Quotations about Ideas

An idea isn't responsible for the people who believe it. ~Don Marquis


If you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange these apples then you and I will still each have one apple. But if you have an idea and I have an idea and we exchange these ideas, then each of us will have two ideas. ~George Bernard Shaw


Ideas can no more flow backward than can a river. ~Victor Hugo


A half-baked idea is okay as long as it's in the oven. ~Author Unknown


The brain is a commodity used to fertilize ideas. ~Elbert Hubbard


Every idea I get I have to deny, that's my way of testing it. ~Alain, Histoire de mes pensées


Ideas can be life-changing. Sometimes all you need to open the door is just one more good idea. ~Jim Rohn


If at first, the idea is not absurd, then there is no hope for it. ~Albert Einstein


You have to have an idea of what you are going to do, but it should be a vague idea. ~Pablo Picasso


Ideas are like wandering sons. They show up when you least expect them. ~Bern Williams


An idea that is not dangerous is unworthy to be called an idea at all. ~Elbert Hubbard


Others go to bed with their mistresses; I with my ideas. ~José Marti, letter, 1890


The way to get good ideas is to get lots of ideas, and throw the bad ones away. ~Linus Pauling


My mind contains many good ideas, but it's not always easy to squeeze one out. ~Ashleigh Brilliant


Drawing is putting a line round an idea. ~Henri Matisse


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


Language is the means of getting an idea from my brain into yours without surgery. ~Mark Amidon


Labor gives birth to ideas. ~Jim Rohn


There is only one way in which a person acquires a new idea: by the combination or association of two or more ideas he already has into a new juxtaposition in such a manner as to discover a relationship among them of which he was not previously aware. ~Francis A. Cartier


Night time is really the best time to work. All the ideas are there to be yours because everyone else is asleep. ~Catherine O'Hara


Money never starts an idea. It is always the idea that starts the money. ~Owen Laughlin


Nothing is more dangerous than an idea when it is the only one you have. ~Emile Chartier


Everyone who's ever taken a shower has an idea. It's the person who gets out of the shower, dries off and does something about it who makes a difference. ~Nolan Bushnell


My ideas usually come not at my desk writing but in the midst of living. ~Anais Nin


When you write down your ideas you automatically focus your full attention on them. Few if any of us can write one thought and think another at the same time. Thus a pencil and paper make excellent concentration tools. ~Michael Leboeuf


An original idea. That can't be too hard. The library must be full of them. ~Stephen Fry


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


An idea whose time has come was waiting there all along. ~Carrie Latet


An idea not coupled with action will never get any bigger than the brain cell it occupied. ~Arnold H. Glasgow


No matter how brilliantly an idea is stated, we will not really be moved unless we have already half-thought of it ourselves. ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960


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? ~Dale Carnegie


Adults are always asking little kids what they want to be when they grow up because they're looking for ideas. ~Paula Poundstone


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. ~J. Krishnamurti