152 quotes about Ideas
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Don't worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you'll have to ram them down people's throats.
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Eureka! I've got it.
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The idea is in my head to put it down is nothing.
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An idea is never given to you without you being given the power to make it reality. You must, nevertheless, suffer for it.
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Ideas are invented only as correctives to the past. Through repeated rectification of this kind one may hope to disengage an idea that is valid.
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Ideas are refined and multiplied in the commerce of minds. In their splendor, images effect a very simple communion of souls.
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In every great time there is some one idea at work which is more powerful than any other, and which shapes the events of the time and determines their ultimate issues.
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Take the obvious, add a cupful of brains, a generous pinch of imagination, a bucketful of courage and daring, stir well and bring to a boil.
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We are not to make the ideas of contentment and aspiration quarrel, for God made them fast friends. A man may aspire, and yet be quite content until it is time to raise; and both flying and resting are but parts of one contentment. The very fruit of the gospel is aspiration. It is to the heart what spring is to the earth, making every root, and bud, and bough desire to be more. -
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A good idea plus capable men cannot fail; it is better than money in the bank.
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We like to test things... no matter how good an idea sounds, test it first.
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It is the nature of thought to find its way into action.
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The most important thing in science is not so much to obtain new facts as to discover new ways of thinking about them.
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So long as new ideas are created, sales will continue to reach new highs.
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It is useless to send armies against ideas.
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There is no adequate defense, except stupidity, against the impact of a new idea.
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Get your ideas on paper and study them. Do not let them go to waste!
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Every new idea is an impossibility until it is born.
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If you want to get across an idea, wrap it up in a person.
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Such as take lodgings in a head that's to be let unfurnished.
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We are governed not by armies, but by ideas.
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Nothing dies harder than a bad idea.
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It doesn't matter how new an idea is: what matters is how new it becomes.
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The ideas I stand for are not mine. I borrowed them from Socrates. I swiped them from Chesterfield. I stole them from Jesus. And I put them in a book. If you don't like their rules, whose would you use?
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A man is not necessarily intelligent because he has plenty of ideas, any more than he is a good general because he has plenty of soldiers.
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There are well-dressed foolish ideas, just as there are will-dressed fools.
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Nothing is more dangerous than an idea, when you only have one.
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Every revolutionary idea seems to evoke three stages of reaction. They may be summed up by the phrases: (1) It's completely impossible. (2) It's possible, but it's not worth doing. (3) I said it was a good idea all along.
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The wise only possess ideas; the greater part of mankind are possessed by them.
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People will accept your ideas much more readily if you tell them Benjamin Franklin said it first.
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Hang ideas! They are tramps, vagabonds, knocking at the back-door of your mind, each taking a little of your substance, each carrying away some crumb of that belief in a few simple notions you must cling to if you want to live decently and would like to die easy!
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An idea is the only level which moves the world.
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Not the one who has many ideas, but the one who has a single conviction may become a great person.
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Ideas are powerful things, requiring not a studious contemplation but an action, even if it is only an inner action. Their acquisition obligates each man in some way to change his life, even if it is only his inner life. They demand to be stood for. They dictate where a man must concentrate his vision. They determine his moral and intellectual priorities. They provide him with allies and make him enemies. In short, ideas impose an interest in their ultimate fate which goes far beyond the realm of the merely reasonable.
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Ideas are the roots of creation.
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He was distinguished for ignorance; for he had only one idea, and that was wrong.
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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.
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Neither man or nation can exist without a sublime idea.
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The value of an idea lies in the using of it.
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To have a great idea, have a lot of them.
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Great ideas originate in the muscles.
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They come into being not through demonstration but through revelation, through the medium of powerful personalities.
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Harold, like the rest of us, had many impressions which saved him the trouble of distinct ideas.
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We are prisoners of ideas.
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It is a lesson which all history teaches wise men, to put trust in ideas, and not in circumstances.
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Ideas must work through the brains and the arms of good and brave men, or they are no better than dreams.
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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. --
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Man's fear of ideas is probably the greatest dike holding back human knowledge and happiness.
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You have to hatch ideas -- and then hitch them.
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Men who accomplish great things in the industrial world are the ones who have faith in the money producing power of ideas.
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It's very good for an idea to be commonplace. The important thing is that a new idea should develop out of what is already there so that it soon becomes an old acquaintance. Old acquaintances aren't by any means always welcome, but at least one can't be mistaken as to who or what they are.
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Ideas are fatal to caste.
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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.
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An idea is a feat of association, and the height of it is a good metaphor.
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Ideas control the world.
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An idea is a putting truth in check-mate.
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Great people talk about ideas. Small people talk about other people.
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It is not always by plugging away at a difficulty and sticking to it that one overcomes it; often it is by working on the one next to it. Some things and some people have to be approached obliquely, at an angle.
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Ideas not coupled with action never become bigger than the brain cells they occupied.
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Whenever I hear people talking about liberal ideas, I am always astounded that men should love to fool themselves with empty sounds. An idea should never be liberal; it must be vigorous, positive, and without loose ends so that it may fulfill its divine mission and be productive. The proper place for liberality is in the realm of the emotions.
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Daring ideas are like chessmen moved forward. They may be beaten, but they may start a winning game.
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I had a monumental idea this morning, but I didn't like it.
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Very simple ideas lie within the reach only of complex minds
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Go out and buy yourself a five-cent pencil and a ten-cent notebook and begin to write down some million-dollar ideas for yourself.
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Sometimes the best, and only effective, way to kill an idea is to put it into practice.
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Ideas move fast when their time comes.
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Ideas... they have the power
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All achievements, all earned riches, have their beginning in an idea.
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Lots of people know a good thing the minute the other fellow sees it first.
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A mind once stretched by a new idea never regains its original dimensions.
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Many ideas grow better when transplanted into another mind than in the one where they sprung up.
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Man's mind, stretched by a new idea, never goes back to its original dimensions.
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A new and valid idea is worth more than a regiment and fewer men can furnish the former than command the latter.
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Good ideas are a dime a dozen, bad ones are free.
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The idea that is not dangerous is not worthy of being called an idea at all.
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There is one thing stronger than all the armies in the world, and that is an idea whose time has come.
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Greater than the tread of mighty armies is an idea whose time has come.
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Great ideas need landing gear as well as wings.
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Ideas are, in truth, force.
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A new idea is first condemned as ridiculous and then dismissed as trivial, until finally, it becomes what everybody knows.
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An idea, to be suggestive, must come to the individual with the force of revelation.
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If you have the same ideas as everybody else but have them one week earlier than everyone else then you will be hailed as a visionary. But if you have them five years earlier you will be named a lunatic.
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