Ideas quotes
16.4K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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Browse quotes that often appear alongside ideas — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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"Anybody who's ever gone through a hard time - any outsider's perception, no matter how much information they're given, they have no idea what the person's life is like."
"Leadership is scarce because few people are willing to go through the discomfort required to lead. This scarcity makes leadership valuable...It's uncomfortable to stand up in front of strangers. It's uncomfortable to propose an idea that might fail. It's uncomfortable to challenge the status quo. It's uncomfortable to resist the urge to settle...If you're not uncomfortable in your work as a leader, it's almost certain you're not reaching your potential as a leader."
"I see people as the nucleus of a great idea that hasn't come to be yet."
"Every idea has to become broad till it covers the whole of this world, every aspiration must go on increasing till it has engulfed the whole of humanity, nay, the whole of life, within its scope."
"Every idea is an incitement. It offers itself for belief, and if believed it is acted on unless some other belief outweighs it or some failure of energy stifles the movement at its birth. The only difference between the expression of an opinion and an incitement is the speaker's enthusiasm for the result."
"Warfare is a means and not an end. Warfare is a tool of revolutionaries. The important thing is the revolution. The important thing is the revolutionary cause, revolutionary ideas, revolutionary objectives, revolutionary sentiments, revolutionary virtues!"
"loves are like empires: when the idea they are founded on crumbles, they, too, fade away."
"The idea of wilderness needs no defense, it only needs defenders."
"The idea of Ghost Stories is how to turn something bad into something that gives you an uplift."
"Ideas are the beginning of all achievement."
"Motivation is when you get hold of an idea and carry it through to its conclusion, inspiration is the reverse. An idea gets hold of you and carries you where you are intended to go."
"Don't imagine that, if you had a great deal of time, you would spend more of it in prayer. Get rid of that idea; it is no hindrance to prayer to spend your time well."
"I never liked the idea of giving interviews. One says many things, but when they are published, they become shortened, condensed. The ideas lose their meaning."
"I am more of a sponge than an inventor. I absorb ideas from every source. I take half-matured schemes for mechanical development and make them practical. I am a sort of a middleman between the long-haired and impractical inventor and the hard-headed business man who measures all things in terms of dollars and cents. My principal business is giving commercial value to the brilliant but misdirected ideas of others."
"For me, collaborating is a marriage of the minds. It's two or more people coming together and making an idea come alive. Using their own creative knowledge or creative spirit to make the best version of an idea. To inspire an idea and to challenge it to be better than just one person's vision for it."
"The difference between a man who faces death for the sake of an idea and an imitator who goes in search of martyrdom is that whilst the former expresses his idea most fully in death it is the strange feeling of bitterness which comes from failure that the latter really enjoys; the former rejoices in his victory, the latter in his suffering."
"Anticipatory plagiarism occurs when someone steals your original idea and publishes it a hundred years before you were born."
"People don't like the idea of thinking long term. Many are desperately seeking short term answers because they have money problems to be solved today."
"There was never an idea started that woke up men out of their stupid indifference but its originator was spoken of as a crank."
"The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e., the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force."
