quotations about ideas
If you're going to deal in the world of ideas, you have to be, to some extent, a salesman. And you're going to sink or rise according to your ability to be a good salesman of ideas.
BARRY DILLER
Playboy, Jul. 1989
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
If it's a good idea, go ahead and do it. It is much easier to apologize than it is to get permission.
GRACE HOPPER
attributed, Built to Learn
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
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
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
Take in the ideas of the day, drain off those of yesterday.
EDWARD BULWER-LYTTON
Kenelm Chillingly: His Adventures and Opinions
There is no idea so bad that it cannot be made to look brilliant with the proper application of fonts and color.
SCOTT ADAMS
Dilbert's Guide to the Rest of Your Life: Dispatches from Cubicleland
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
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
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
Unless our ideas are questioned, they become part of the furniture of eternity.
WALTER LIPPMANN
The Stakes of Diplomacy
Every man believes that if he could get capital interested, he could set the world on fire with his ideas.
EDGAR WATSON HOWE
Country Town Sayings
Great ideas and great melodies have a lot in common.
BONO
interview, Larry King Weekend, 2002
The ideas of things precede and lead to their creation.
CHRISTIAN NESTELL BOVEE
Intuitions and Summaries of Thought
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
Ideas are the pulses of the soul.
EDWARD COUNSEL
Maxims
I got a head full of ideas
That are drivin’ me insane
BOB DYLAN
"Maggie's Farm"
Ideas should be neutral. But man animates them with his passions and folly. Impure and turned into beliefs, they take on the appearance of reality. The passage from logic is consummated. Thus are born ideologies, doctrines, and bloody farce.
EMIL CIORAN
A Short History of Decay