Famously Said Random quote

Topics/Thinking

Quotes about ideas

115 quotes from 89 people

Most readBy personPage 2 of 8

The value of an idea lies in the using of it.
Thomas Edison1847–1931
It is the cause, not the death, that makes the martyr.
Napoleon1769–1821
Great ideas originate in the muscles.
Thomas Edison1847–1931
When ideas fail, words come in very handy.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe1749–1832
- Talking
Your theory is crazy, but it’s not crazy enough to be true.
Niels Bohr1885–1962Said to Wolfgang Pauli after his presentation of Heisenberg’s and Pauli’s nonlinear field theory of elementary particles, at Columbia University (1958), as reported by F. J. Dyson in his paper “Innovation in Physics” (Scientific American, 199, No. 3
Daring ideas are like chessmen moved forward; they may be beaten but they may start a winning game.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe1749–1832
There is nothing easier than lopping off heads and nothing harder than developing ideas.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky1821–1881
- War & Peace
Books serve to show a man that those original thoughts of his aren’t very new at all.
Abraham Lincoln1809–1865
- Reading
New opinions are always suspected, and usually opposed, without any other reason but because they are not already common.
John Locke1632–1704An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689), Dedicatory epistle, as quoted in
The world moves, and ideas that were good once are not always good.
Dwight D. Eisenhower1890–1969Press Conference, Washington, D.C.
The genius of democracies is seen not only in the great number of new words introduced but even more in the new ideas they express.
Alexis de Tocqueville1805–1859Democracy in America, Volume II (1840), Book One, Chapter XVI.
- Democracy
Neither man or nation can exist without a sublime idea.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky1821–1881
Out of every hundred new ideas ninety-nine or more will probably be inferior to the traditional responses which they propose to replace. No one man, however brilliant or well-informed, can come in one lifetime to such fullness of understanding as to safely judge and dismiss the customs or institutions of his society, for those are the wisdom of generations after centuries of experiment in the laboratory of history.
Will Durant1885–1981And Ariel Durant, The Lessons of History (1968)
A powerful idea communicates some of its strength to him who challenges it.
Marcel Proust1871–1922
That fellow seems to me to possess but one idea, and that is a wrong one.
Samuel Johnson1709–1784Life of Samuel Johnson (1791), Vol II (1770) p. 181
- Clever Jabs