Ideas Quotes

As managers rise up the hierarchy, a host of situational forces come to bear on them which can easily undermine their respect for the people on the front lines, and hence cause them to disregard the value in front-line ideas.

~ Dean M. Schroeder

Convincing a leader of the value of front-line ideas alone is rarely enough for that person to overcome years of entrenched bad habits and to change his management style.

~ Dean M. Schroeder

Like Achilles, the hero who forgot his heel, or like Icarus who, flying close to the sun, forgot that his wings were made of wax, we should be wary when triumphant ideas seem unassailable, for then there is all the more reason to predict their downfall.

~ Dwight Longenecker

Nietzsche, an infinitely harder and more courageous intellect, was incapable of any such confusion of ideas; he seldom allowed sentimentality to turn him from the glaring fact.

~ H.l. Mencken

The elegance of a mathematical theorem is directly proportional to the number of independent ideas one can see in the theorem and inversely proportional to the effort it takes to see them.

~ George Pólya

Ideas are universal, the names and titles we give them are not.

~ Paul Pavlo Shiller

The author relates George Bernard Shaw's sentiments that polite conversation excludes the only two subjects that matter, religion and politics.

~ Lyle Wesley Dorsett

An idea is like a rare bird which cannot be seen. What one sees is the trembling of the branch it has just left.

~ Lawrence Durrell

At the heart of science is an essential balance between two seemingly contradictory attitudes--an openness to new ideas, no matter how bizarre or counterintuitive they may be, and the most ruthless skeptical scrutiny of all ideas, old and new. This is how deep truths are winnowed from deep nonsense.

~ Carl Sagan

If unconventional ideas = sperm, then public opinion = abortion.

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

The river reflected whatever it chose of sky and bridge and burning tree, and when the undergraduate had oared his boat through the reflections they closed again, completely, as if they had never been. There one might have sat the clock round lost in thought. Thought --to call it by a prouder name than it deserved-- had let its line down into the stream. It swayed, minute after minute, hither and thither among the reflections and the weeds, letting the water lift it and sink it until --you know the little tug -- the sudden conglomeration of an idea at the end of one's line: and then the cautious hauling of it in, and the careful laying of it out? Alas, laid on the grass how small, how insignificant this thought of mine looked; the sort of fish that a good fisherman puts back into the water so that it may grow fatter and be one day worth cooking and eating.

~ Virginia Woolf

Opinions of the masses kill the 'extra' in an 'extraordinary' idea.

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Our ideas are like boomerangs,when you throw them they are destined to come back.

~ Pradeep Chaswal

Public opinion is to an unconventional idea … what abortion is to sperm.

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

In our world, to do what you want to do, you must first do what you have to do.

~ Anirudh Arun

An idea? An idea won't get you nothing but another idea. You need money, cash, to make anything happen in this doggone world.

~ Nathan Mccall

Anyone with a great product to sell should never criticize competing products. Your product should sell on its own merit. Consumers want the best of the best, not the best of a bad situation.

~ Zack W. Van

Ideas are cheap. Writing them into a freakin' 90k word novel is the hard part.

~ Ellie Ann

Committees kill unconventional ideas for a living.

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

It is commonly said to my little friend Legion: Read the great writers for style. But I say to him: Read the great dead masters for ideas. Devour them, Fletcherize them, digest, assimilate, make them part of your blood; let the enriched blood visit your brain. The resultant activities will be fairly your own, and the little kinks and convolutions of your brain, which are entirely different from the kinks of any other brain, will furnish you all the style you will ever get.There are no really fresh ideas; just as there is not any fresh air. Air and ideas are refreshed and refreshing, vitalized and vitalizing; but the thoughts have been thought before and the air has been breathed before.

~ Eugene Manlove Rhodes

Hope is not some abstract, softheaded concept. It is an idea with an engine.

~ Don Maruska

Listen, the next revolution is gonna be a revolution of ideas.

~ Bill Hicks

It was understood that they shared the same thresholds--the same inexhaustible appetite for wasting time, for discussing lofty ideas, for dissecting trivial things, for driving to nowhere in particular, for listening to music, for talking about books, for obsessing over pop culture, but mostly for laughing, talking, and simply being together. There was nothing one could say that the other would find too cruel or too kind. And on those rare occasions when they did tire of each other, they needed only go a day without talking before they yearned to reconnect.

~ Galt Niederhoffer

And you realize that there’s no such thing as an individual, we’re just all a collection of each other’s influence on each other. Everyone says things to each other, the television, your parents, your friends, that’s all we are, is a collection of intermingling ideas as a collective.

~ Matt Bellamy

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

~ Linus Pauling

So it turns out that late-night flashes of brilliance often look a little less brilliant in the bright light of morning.

~ Stacey Kade

Every writer or wanna-be writer has ideas for books. The problem isn't finding an idea, it's choosing one

~ Jo Linsdell

After passionately nursing this idea for about an hour, I suddenly had another idea: no I wouldn't. Of course I wouldn't make an entire city out of cereal boxes in the basement. The moment I had this second thought, I knew this was the real one.

~ Miranda July

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. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation.

~ Thomas Jefferson

15General ideas and great conceit are always a fair way to bring about terrible misfortune.

~ Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

In the particular dwells the tawdry. In the conceptual dwells the grand, the transcendent, the everlasting. Earthly countries and single malignant boys can go to hell; the idea of countries and the idea of sons triumph for eternity.

~ Lionel Shriver

Some places will, however, be left behind. Not every city will succeed, because not every city has been adept at adapting to the age of information, in which ideas are the ultimate creator of wealth.

~ Edward Glaeser

There's only one thing in life more dangerous than a bad idea, and that's a good one.

~ Greg Curtis

The movies remind me of the Triangle Club at Princeton. I used to belong to it, and we always started out firm in our decision to create new and startling things. We always ended up by producing the same old show. In the beginning, our enthusiasm and ideals discarded as rubbish all the old fossilized plots.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

One idea lights a thousand candles.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

To emend one's thinking constantly is a desirable practice, and one I often engage in--sometimes to the point of being almost schizophrenic. But there are cases where one should not parade changes just to prove one is up to date. In the field of ideas, as much as in other fields, monogamy is not necessarily a sign of absence of libido.

~ Umberto Eco

Apparently, my hopes, dreams and aspirations were no match against my poor spelling, punctuation and grammar.

~ Red Red Rover

Bigotry may be roughly defined as the anger of men who have no opinions. It is the resistance offered to definite ideas by that vague bulk of people whose ideas are indefinite to excess. Bigotry may be called the appalling frenzy of the indifferent. This frenzy of the indifferent is in truth a terrible thing; it has made all monstrous and widely pervading persecutions. In this degree it was not the people who cared who ever persecuted; the people who cared were not sufficiently numerous. It was the people who did not care who filled the world with fire and oppression. It was the hands of the indifferent that lit the faggots; it was the hands of the indifferent that turned the rack. There have come some persecutions out of the pain of a passionate certainty; but these produced, not bigotry, but fanaticism--a very different and a somewhat admirable thing. Bigotry in the main has always been the pervading omnipotence of those who do not care crushing out those who care in darkness and blood.

~ G.k. Chesterton

It is critical to learn how to listen for what is not being said.

~ Debra Kaye

Knowledge is the stuff from which new ideas are made. Thus, the real key to being creative lies in what you do with your knowledge.

~ Roger Von Oech