Idea Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

If you want to get across an idea, wrap it up in a person.

If I have a thousand ideas and only one turns out to be good, I am satisfied.

The dreadful truth is that when people come to see their MP, they have run out of better ideas.

The universal principle of etymology in all languages: words are carried over from bodies and from the properties of bodies to express the things of the mind and spirit. The order of ideas must follow the order of things.

Giambattista Vico

A linguistic system is a series of differences of sound combined with a series of differences of ideas; but the pairing of a certain number of acoustical signs with as many cuts made from the mass of thought engenders a system of values.

Ferdinand de Saussure

I can't understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I'm frightened of the old ones.

It always does seem to me that I am doing more work than I should do. It is not that I object to the work, mind you; I like work: it fascinates me. I can sit and look at it for hours. I love to keep it by me: the idea of getting rid of it nearly breaks my heart.

Jerome K. Jerome

An idea is an eye given by God for the seeing of God. Some of these eyes we cannot bear to look out of; we blind them as quickly as possible.

A fact in itself is nothing. It is valuable only for the idea attached to it, or for the proof which it furnishes.

It only takes twenty years for a liberal to become a conservative without changing a single idea.

Robert Anton Wilson

As scientists, we keep an open mind, but we have to base our ideas about the past on archaeological evidence.

If Pakistan has any ideas of annexing any part of our territories by force, she should think afresh. I want to state categorically that force will be met with force and aggression against us will never be allowed to succeed.

Lal Bahadur Shastri

"The first thing I've got to do," said Alice to herself as she wandered in the woods, "is to grow to my right size again; and the second thing is to find my way into that lovely garden. I think that will be the best plan." It sounded an excellent plan, no doubt; the only difficulty was that she had not the smallest idea how to set about it.

The idea of mathematics is the idea of science in general.

If you have never been at sea in a heavy gale, you can form no idea of the confusion of mind occasioned by wind and spry together. They blind, deafen, and strangle you, and take away all power of action or reflection.

Edgar Allan Poe

I have never seen the slightest scientific proof of the religious ideas of heaven and hell, of future life for individuals, or of a personal God.

Ideas in mathematics are a sure ground of certainty; and yet everyone may not make so right an use of them, as to attain to certainty by them: but yet anyone's failing of certainty by them, is not the overturning of this truth, that certainty is to be had by them.

An idea is a meteor; at the moment of success, the accumulated meditations which have preceded it open a little, and a spark flashes forth from it....

A revolution is an idea which has found its bayonets.

Napoleon I of France

It is one of the signs of the times. We confess that we have risen from reading this book with enlarged ideas, and grander conceptions of our duties in this world. It did expand us a little.

Henry David Thoreau

I refuse to accept despair as the final response to the ambiguities of history. I refuse to accept the idea that the "isness" of man's present nature makes him morally incapable of reaching up for the eternal "oughtness" that forever confronts him

Martin Luther King, Jr.

The idea of men's receiving an intimation of their connection with the world around them through an immediate feeling which is from the outset directed to that purpose sounds so strange and fits in so badly with the fabric of our psychology that one is justified in attempting to discover a psycho-analytic - that is, a genetic - explanation of such a feeling.

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.

I absolutely did not start writing these books to encourage any child into witchcraft. … I'm laughing slightly because to me, the idea is absurd.
I have met thousands of children now, and not even one time has a child come up to me and said, "Ms. Rowling, I'm so glad I've read these books because now I want to be a witch." They see it for what it is... It is a fantasy world and they understand that completely.

Ideas are like everything else. They've got to be marketed.

Agatha Christie