Ideas

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

As long as there are human beings, there will be the idea of brotherhood -- and an almost total inability to practice it. ~~ Sydney J. Harris

Most important ideas aren't exciting, and most exciting ideas aren't important. ~~ Unattributed

My class, you will learn to think for yourselves again. You will learn to savor words and language. No matter what anybody tells you, words and ideas can change the world. ~~ Dead Poets Society (film, 1989)

Creativity is so delicate a flower that praise tends to make it bloom, while discouragement often nips it in the bud. Any of us put out more and better ideas if our efforts are truly appreciated. ~~ Alexander Osborn

Creativity is essentially a lonely art. An even lonelier struggle. To some a blessing. To others a curse. It is in reality the ability to reach inside yourself and drag forth from your very soul an idea. ~~ Lou Dorfsman

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

Almost all really new ideas have a certain aspect of foolishness when they are first produced. ~~ Alfred North Whitehead

It's tough watching a good idea lose because its backers are less eloquent or have less clout than its opponents. ~~ Lester Case

A new idea is delicate. It can be killed by a sneer or a yawn; it can be stabbed to death by a quip and worried to death by a frown on the right man's brow. ~~ Charles Brower

Ideas are like children -- no matter how much you admire someone else's, you can't help liking your own best. ~~ Unattributed

A book is the only place in which you can examine a fragile thought without breaking it, or explore an explosive idea without fear it will go off in your face. one of the few havens remaining where a man's mind can get both provocation and privacy. ~~ Edward P. Morgan

Sometimes I think we're alone in the universe, and sometimes I think we're not. In either case, the idea is quite staggering. ~~ Arthur C. Clarke

Our heritage and ideals, our code and standards -- the things we live by and teach our children -- are preserved or diminished by how freely we exchange ideas and feelings. ~~ Walt Disney

Men moving only in an official circle are apt to become merely official -- not to say arbitrary -- in their ideas, and are apter and apter with each passing day to forget that they only hold power in a representative capacity. ~~ Abraham Lincoln

The men who come on the stage at one period are all found to be related to each other. Certain ideas are in the air. ~~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

As we reach midlife . we are not prepared for the idea that time can run out on us, or for the startling truth that if we don't hurry to pursue our own definition of a meaningful existence, life can become a repetition of trivial maintenance duties. ~~ Gail Sheehy

Great ideas need landing gear as well as wings. ~~ C. D. Jackson

Exhilaration is that feeling you get just after a great idea hits you, and just before you realize what's wrong with it. ~~ Joe Moore

I wanted to see what real courage is, instead of getting the idea that courage is a man with a gun in his hand. It's when you know you're licked before you begin but you begin anyway and see it through no matter what. ~~ Harper Lee [To Kill a Mockingbird]

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 [1st Century AD]

I never said I had no idea about most of the things you said I said I had no idea about. ~~ Elliott Abrams

Ford used to have a better idea; now they don't have a clue. ~~ Steve Kravitz

A committee is a cul-de-sac down which ideas are lured and then quietly strangled. ~~ Sir Barnett Cocks

It's not a bad idea to get in the habit of writing down one's thoughts. It saves one having to bother anyone else with them. ~~ Isabel Colegate

When ideas fail, words come in very handy. ~~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Ideas are powerful things, requiring not a studious contemplation but an action, even if it is only an inner action. ~~ Midge Dector

Having the world's best idea will do you no good unless you act on it. People who want milk shouldn't sit on a stool in the middle of a field in hopes that a cow will back up to them. ~~ Curtis Grant

If you are possessed by an idea, you find it expressed everywhere, you even smell it. ~~ Thomas Mann

Very simple ideas lie within the reach only of complex minds. ~~ Remy de Gourmont

It has been left to our generation to discover that you can move heaven and earth to save five minutes and then not have the faintest idea what to do with them when you have saved them. ~~ C. E. M. Joad

The only valid censorship of ideas is the right of people not to listen. ~~ Tommy Smothers

The most disturbing and wasteful emotions in modern life, next to fright, are those which are associated with the idea of blame, directed against the self or against others. ~~ Harvey Ferguson

If you want to get across an idea, wrap it up in a person. ~~ Ralph Bunche

All words are pegs to hang ideas on. ~~ Henry Ward Beecher

Never, never rest contented with any circle of ideas, but always be certain that a wider one is still possible. ~~ Richard Jefferies

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

I had an immense advantage over many others dealing with the problem inasmuch as I had no fixed ideas derived from long-established practice to control and bias my mind, and did not suffer from the general belief that whatever is, is right. ~~ Henry Bessemer

He can compress the most words into the smallest idea of any man I ever met. ~~

Abraham Lincoln

The essence of success is that it is never necessary to think of a new idea oneself. It is far better to wait until somebody else does it, and then to copy him in every detail, except his mistakes. ~~ Aubrey Menen

No idea is so antiquated that it was not once modern. No idea is so modern that it will not someday be antiquated. ~~ Ellen Glasgow

One of the greatest pains to human nature is the pain of a new idea. ~~ Walter Bagehot

Ideas, like individuals, live and die. They flourish, according to their nature, in one soil or climate and droop in another. They are the vegetation of the mental world. ~~ Macneile Dixon

College isn't the place to go for ideas. ~~ Helen Keller

It's just as sure a recipe for failure to have the right idea fifty years too soon as five years too late. ~~ J. R. Platt

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

The thinker dies, but his thoughts are beyond the reach of destruction. Men are mortal; but ideas are immortal. ~~ Walter Lippman

Generally students are the best vehicles for passing on ideas, for their thoughts are plastic and can be molded and they can adjust the ideas of old men to the shape of reality as they find it in the villages and hills of China or in ghettos and suburbs of America. ~~ Theodore H. White

A man may die, nations may rise and fall, but an idea lives on. Ideas have endurance without death. ~~ John F. Kennedy

Many great ideas have been lost because the people who had them couldn't handle being laughed at. ~~ Unattributed

Ideas are refined and multiplied in the commerce of minds. In their splendor, images effect a very simple communion of souls. ~~ Gaston Bachelard

I can't understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I'm frightened of the old ones. ~~ John Cage

It's very good for an idea to be commonplace. The important thing is that a new idea should develop out of what is already there so that it soon becomes an old acquaintance. Old acquaintances aren't by any means always welcome, but at least one can't be mistaken as to who or what they are. ~~ Penelope Fitzgerald

One does not adopt a new idea, one slips into it. ~~ Jean-Paul Sartre

My ideas are a curse.
They spring from a radical discontent
With the awful order of things. ~~ Anne Sexton

There are well-dressed foolish ideas just as there are well-dressed fools. ~~ Nicolas Chamfort

Every composer knows the anguish and despair occasioned by forgetting ideas which one has not time to write down. ~~ Hector Berlioz

Ideas shape the course of history. ~~ John Maynard Keynes

To die for an idea is to place a pretty high price on conjecture. ~~ Anatole France