Quotations on Ideas

Nothing is more dangerous than an idea when its the only one we have.

~ Unknown

Every time a man puts a new idea across he finds ten men who thought of it before he did - but they only thought of it.

~ Unknown

For an idea to be fashionable is ominous, since it must afterwards be always old-fashioned.

~ George Santayana

A powerful idea communicates some of its power to the man who contradicts it.

~ Marcel Proust

To accept an unorthodoxy is always to inherit unresolved contradictions.

~ George Orwell

Ideas must work their way through the brains and arms of men, or they are no better than dreams.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

The vitality of thought is in adventure. Ideas won't keep. Something must be done about them. When the idea is new, its custodians have fervor, live for it, and if need be, die for it.

~ Alfred North Whitehead

He was distinguished for ignorance; for he had only one idea, and that was wrong.

~ Benjamin Disraeli

Having ideas is like having chessmen moving forward; they may be beaten, but they may start a winning game.

~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Many ideas grow better when transplanted into another mind than in the one where they sprung up.

~ Oliver Wendell Holmes

Man's mind stretched to a new idea never goes back to its original dimensions.

~ Oliver Wendell Holmes

An idea is a feat of association, and the height of it is a good metaphor.

~ Robert Frost

The real Antichrist is he who turns the wine of an original idea into the water of mediocrity.

~ Eric Hoffer

An idea is salvation by imagination.

~ Frank Lloyd Wright

No army can withstand the strength of an idea whose time has come.

~ Victor Hugo

An cold in the head causes less suffering than an idea.

~ Jules Renard

An idea is not responsible for the people who believe in it.

~ Don Marquis

No matter how brilliantly an idea is stated, we will not really be moved unless we have already half thought of it ourselves.

~ Mignon McLaughlin

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

~ Stanislaw Lec

A man is infinitely more complicated than his thoughts.

~ Paul Valéry

The history of thought may be summed up in these words: it is absurd by what is seeks and great by what it finds.

~ Paul Valéry

Only the wise possess ideas; the greater part of mankind are possessed by them.

~ Samuel Taylor Coleridge

The ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class.

~ Karl Marx

Great ideas are not charitable.

~ Henri de Montherlant