Inspirational Quotations

Inspirational Quotations on Ideas

Every breeze wafts intelligence from country to country, every wave rolls it and gives it forth, and all in turn receive it. There is a vast commerce of ideas, there are marts and exchanges for intellectual discoveries, and a wonderful fellowship of those individual intelligences which make up the minds and opinions of the age.
Daniel Webster (1782–1852) American Statesman, Lawyer

My mind contains many good ideas, but it’s not always easy to squeeze one out.
Ashleigh Brilliant (b.1933) British Cartoonist, Author

I had a monumental idea this morning, but I didn’t like it.
Samuel Goldwyn (1879–1974) Polish-born American Film Producer, Businessperson

An idea is a feat of association, and the height of it is a good metaphor.
Robert Frost (1874–1963) American Poet

The difference between people and ideas is… only superficial.
Richard Rorty (1931–2007) American Philosopher

You cannot put a rope around the neck of an idea; you cannot put an idea up against the barrack-square wall and riddle it with bullets; you cannot confine it in the strongest prison cell your slaves could ever build.
Sean O’Casey (1880–1964) Irish Dramatist, Memoirist

An idea that is developed and put into action is more important than an idea that exists only as an idea.
Edward de Bono (1933–2021) Maltese-British Psychologist, Writer

There is no prosperity, trade, art, city, or great material wealth of any kind, but if you trace it home, you will find it rooted in a thought of some individual man.
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–82) American Philosopher

The greatest achievements of the human mind are generally received with distrust.
Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860) German Philosopher

An idea isn’t responsible for the people who believe it.
Don Marquis (1878–1937) American Humorist, Journalist, Author

The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.
John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946) English Economist

It is not once nor twice but times without number that the same ideas make their appearance in the world.
Aristotle (384BCE–322BCE) Ancient Greek Philosopher, Scholar

Ideas are refined and multiplied in the commerce of minds. In their splendor, images effect a very simple communion of souls.
Gaston Bachelard (1884–1962) French Philosopher, Psychoanalyst, Poet

The ideas of a time are like the clothes of a season: they are as arbitrary, as much imposed by some superior will which is seldom explicit. They are utilitarian and political, the instruments of smooth-running government.
Wyndham Lewis (1882–1957) English Novelist, Painter, Critic

Ideas are, in truth, forces. Infinite, too, is the power of personality. A union of the two always makes history.
Henry James (1843–1916) American-born British Novelist, Writer

An idea is never given to you without you being given the power to make it reality. You must, nevertheless, suffer for it.
Richard Bach (b.1936) American Novelist, Aviator

No man is a failure who is enjoying life.
William Feather (1889–1981) American Publisher, Author

New ideas are one of the most overrated concepts of our time. Most of the important ideas that we live with aren’t new at all.
Andy Rooney (b.1919) American Writer, Humorist, TV Personality

We shouldn’t be looking for heroes, we should be looking for good ideas.
Noam Chomsky (b.1928) American Linguist, Social Critic

By what strange law of mind is it that an idea long overlooked, and trodden under foot as a useless stone, suddenly sparkles out in new light as a discovered diamond?
Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811–96) American Abolitionist, Author

To have a great idea, have a lot of them.
Thomas Edison (1847–1931) American Inventor, Scientist, Entrepreneur

Our ideas, like orange-plants, spread out in proportion to the size of the box which imprisons the roots.
Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton (1803–73) British Novelist, Poet, Politician

Ideas have become far more important to us than action – ideas so cleverly expressed in books by the intellectuals in every field. The more cunning, the more subtle, those ideas are the more we worship them and the books that contain them. We are those books, we are those ideas, so heavily conditioned are we by them. We are forever discussing ideas and ideals and dialectically offering opinions. Every religion has its dogma, its formula, its own scaffold to reach the gods, and when inquiring into the beginning of thought we are questioning the importance of this whole edifice of ideas. We have separated ideas from action because ideas are always of the past and action is always the present – that is, living is always the present. We are afraid of living and therefore the past, as ideas, has become so important to us.
Jiddu Krishnamurti (1895–1986) Indian Philosopher

An idea that is not dangerous is unworthy to be called an idea at all.
Elbert Hubbard (1856–1915) American Writer, Publisher, Artist, Philosopher

Of course all life is a process of breaking down, but the blows that do the dramatic side of the work – the big sudden blows that come, or seem to come, from outside – the ones you remember and blame things on and, in moments of weakness, tell your friends about, don’t show their effect all at once. There is another sort of blow that comes from within – that you don’t feel until it’s too late to do anything about it, until you realize with finality that in some regard you will never be as good a man again. The first sort of breakage seems to happen quick – the second kind happens almost without your knowing it but is realized suddenly indeed. Before I go on with this short history, let me make a general observation – 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 Fitzgerald (1896–1940) American Novelist

They come into being not through demonstration but through revelation, through the medium of powerful personalities.
Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born Physicist

The soft-minded man always fears change. He feels security in the status quo, and he has an almost morbid fear of the new. For him, the greatest pain is the pain of a new idea.
Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–68) American Civil Rights Leader, Clergyman

There are no new ideas. There are only new ways of making them felt.
Audre Lorde (1934–92) American Poet, Activist

You can judge your age by the amount of pain you feel when you come in contact with a new idea.
John Nuveen

A pile of rocks ceases to be a rock when somebody contemplates it with the idea of a cathedral in mind.
Antoine de Saint-Exupery (1900–44) French Novelist, Aviator

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