Ideas Quotes

I do not believe that we can put into anyone ideas which are not in him already. As a rule there are in everyone all sorts of good ideas, ready like tinder. But much of this tinder catches fire, or catches it successfully, only when it meets some flame or spark from outside, i.e., from some other person.

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

One original thought is worth a thousand mindless quotings

The idea that is not dangerous is not worthy of being called an idea at all.

You sometimes find something good in the lunatic fringe. In fact, we have got as part of our social and economic government today a whole lot of things which in my boyhood were considered lunatic fringe, and yet they are now part of everyday life.

If you hear a good idea, capture it; write it down. Don't trust your memory. Then on a cold wintry evening, go back through your journal, the ideas that changed your life, the ideas that saved your marriage, the ideas that bailed you out of bankruptcy, the ideas that helped you become successful, the ideas that made you millions. What a good review-going back over the collection of ideas that you gathered over the years. So be a collector of good ideas for your business, for your relationships, for your future.

Everything of mine is permeated with my love of ideas-both big and small. It doesn't matter what it is, as long as it grabs me and holds me, facinates me. And then I'll run out and something about it... I write for fun.

Each thought that is welcomed and recorded is a nest egg, by the side of which more will be laid.

There is no better opportunity to receive more than to be thankful for what you already have. Thanksgiving opens the windows of opportunity for ideas to flow your way.

Ideas have a short shelf life. You must act on them before the expiration date.

Lead the ideas of your time and they will accompany and support you; fall behind them and they drag you along with them; oppose them and they will overwhelm you.

All great deeds and all great thoughts have a ridiculous beginning.

Writing is like sex. You have to save your love for the love object. If you go around spouting about your idea, there'll be no "charge" left. You can't father children that way.

If you share a good idea long enough, it will eventually fall on good people.

The idea really came to me the day I got my new false teeth.

The best university that can be recommended to a man of ideas is the gauntlet of the mob.

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

The same ideas, one must believe, recur in men's minds not once or twice but again and again.

Living truth is that alone which has its origins in thinking. Just as a tree bears year after year the same fruit which is each year new, so must all permanently valuable ideas be continually born again in thought.

The difference between architecture and building is that the former expresses an idea, while the latter is merely a structure built on economical principles. The value of matter depends solely on its capacities of expressing ideas.

Ideas are the very coinage of your brain.

Many of the products which create a modern standard of living are only the physical incorporations of ideas- not only the ideas of an Edison or a Ford but the ideas of innumerable anonymous people who figure out the design of supermarkets, the location of gasoline stations, and the million mundane things on which our material well-being depends. Societies which have more people carrying out physical acts and fewer people supplying ideas do not have higher standards of living. Quite the contrary.

The attempt to suppress an idea has always and everywhere proved a failure.

Most of my ideas belonged to other people who never bothered to develop them.

there was no crime in unconscious plagiarism; that I committed it everyday, that he committed it everyday, that every man alive on earth who writes or speaks commits it every day and not merely once or twice but every time he open his mouth… there is nothing of our own in it except some slight change born of our temperament, character, environment, teachings and associations

More gold has been mined from the thoughts of men than has been taken from the earth.

A great idea is simply the combination of many good ideas.

The only sure way to avoid making mistakes is to have no new ideas.

Because I readily absorb ideas from every source - frequently starting where the last person left off - I never pick up an item without thinking of how I might improve it.

Books are the liberated spirits of men.

I begin already to weigh my words and sentences more than I did, and am looking about for a sentiment, an illustration, or a metaphor in every corner of the room. Could my Ideas flow as fast as the rain in the Storecloset it would be charming.

There is no longer a single idea explaining everything, but an infinite number of essences giving a meaning to an infinite number of objects. The world comes to a stop, but also lights up.

The miracle of turning inklings into thoughts and thoughts into words and words into metal and print and ink never palls for me.

Truth happens to an idea

A skeptic as to all ideas, including especially my own, I have never suffered a pang when the ideas of some other imbecile prevailed.

What counts, in the long run, is not what you read; it is what you sift through your own mind; it is the ideas and impressions that are aroused in you by your reading. It is the ideas stirred in your own mind, the ideas which are a reflection of your own thinking, which make you an interesting person

What you want, what you're hanging around in the world waiting for, is for something to occur to you.

If we exchange one dollar, we both have one dollar each. But if we exchange one good thought, we both have two good thoughts

The mind becomes withered, stagnant, narrow and closed unless it searches for new ideas.

Motivation means we have an idea and we are going to carry through on that idea. We work hard at it, and we are disciplined.

Poetry is a serious business; literature is the apparatus through which the world tries to keep intact its important ideas and feelings.

There is one thing stronger than all the armies in the world, and that is an idea whose time as come.

My little notebooks were beginnings - they were the ground into which I dropped the seed... I would work in this way when I was out in the crowds, then put the stuff together at home.

An idea comes as near to something for nothing as you can get.

It is always delightful when a great and beautiful idea proves to be consonant with reality.

For just when ideas fail, a word comes in to save the situation.

A stand can be made against invasion by an army; no stand can be made against invasion by an idea.

People with new ideas, people with the faintest capacity for saying something new, are extremely few in number, extraordinarily so, in fact.

A thought is often original, though you have uttered it a hundred times.

A rush of thoughts is the only conceivable prosperity that can come to us.

Everyone sits in the prison of his own ideas; he must burst it open, and that in his youth, and so try to test his ideas on reality.

I get lots of ideas when the lights go out at night and it gets very quiet. Sometimes they come when I first lie down to sleep; other times I wake up with an idea racing through my mind. But regardless of when an idea comes, I have made it a habit to get out of bed and write the idea down before it disappears into my dreams. You should do the same.

I [who] am perpetually making notes in the margin of my mind for some final statement.

If you don’t have a plan, you will fail, and you can quote me.” You need a definite plan, it should be written down, and it should dictate, with military precision, the moves that you will be taking. Napoleon Hill said, “First comes thought; then organization of that thought, into ideas and plans; then transformation of those plans into reality.

The fact is that certain ideas exist almost everywhere and at all times and can even spontaneously create themselves quite independently of migration and tradition.

Love is easy, and I love writing. You can't resist love. You get an idea, someone says something, and you're in love.

Labor gives birth to ideas.

A man may die, nations may rise and fall, but an idea lives on.

Thought cannot conceive of anything that may not be brought to expression. He who first uttered it may be only the suggester, but the doer will appear.

When a new idea comes our way, we must put it on our mental scales and weigh it carefully before deciding its value.