#Ideas Quotes

“Ideas are the very coinage of your brain.”

“It has come to be practically a sort of rule in literature that a man, having once shown himself capable of original writing, is entitled thenceforth to steal from the writings of others at discretion.”

“We are the prisoners of ideas.”

“Out of Plato come all things that are still written and debated about among men of thought.”

“He presents me with what is always an acceptable gift who brings me news of a great thought before unknown. He enriches me without impoverishing himself.”

“Meantime the education of the general mind never stops. The reveries of the true and simple are prophetic. What the tender poeticyouth dreams, and prays, and paints today, but shuns the ridicule of saying aloud, shall presently be the resolutions of public bodies, then shall be carried as grievance and bill of rights through conflict and war, and then shall be triumphant law and establishment for a hundred years, until it gives place, in turn, to new prayers and pictures.”

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

“One idea lights a thousand candles.”

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

“One single idea may have greater weight than all the men, animals, and machines for a century.”

“Let ideas establish their legitimate sway again in society, let life be fair and poetic, and the scholars will gladly be lovers, citizens, and philanthropists.”

“Without execution, thinking is mere idleness.”

“A little mouse of thought appears in the room, and even the mightiest potentates are thrown into panic. They make frantic efforts to bar our thoughts and words; they are afraid of the workings of the human mind.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“Heaven often protects valuable souls charged with great secrets, great ideas, by long shutting them up with their own thoughts.”

“The mind, once stretched by a new idea, never returns to its original dimensions.”

“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.”

“To clothe the fiery thoughtIn simple words succeeds,For still the craft of genius isTo mask a king in weeds.”

“The key to every man is his thought. Sturdy and defying though he look, he has a helm which he obeys, which is the idea after which all his facts are classified. He can only be reformed by showing him a new idea which commands his own.”

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

“If NATURE has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea... No one possesses the less, because every other possess the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.”

“Victor Hugo said you can stop an invasion of armies, but you can never stop an invasion of ideas. There's nothing more powerful than an idea whose time has come. It wasn't until 1920, four years after my mother was born - and she's still alive and healthy - that women were given the right to vote. Now it's hard even to imagine that for the greater part of the history of our country fifty percent of the population was not allowed to vote.”

“New information makes new and fresh ideas possible.”

“You can't just have a thought. You have to follow the thought through. But everything starts with the thought.”

“To begin with, our knowledge grows in spots. The spots may be large or small, but the knowledge ever grows all over... What you first gain from them is probably a small amount of new information, a few new definitions, or distinctions, or points of view. But while these special ideas are being added, the rest of your knowledge stands still, and only gradually will you 'line up' your previous opinions with the novelties I am trying to instil, and modify to some slight degree their mass.”

“Every reform was once a private opinion.”

“Truth in our ideas means their power to work.”

“An idea, to be suggestive, must come to the individual with the force of revelation.”

“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.”

“It is not men that interest or disturb me primarily; it is ideas. Ideas live; men die.”

“The men who act stand nearer to the mass of man than the men who write; and it is in their hands that new thought gets its translation into the crude language of deeds.”

“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.”

“There's not an idea in our heads that has not been worn shiny by someone else's brains.”

“Motivation is when you get hold of an idea and carry it through to its conclusion, inspiration is the reverse. An idea gets hold of you and carries you where you are intended to go.”

“Truth is something that happens to an idea.”

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

“So you see that the process of education, taken in a large way, may be described as nothing but the process of acquiring ideas or conceptions, the best educated mind being the mind which has the largest stock of them, ready to meet the largest possible variety of the emergencies of life. The lack of education means only the failure to have acquired them, and the consequent liability to be 'floored' and 'rattled' in the vicissitudes of experience.”

“If, then, you wish to insure the interest of your pupils, there is only one way to do it; and that is to make certain that they have something in their minds to attend with, when you begin to talk. That something can consist in nothing but a previous lot of ideas already interesting in themselves, and of such a nature that the incoming novel objects which you present can dovetail into them and form with them some kind of a logically associated or systematic whole.”

“Our volitional habits depend, then, first, on what the stock of ideas is which we have; and, second, on the habitual coupling of the several ideas with action or inaction respectively.”

“If you can't communicate and talk to other people and get across your ideas, you're giving up your potential.”

“Truth happens to an idea”

“True ideas are those that we can assimilate, validate, corroborate, and verify. False ideas are those that we cannot. That is the practical difference it makes to us to have true ideas; that therefore is the meaning of truth, for it is all that truth is known as.”

“True ideas lead us into useful verbal and conceptual quarters as well as directly up to useful sensible termini. They lead to consistency, stability and flowing human intercourse.”

“An idea will infect another with its own emotional interest when they have become both associated together into any sort of a mental total.”

“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.”

“First... a new theory is attacked as absurd; then it is admitted to be true, but obvious and insignificant; finally it is seen to be so important that its adversaries claim that they themselves discovered it.”

“Ideas are so much flat psychological surface unless some mirrored matter gives them cognitive lustre. This is why as a pragmatistI have so carefully posited 'reality' ab initio, and why throughout my whole discussion, I remain an epistemologist realist.”

“Our ideas must agree with realities, be such realities concrete or abstract”