Ideas Quotes

The need to be right all the time is the biggest bar to new ideas. It is better to have enough ideas for some of them to be wrong than to be always right by having no ideas at all.

Edward De Bono

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.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

To die for an idea it is unquestionably noble. But how much nobler it would be if men died for ideas that were true.

H. L. Mencken

Daring ideas are like chessmen moved forward. They may be beaten, but they may start a winning game.

Goethe

In a war of ideas, it is people who get killed.

Stanislaus J. Lec

When I am, as it were, completely myself, entirely alone, and of good cheer - Say traveling in a carriage, or walking after a good meal, or during the night when I cannot sleep - It is on such occasions that my ideas flow best, and most abundantly. Whence and how they come, I know not, nor can I force them...

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

Fixed ideas are like a cramp in the foot - The best remedy against it is to tread on it.

S? ren Kierkegaard, Journal, july 6., 1838

There are only two kinds of scholars; those who love ideas and those who hate them.

Emile Chartie

So many new ideas are at first strange and horrible, though ultimately valuable that a very heavy responsibility rests upon those who would prevent their dissemination.

John Haldane

Some men never seem to grow old. Always active in thought, always ready to adopt new ideas, they are never chargeable with foggyism. Satisfied, yet ever dissatisfied, settled, yet ever unsettled, they always enjoy the best of what is, are the first to find the best of what will be.

William Shakespeare

The test of a first - Rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

It is impossible for ideas to compete in the marketplace if no forum for their presentation is provided or available.

Thomas Mann

The bad teacher imposes his ideas and his methods on his pupils, and such originality as they may have is lost in the second - Rate art of imitation.

Stephen Neill

The test of a first - Rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Every composer knows the anguish and despair occasioned by forgetting ideas which one had no time to write down.

Hector Berlioz

If there is anything more dangerous to the life of the mind than having no independent commitment to ideas, it is having an excess of commitment to some special and constricting idea.

Richard Hofstadte

Great minds discuss ideas Average minds discuss events Small minds discuss people.

Unknown

It is by acts and not by ideas that people live.

Anatole France

All the really good ideas I ever had came to me while I was milking a cow.

Grant Wood

Ideas shape the course of history.

John Maynard Keynes

I am about to put foward some major ideas they will be heard and pondered. If not all of them please, surely a few will in some sort, then, I shall have contributed to the progress of our age, and shall be content.

Marquis de Sade

But you can catch yourself entertaining habitually certain ideas and setting others aside; and that, I think, is where our personal destinies are largely decided.

Alfred North Whitehead

Nothing is so perfectly amusing as a total change of ideas.

Laurence Sterne

All words are pegs to hang ideas on.

Henry Ward Beeche

Great minds discuss ideas; Average minds discuss events; Small minds discuss people.

Eleanor Roosevelt

There is only one way in which a person acquires a new idea; by 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. Carte

Whoever sets himself to see things as they are will find himself one of a very small circle but it is only by this small circle resolutely doing its own work that adequate ideas will ever get current at all.

Matthew Arnold

The best way to have a good idea is to have a lot of ideas.

Dr. Linus Pauling

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

Bern Williams

When ideas fail, words come in very handy.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Any man who afflicts the human race with ideas must be prepared to see them misunderstood.

H. L. Mencken

I think I should have no other mortal wants, if I could always have plenty of music. It seems to infuse strength into my limbs and ideas into my brain. Life seems to go on without effort, when I am filled with music.

George Eliot

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

Albert Einstein

I will ignore all ideas for new works on engines of war, the invention of which has reached its limits and for whose improvements I see no further hope.

Sextus Julius Frontinus

Ours is the age of substitutes instead of language, we have jargon instead of principles, slogans and instead of genuine ideas, bright ideas.

Eric Bentley

There is no law against composing music when one has no ideas whatsoever. The music of Wagner, therefore, is perfectly legal.

The National, Paris, 1850

Very simple ideas lie within the reach only of complex minds.

Rmy de Gourmont