quotations about ideas
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 lead revolutions.
EDWARD COUNSEL
Maxims
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 are the pulses of the soul.
EDWARD COUNSEL
Maxims
Ideas are dangerous, but the man to whom they are least dangerous is the man of ideas. He is acquainted with ideas, and moves among them like a lion-tamer. Ideas are dangerous, but the man to whom they are most dangerous is the man of no ideas. The man of no ideas will find the first idea fly to his head like wine to the head of a teetotaller.
G. K. CHESTERTON
Heretics
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
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
Great ideas and great melodies have a lot in common.
BONO
interview, Larry King Weekend, 2002
Every revolutionary idea--in science, politics, art or whatever--seems to evoke three stages of reaction. They may be summed up by the phrases: (1) It's completely impossible. (2) It's possible, but it's not worth doing. (3) I said it was a good idea all along.
ARTHUR C. CLARKE
The Promise of Space
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
It is of the nature of idea to be communicated: written, spoken, done. The idea is like grass. It craves light, likes crowds, thrives on crossbreeding, grows better for being stepped on.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Dispossessed
Good ideas do not need to be shouted. They can take care of themselves.
JOHN DANIEL BARRY
"Self," Reactions and Other Essays
I expose myself to life, and from that, ideas come as a surprise. I totally dismiss the ones that are pleasant and easy. I'm only interested in the ones that really disturb me and that I get obsessed about. They're what bring me to new territory.
MARINA ABRAMOVIC
"Life's Work: An Interview with Marina Abramovic", Harvard Business Review, November 2016