal.

Richard Adams

I am long on ideas, but short on time. I only expect to live only about a hundred years.

Thomas Alva Edison

Generally students are the best vehicles for passing on ideas, for their thoughts are plastic and can be molded and they can adjust the ideas of old men to the shape of reality as they find it in villages and hills of China or in ghettos and suburbs of America.

Theodore Harold White

We are prisoners of ideas.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

The test of a first - Rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

In the realm of ideas it is better to let the mind sally forth, even if some precious preconceptions suffer a mauling.

Robert F. Goheen

A committee is a cul - De - Sac down which ideas are lured and then quietly strangled.

Sir Barnett Cocks (ca. 1907)

Ideas control the world.

James Abram Garfield

I think I should have no other mortal wants, if I could always have plenty of music. It seems to infuse strength into my limbs and ideas into my brain. Life seems to go on without effort, when I am filled with music.

George Eliot

There is nothing easier than lopping off heads and nothing harder than developing ideas.

Fyodor Dostoevsky

To steal ideas from one person is plagiarism, to steal ideas from many is research.

Anon.

Any ideas, plan, or purpose may be placed in the mind through repetition of thought.

Napoleon Hill

There is no connection between the political ideas of our educated class and the deep places of the imagination.

Lionel Trilling, The Liberal Imagination (1950)

Ours is the age of substitutes instead of language, we have jargon instead of principles, slogans and instead of genuine ideas, bright ideas.

Eric Bentley

Daring ideas are like chessmen moved forward. They may be beaten, but they may start a winning game.

Goethe

Men moving only in an official circle are apt to become merely official - - Not to say arbitrary - - In their ideas, and are apter and apter with each passing day to forget that they only hold power in a representative capacity.

William Adams

This coffee plunges into the stomach... the mind is aroused, and ideas pour forth like the battalions of the Grand Army on the field of battle.... Memories charge at full gallop... the light cavalry of comparisons deploys itself magnificently; the artillery of logic hurry in with their train of ammunition; flashes of wit pop up like sharp - Shooters.

Honore de Balzac

Any man who afflicts the human race with ideas must be prepared to see them misunderstood.

H. L. Mencken

The making of a journalist: no ideas and the ability to express them.

Karl Kraus

I had an immense advantage over many others dealing with the problem inasmuch as I had no fixed ideas derived from long - Established practice to control and bias my mind, and did not suffer from the general belief that whatever is, is right.

Henry Besseme

You have to let people challenge your ideas.

Tom Kasten, VP, Levi Strauss and Co.

The teacher is one who makes two ideas grow where only one grew before.

Elbert Hubbard

Dreams, ideas, and plans not only are an escape, they give me purpose, a reason to hang on.

Steven Patrick Callahan

Reading transports me. I can go anywhere and never leave my chair. It lets me shake hands with new ideas.

Rolfe Neill

Language is only the instrument of science, and words are but the signs of ideas.

Samuel Johnson

At the center of each human heart is goodness, layered over with hurt, confusion, and mistaken ideas. Our task is to gently peel off layer after layer until the unfettered heart can shed its love upon the world.

Sue Patton Thoele, The Courage To Be Yourself Journal

Never, never rest contented with any circle of ideas, but always be certain that a wider one is still possible.

Pearl Bailey

The men who come on the stage at one period are all found to be related to each other. Certain ideas are in the air.

Julie Arabi

In a war of ideas, it is people who get killed.

Stanislaus J. Lec

It is not in the world of ideas that life is lived. Life is lived for better or worse in life, and to a man in life, his life can be no more absurd than it can be the opposite of absurd, whatever that opposite may be.

Archibald MacLeish

The more words you know, the more clearly and powerfully you will think and the more ideas you will invite into your mind.

Wilfred Funk