Ideas Quotes

I could not sleep when I got on the hunt for an idea, until I had caught it. This was a kind of passion with me, and it has stuck with me.

Nothing else in the world... not all the armies... is so powerful as an idea whose time has come.

Live the full life of the mind, exhilarated by new ideas, intoxicated by the Romance of the unusual.

The whole drift of our law is toward the absolute prohibition of all ideas that diverge in the slightest form from the accepted platitudes, and behind that drift of law there is a far more potent force of growing custom, and under that custom there is a natural philosophy which erects conformity into the noblest of virtues and the free functioning of personality into a capital crime against society.

To truth only a brief celebration of victory is allowed between the two long periods during which it is condemned as paradoxical, or disparaged as trivial.

Keep a note pad and pencil on your bedside table. Million-dollar ideas sometimes strike at 3 A.M.

Much of the social history of the Western world, over the past three decades, has been a history of replacing what worked with what sounded good.

The mind, in short, works on the data it receives very much as a sculptor works on his block of stone. In a sense the statue stoodthere from eternity. But there were a thousand different ones beside it, and the sculptor alone is to thank for having extricated this one from the rest.

Not just in commerce but in the world of ideas too our age is putting on a veritable clearance sale. Everything can be had so dirt cheap that one begins to wonder whether in the end anyone will want to make a bid.

Creativity comes from spontaneous meetings, from random discussions.

To develop the creative attitude, analyze and focus on the wanted SOLUTION; seek out and fill your mind with the FACTS; write down ideas, both sensible and seemingly wild; let the facts and ideas simmer in your mind; evaluate, recheck, settle on the creative ideas.

Ideas devour the ages as men are devoured by their passions. When man is cured, human nature will cure itself perhaps.

An invasion of armies can be resisted, but not an idea whose time has come.

In all assemblies, though you wedge them ever so close, we may observe this peculiar property, that over their heads there is room enough; but how to reach it is the difficult point. To this end the philosopher's way in all ages has been by erecting certain edifices in the air.

All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.

I get all my ideas in Switzerland near the Forka Pass. There is a little town called Gletch, and two thousand feet up above Gletch there is a smaller hamlet called Über Gletch. I go there on the fourth of August every summer to get my cuckoo clock fixed. While the cuckoo is in the hospital, I wander around and talk to the people in the streets. They are very strange people, and I get my ideas from them.

The beauty of a great idea lies in the art of using it.

Inherited ideas are a curious thing, and interesting to observe and examine.

Ideas are the beginning of all achievement.

A fact: one picks it up and reads it, and puts it down, and there is an end to it. But an idea! That one may pick up, and reflect upon, and oppose, and expand, and so pass a delightful afternoon altogether.

Let a hundred flowers bloom, let a hundred schools of thought contend.

In the managerial organization, the top people sit in judgment; in the innovative organization it is their job to encourage ideas, no matter how unripe or crude.

An idea is a feat of association, and the height of it is a good metaphor.

Private, accidental, confidential conversation breeds thought. Clubs produce oftener words.

All your ideas may be solid or even good .. But you have to Actually EXECUTE on them for them to matter.

When I am in the process of conceiving a story, I make sure it can be told with words and pictures. The story has to be creative, original and interesting in both areas. Many stories get rejected because they feel derivative.

We have always been shameless about stealing great ideas.

We are the prisoners of ideas. They catch us up for moments into their heaven, and so fully engage us, that we take no thought forthe morrow, gaze like children, without an effort to make them our own.

It's the disease of thinking that a having a great idea is really 90% of the work. And if you just tell people, 'here's this great idea,' then of course they can go off and make it happen. The problem with that is that there's a tremendous amount of craftsmanship between a having a great idea and having a great product.

Suppressing ideas never succeeds in making them go away.

Thanksgiving opens up the windows of the opportunity for ideas to flow your way.

What the tender and poetic youth dreams to-day, and conjures up with inarticulate speech, is to-morrow the vociferated result of public opinion, and the day after is the character of nations.

Ideas and philosophies change just as machines do. Religions changed because of the birth control pill. Politics changes because of the hydrogen bomb. All because of science fictional inventions.

It's very important to write things down instantly, or you can lose the way you were thinking out a line. I have a rule that if I wake up at 3 in the morning and think of something, I write it down. I can't wait until morning - it'll be gone.

My fancies are fireflies Specks of living light twinkling in the dark.

Ideas are information taking shape.

One inconvenience I sometimes experienced in so small a house, the difficulty of getting to a sufficient distance from my guest when we began to utter the big thoughts in big words. You want room for your thoughts to get into sailing trim and run a course or two before they make their port. The bullet of your thought must have overcome its lateral and ricochet motion and fallen into its last and steady course before it reaches the ear of the hearer, else it may plow out again through the side of his head.

Plato's world of ideas is beautiful.

A new idea is first condemned as ridiculous and then dismissed as trivial, until finally, it becomes what everybody knows.

One sound idea is all that you need to achieve success.

There are plenty of good ideas, if only they can be backed with the power of action.

Our ideas must agree with realities, be such realities concrete or abstract, be they facts or be they principles, under penalty of endless inconsistency and frustration.

There are millions of business ideas out there but only a tiny percentage of businesses succeed.

I do not know but thoughts written down thus in a journal might be printed in the same form with greater advantage than if the related ones were brought together into separate essays.

Every great idea exerts, on first appearing, a tyrannical influence: Hence, the advantages it brings are turned all too soon into disadvantages.

A new idea comes suddenly and in a rather intuitive way, but intuition is nothing but the outcome of earlier intellectual experience.

Our best thoughts come from others.

Money-or rather the lack of it to carry out my ideas-may worry me, but it does not excite me.

Because ideas have to be original only with regard to their adaptation to the problem at hand, I am always extremely interested in how others have used used them.

If two people agree, one of them is unnecessary.

There is plenty of time to argue with new ideas later. They key is to take careful notes first and debate second.

I welcome and seek your ideas, but do not bring me small ideas; bring me big ideas to match our future.

The three things that are most essential to achievement are common sense, hard work and stick-to-it-iv-ness... Unfortunately, many of life's failures are experienced by people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up. I have far more respect for the person with a single idea who gets there than for the person with a thousand ideas who does nothing.

In general, shorter is better. If you can encapsulate your idea into a single captivating sentence, you're halfway home.

A day will come when there will be no battlefields, but markets opening to commerce and minds opening to ideas.

All the forces in the world are not so powerful as an idea whose time has come.

Genius is a potential that lives within you and every other human being. You have many moments of genius in your lifetime. These are the times when you have a uniquely brilliant idea and implement it even if only you are aware of how fantastic it is.

In a magazine, one can get - from cover to cover - 15 to 20 different ideas about life and how to live it.

When I have an idea, I turn down the flame, as if it were a little alcohol stove, as low as it will go. Then it explodes and that is my idea.

The light dove, in free flight cutting through the air the resistance of which it feels, could get the idea that it could do even better in airless space. Likewise, Plato abandoned the world of the senses because it posed so many hindrances for the understanding, and dared to go beyond it on the wings of the ideas, in the empty space of pure understanding.