quotations about ideas
The ideas of things precede and lead to their creation.
CHRISTIAN NESTELL BOVEE
Intuitions and Summaries of Thought
The ideas of people in general are not raised higher than the roofs of the houses. All their interests extend over the earth's surface in a layer of that thickness. The meeting-house steeple reaches out of their sphere.
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE
American Note-Books, 1836
Some have ideas. You know how old chickens scratch and gabble. That's how the tales started, all the gossip, the wondering, all the things people said without knowing and then believed, since they heard it with their own ears, from their own lips, each word.
LOUISE ERDRICH
Tracks
A good idea becomes great when the people are ready. The individual who is impatient with people will be defective in leadership. The evidence of strength lies not in streaking ahead, but in adapting your stride to the slower pace of others while not forfeiting your lead. If we run too far ahead, we lose our power to influence.
JOHN C. MAXWELL
Developing the Leader Within You
Ideas are of themselves extraordinarily valuable, but an idea is just an idea. Almost anyone can think up an idea. The thing that counts is developing it into a practical product.
HENRY FORD
introduction, My Life and Work
Take in the ideas of the day, drain off those of yesterday.
EDWARD BULWER-LYTTON
Kenelm Chillingly: His Adventures and Opinions
New scientific ideas never spring from a communal body, however organized, but rather from the head of an individually inspired researcher who struggles with his problems in lonely thought and unites all his thought on one single point which is his whole world for the moment.
MAX PLANCK
addressing the 25th anniversary of the Kaiser-Wilhelm Gesellschaft, January 1936
To live in a great idea means to treat the impossible as though it were possible. It is just the same with a strong character; and when an idea and a character meet, things arise which fill the world with wonder for thousands of years.
JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE
The Maxims and Reflections of Goethe
No grand idea was ever born in a conference, but a lot of foolish ideas have died there.
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD
The Crack-Up
Ideas lead revolutions.
EDWARD COUNSEL
Maxims
I got a head full of ideas
That are drivin’ me insane
BOB DYLAN
"Maggie's Farm"
The ideas of a time are like the clothes of a season: they are as arbitrary, as much imposed by some superior will which is seldom explicit. They are utilitarian and political, the instruments of smooth-running government.
WYNDHAM LEWIS
"Beyond Action and Reaction", The Art of Being Ruled
I think of myself as a bad writer with big ideas, but I'd rather be that than a big writer with bad ideas.
MICHAEL MOORCOCK
Elric: The Stealer of Souls
Tyrannies are overthrown by ideas. Armies are defeated by ideas. Nations, and Time itself, are overmatched by ideas.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
People don't realize how much they are in the grip of ideas. We live among ideas much more than we live in nature.
SAUL BELLOW
Conversations with Saul Bellow
Our ideas ... must first acquire a certain strength, before we can proceed efficiently to act upon them. They have their periods of immaturity and maturity. First comes the germ of the idea; then its growth; then an enlargement of that growth; then an expansion of that enlargement; until finally the idea takes its ultimate form as a picture, a book, or a revolution.
CHRISTIAN NESTELL BOVEE
Intuitions and Summaries of Thought
The power of a bold idea uttered publicly in defiance of dominant opinion cannot be easily measured. Those special people who speak out in such a way as to shake up not only the self-assurance of their enemies, but the complacency of their friends, are precious catalysts for change.
HOWARD ZINN
You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train
If you want to have good ideas you must have many ideas. Most of them will be wrong, and what you have to learn is which ones to throw away.
LINUS PAULING
attributed, "The Impact of Linus Pauling on Molecular Biology", 1995
It's not that we need new ideas, but we need to stop having old ideas.
EDWIN H. LAND
attributed, Platform Ecosystems: Aligning Architecture
Indiscriminate ideological suspicion of any idea, without the urge to exalt an idea of one's own, will discourage rather than promote lucidity.
ERNST BLOCH
Man on His Own