Ideas quotes
16.4K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
Explore further
Browse quotes that often appear alongside ideas — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
Quote collection
Follow a thought to its author, or read the full quote page.
"One has to be a lowbrow, a bit of a murderer, to be a politician, ready and willing to see people sacrificed, slaughtered, for the sake of an idea, whether a good one or a bad one."
"The reason why new concepts in any branch of science are hard to grasp is always the same; contemporary scientists try to picture the new concept in terms of ideas which existed before."
"Law Number XXXVI: The thickness of the proposal required to win a multimillion dollar contract is about one millimeter per million dollars. If all the proposals conforming to this standard were piled on top of each other at the bottom of the Grand Canyon it would probably be a good idea."
"Republicans have nothing but bad ideas and Democrats have no ideas."
"Why is a raven like a writing desk? - Mad Hatter I haven't the slightest idea. - Alice"
"So many Americans, for one reason or another, they watch the news and it doesn't really give them the idea of the world. Or they don't read or travel. They have no idea that America is part of the world and not the world itself."
"His head was an hour-glass; it could stow an idea, but it had to do it a grain at a time, not the whole idea at once."
"When a person is accustomed to one hundred and thirty-eight in the shade, his ideas about cold weather are not valuable."
"The slowness of one section of the world about adopting the valuable ideas of another section of it is a curious thing and unaccountable."
"Inherited ideas are a curious thing, and interesting to observe and examine."
"The idea that a baby doesn't amount to anything! Why, one baby is just a house and a front yard full by itself. One baby can, furnish more business than you and your whole Interior Department can attend to. He is enterprising, irrepressible, brimful of lawless activities."
"A man who is not born with the novel-writing gift has a troublesome time of it when he tries to build a novel. I know this from experience. He has no clear idea of his story; in fact he has no story. He merely has some people in his mind, and an incident or two, also a locality, and he trusts he can plunge those people into those incidents with interesting results."
"Few of us stand prosperity; another man's I mean."
"My idea of our civilization is that it is a shoddy, poor thing and full of cruelties, vanities, arrogances, meannesses and hypocrisies."
"My faith in human dignity consists in the belief that man is the greatest scamp on earth. Human dignity must be associated with the idea of a scamp and not with that of an obedient, disciplined and regimented soldier."
"What! Would I be turned back from doing a thing that I had determined to do, and that I knew to be right, by the airs and interference of such a person, or any person I may say? No, I have no idea of being so easily persuaded. When I have made up my mind, I have made it."
"You must really begin to harden yourself to the idea of being worth looking at."
"I begin already to weigh my words and sentences more than I did, and am looking about for a sentiment, an illustration, or a metaphor in every corner of the room. Could my Ideas flow as fast as the rain in the Storecloset it would be charming."
"If they had said that the sun or the moon had gone out of the heavens, it could not have struck me with the idea of a more awful and dreary blank in creation than the words: Byron is dead!"
"An idea is a greater monument than a cathedral. And the advance of man's knowledge is more of a miracle than any sticks turned to snakes, or the parting of waters!"
