Ideas Quotes

But you can catch yourself entertaining habitually certain ideas and setting others aside; and that, I think, is where our personal destinies are largely decided.

Alfred North Whitehead

What makes men of genius, or rather, what they make, is not new ideas, it is that idea - Possessing them - That what has been said has still not been said enough.

Eugene Delacroix

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

Grant Wood

Nothing is so perfectly amusing as a total change of ideas.

Laurence Sterne

The church was not merely a thermometer that recorded the ideas and principles of popular opinion; it was a thermostat that transformed the mores of society.

Martin Luther King Jr., Letter from Birmingham Jail, April 1963

The public interest is best served by the free exchange of ideas.

Judge John Kane, US District Court

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

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

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Every composer knows the anguish and despair occasioned by forgetting ideas which one had no time to write down.

Hector Berlioz

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

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

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

Pearl Bailey

Equal participants doing similar things will generate lots of new ideas.

Tom McMakin, CEO, Great Harvest

There are well - Dressed foolish ideas just as there are well - Dressed fools.

Diane Ackerman

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

Anon.

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

Be less curious about people and more curious about ideas.

Marie Curie

Ideas are refined and multiplied in the commerce of minds. In their splendor, images effect a very simple communion of souls.

Gaston Bachelard

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

The best ideas come from jokes. Make your thinking as funny as possible.

David Ogilvie

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

Hyman Rickove

Half of the secular unrest and dismal, profane sadness of modern society comes from the vain ideas that every man is bound to be a critic for life.

Henry Van Dyke

I believe that there never was a creator of a philosophical system who did not confess at the end of his life that he had wasted his time. It must be admitted that the inventors of the mechanical arts have been much more useful to men that the inventors of syllogisms. He who imagined a ship towers considerably above him who imagined innate ideas.

Voltaire

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

Life - Transforming ideas have always come to me through books.

Bell Hooks, O Magazine, December 2003

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

The difficulty lies, not in the new ideas, but in escaping the old ones, which ramify, for those brought up as most of us have been, into every corner of our minds.

John Maynard Keynes

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

Samuel Johnson

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

But any man who afflicts the human race with ideas must be prepared to see them misunderstood, and that is what happened to Jesus.

Henry Louis Mencken

Without absolutes revealed from without by God Himself, we are left rudderless in a sea of conflicting ideas about manners, justice and right and wrong, issuing from a multitude of self - Opinionated thinkers.

John Owen

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

Karl Kraus

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

David H. Comins

If there is anything more dangerous to the life of the mind than having no independent commitment to ideas, it is having an excess of commitment to some special and constricting idea.

Richard Hofstadte

The only valid censorship of ideas is the right of people not to listen.

Tommy Smothers