Idea Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

She has always thought and always thinks; though not as a man, but as Nature. She broods over an all-comprehending idea, which no searching can find out.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Not that this confusion signifies to them who never care to think about the matter at all, for they have the wit to be well pleased with themselves, however great the turmoil of their ideas. But you, if you are a philosopher, will, I believe, do as I say.

In our university [of Virginia] you know there is no Professorship of Divinity. A handle has been made of this, to disseminate an idea that this is an institution, not merely of no religion, but against all religion. Occasion was taken at the last meeting of the Visitors, to bring forward an idea that might silence this calumny, which weighed on the minds of some honest friends to the institution.

Thomas Jefferson

I have been told I was on the road to Hell, but I had no idea it was just a mile down the road with a dome on it.

Abraham Lincoln

A large percentage of those living in developed societies are told what brand of soda they should drink, what cigarettes they should smoke, what clothes and shoes they should wear, what they should eat and what brand of food they should buy. Their political ideas are supplied in the same way. Every year a trillion dollars is spent on advertising.

The value of an idea has nothing whatever to do with the sincerity of the man who expresses it.

There is a way of beating ISIS so easily, so quickly, so effectively, and it would be so nice...I know a way that would absolutely give us guaranteed victory...the problem is them everybody will take the idea, run with it and then people will forget where it came from...I ran it past two or three people. [It's] so simple. It's like the paper clip.

So far no one had had enough courage and intelligence to reveal me to my dear Germans. My problems are new, my psychological horizon frighteningly comprehensive, my language bold and clear; there may well be no books written in German which are richer in ideas and more independent than mine.

Friedrich Nietzsche

The church is always trying to get other people to reform, it might not be a bad idea to reform itself a little, by way of example

The idea of life having a purpose stands and falls with the religious system.

History is a great cemetery: men, deeds, ideas are always dying as soon as they are born.

Simone de Beauvoir

Ideas do not need weapons, to the extent that they can convince the great masses.

I don't know. I don't know at all. And that's what's frightening the life out of me. To have no idea....

Agatha Christie

The thinking of the one, therefore, will be determined by eternal truth, the actions of the other more by the practical reality of the moment. The greatness of the one lies in the absolute abstract soundness of his idea...

There is a two-way trade between science fiction and science. Science fiction suggests ideas that scientists incorporate into their theories, but sometimes science turns up notions that are stranger than any science fiction.

Stephen Hawking

God is intelligent; but in what manner? Man is intelligent by the act of reasoning, but the supreme intelligence lies under no necessity to reason. He requires neither premise nor consequences; nor even the simple form of a proposition. His knowledge is purely intuitive. He beholds equally what is and what will be. All truths are to Him as one idea, as all places are but one point, and all times one moment.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

People have this idea that if you're sexual and beautiful and provocative, then there's nothing else you could possibly offer.

By tomorrow at this time, I think you're going to have a much better idea of what crazy is. — Ev Hillman

If you don't have any fresh ideas, then you use stale tactics to scare the voters. If you don't have a record to run on, then you paint your opponent as someone people should run from. You make a big election about small things.

Business men go down with their businesses because they like the old way so well they cannot bring themselves to change. One sees them all about - men who do not know that yesterday is past, and who woke up this morning with their last year's ideas.

The early Christians rejoiced when they were deemed worthy to suffer for what they believed. In those days the Church was not merely a thermometer that recorded the ideas and principles o popular opinion; it was a thermostat that transformed the mores of society.

Martin Luther King, Jr.

Art was always a means to an end with me. You get an idea, and you just can't wait. Once you've started, then you're in there with the punches flying. There's plenty of trouble, but you can handle it. You can't back out. It gets you down once in a while, but it's exciting. Our whole business is exciting.

The man with a new idea is a crank until the idea succeeds.

One does not adopt an idea, one slips into it.

Jean-Paul Sartre

I am so much a Unitarian as this: that I believe the human mind can admit but one God, and that every effort to pay religious homage to more than one being goes to take away all right ideas.

Ralph Waldo Emerson