Ideas Quotes

Where painting is weakest, namely, in the expression of the highest moral and spiritual ideas, there music is sublimely strong.

Mrs. Stowe

Language is only the instrument of science, and words are but the signs of ideas.

Samuel Johnson

Reading transports me. I can go anywhere and never leave my chair. It lets me shake hands with new ideas.

Rolfe Neill

Be not astonished at new ideas for it is well known to you that a thing does not therefore cease to be true because it is not accepted by many.

Spinoza

At least two - Thirds of our miseries spring from human stupidity, human malice and those great motivators and justifiers of malice and stupidity: idealism, dogmatism and proselytizing zeal on behalf of religous or political ideas.

Aldous Huxley

The ultimate determinant in the struggle now going on for the world will not be bombs and rockets but a test of wills and ideas - A trial of spiritual resolve: the values we hold, the beliefs we cherish and the ideals to which we are dedicated.

Ronald Reagan

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

Certainly, travel is more than the seeing of sights it is a change that goes on, deep and permanent, in the ideas of living.

Miriam Beard

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

Alfred North Whitehead

When I am, as it were, completely myself, entirely alone, and of good cheer - Say traveling in a carriage, or walking after a good meal, or during the night when I cannot sleep - It is on such occasions that my ideas flow best, and most abundantly. Whence and how they come, I know not, nor can I force them...

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

It is not in the world of ideas that life is lived. Life is lived for better or worse in life, and to a man in life, his life can be no more absurd than it can be the opposite of absurd, whatever that opposite may be.

Archibald MacLeish

Great minds discuss ideas; Average minds discuss events; Small minds discuss people.

Eleanor Roosevelt

The ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideas and the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market.

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., (dissent, Abrams v. United States, 1919)

In a war of ideas, it is people who get killed.

Stanislaus J. Lec

People who cannot invent and reinvent themselves must be content with borrowed postures, secondhand ideas, fitting in instead of standing out.

Warren Bennis

A committee is a cul - De - Sac down which ideas are lured and then quietly strangled.

Sir Barnett Cocks (ca. 1907)

Any man who afflicts the human race with ideas must be prepared to see them misunderstood.

H. L. Mencken

Equal participants doing similar things will generate lots of new ideas.

Tom McMakin, CEO, Great Harvest

I believe that there never was a creator of a philosophical system who did not confess at the end of his life that he had wasted his time. It must be admitted that the inventors of the mechanical arts have been much more useful to men that the inventors of syllogisms. He who imagined a ship towers considerably above him who imagined innate ideas.

Voltaire

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

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 villages and hills of China or in ghettos and suburbs of America.

Theodore Harold White

The ultimate determinant in the struggle now going on for the world will not be bombs and rockets but a test of wills and ideas - A trial of spiritual resolve the values we hold, the beliefs we cherish and the ideals to which we are dedicated.

Ronald Reagan

Great people talk about ideas, average people talk about things, and small people talk about wine.

Fran Lebowitz

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.

William Adams

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

Pearl Bailey

Be less curious about people and more curious about ideas.

Marie Curie

Mathematics is a vast adventure in ideas; its history reflects some of the noblest thoughts of countless generations.

Dirk Struik, A Concise History of Mathematics, vol. I

There are well - Dressed foolish ideas just as there are well - Dressed fools.

Diane Ackerman

Whoever sets himself to see things as they are will find himself one of a very small circle but it is only by this small circle resolutely doing its own work that adequate ideas will ever get current at all.

Matthew Arnold

Great minds discuss ideas Average minds discuss events Small minds discuss people.

Unknown

We must have the courage to bet on our ideas, to take the calculated risk, and to act. Everyday living requires courage if life is to be effective and bring happiness.

Maxwell Maltz

To feel the right emotions is fully as important as to hold the right ideas, and the great service of religion is the development of the right emotions.

Geoffrey Parsons

Ideas are the beginning of all achievement.

Bruce Lee

Ideas shape the course of history.

John Maynard Keynes

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

Midge Decto

First comes thought; then organization of that thought, into ideas and plans; then transformation of those plans into reality. The beginning, as you will observe, is in your imagination.

Napoleon Hill

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. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.

F Scott