Ideas Quotes

Everyone is a genius at least once a year. The real geniuses simply have their bright ideas closer together.

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

The greatest ideas are the simplest.

William Golding, Lord of The Flies

People who cannot invent and reinvent themselves must be content with borrowed postures, secondhand ideas, fitting in instead of standing out.

Warren Bennis

There are only two kinds of scholars those who love ideas and those who hate them.

Emile Chartie

Ideas, like individuals, live and die. They flourish, according to their nature, in one soil or climate and droop in another. They are the vegetation of the mental world.

Macneile Dixon

The future does not belong to those who are content with today, apathetic toward common problems and their fellow man alike, timid and fearful in the face of bold projects and new ideas. Rather, it will belong to those who can blend passion, reason and courage in a personal commitment to the ideals of American society.

Robert Francis Kennedy

We get new ideas from God every hour of our day when we put our trust in Him - - But we have to follow that inspiration up with perspiration - - we have to work to prove our faith. Remember that the bee that hangs around the hive never gets any honey.

Albert E. Cliffe

If you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange 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

There is only one way in which a person acquires a new idea; by combination or association of two or more ideas he already has into a new juxtaposition in such a manner as to discover a relationship among them of which he was not previously aware.

Francis A. Carte

Everyone is in business for himself, for he is selling his services, labor or ideas. Until one realizes that this is true he will not take conscious charge of his life and will always be looking outside himself for guidance.

Sidney Madwed

We are not afraid to entrust the American people with unpleasant facts, foreign ideas, alien philosophies, and competitive values. For a nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people.

John Fitzgerald Kennedy

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

Sir Barnett Cocks (ca. 1907)

Ideas must work through the brains and the arms of good and brave men, or they are no better than dreams.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

At least two - Thirds of our miseries spring from human stupidity, human malice and those great motivators and justifiers of malice and stupidity idealism, dogmatism and proselytizing zeal on behalf of religous or political ideas.

Aldous Huxley

When I am, as it were, completely myself, entirely alone, and of good cheer - Say traveling in a carriage, or walking after a good meal, or during the night when I cannot sleep - It is on such occasions that my ideas flow best, and most abundantly. Whence and how they come, I know not, nor can I force them...

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

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

Rolfe Neill

The wise only possess ideas the greater part of mankind are possessed by them.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

The difficulty lies not so much in developing new ideas as in escaping from old ones.

John Maynard Keynes

I have enjoyed greatly the second blooming that comes when you finish the life of the emotions and of personal relations; and suddenly find - At the age of fifty, say - That a whole new life has opened before you, filled with things you can think about, study, or read about... It is as if a fresh sap of ideas and thoughts was rising in you.

Agatha Christie, An Autobiography, 1977

People will accept your ideas much more readily if you tell them Benjamin Franklin said it first.

David H. Comins

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

The test of a first - Rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.

F Scott

There is no law against composing music when one has no ideas whatsoever. The music of Wagner, therefore, is perfectly legal.

The National, Paris, 1850

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

If most of us are ashamed of shabby clothes and shoddy furniture, let us be more ashamed of shabby ideas and shoddy philosophies.

Albert Einstein

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

Stanislaus J. Lec

The way to combat noxious ideas is with other ideas. The way to combat falsehoods is with truth.

William O. Douglas

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

Linus Pauling

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

Good ideas are not adopted automatically. They must be driven into practice with courageous patience.

Hyman Rickove

It is useless to send armies against ideas.

Georg Brandes

The need to be right all the time is the biggest bar to new ideas. It is better to have enough ideas for some of them to be wrong than to be always right by having no ideas at all.

Edward De Bono

Ideas are like wandering sons. They show up when you least expect them.

Bern Williams

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

Bishop Vincent

Men who accomplish great things in the industrial world are the ones who have faith in the money producing power of ideas.

Charles Fillmore

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

Grant Wood

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