He can compress the most words into the smallest ideas of any man I ever met.

Abraham Lincoln (1809 - 1865)

The vitality¹ of thought is in adventure. Ideas won't keep. Something must be done about them.

Alfred North Whitehead (1861 - 1947)

It is by acts and not by ideas that people live.

Anatole France (1844 - 1924)

Ideals are like stars: you will not succeed in touching² them with your hands, but like the seafaring man on the ocean desert of waters, you choose them as your guides, and following them, you reach your destiny.

Carl Schurz (1829 - 1906)

There are only two kinds of scholars; those who love ideas and those who hate them.

Emile Chartier

An idea is salvation³ by imagination.

Frank Lloyd Wright (1869 - 1959)

Everyone is a genius at least once a year. The real geniuses simply have their bright ideas closer together.

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742 - 1799)

I said to myself, I have things in my head that are not like what anyone has taught me - shapes and ideas so near to me - so natural to my way of being and thinking that it hasn't occurred to me to put them down. I decided⁴ to start anew, to strip away what I had been taught.

Georgia O'Keeffe (1887 - 1986)

Any man who afflicts⁵ the human race with ideas must be prepare to see them misunderstood.

H. L. Mencken (1880 - 1956)

To die for an idea; it is unquestionably noble. But how much nobler it would be if men died for ideas that were true!

H. L. Mencken (1880 - 1956)

Every composer knows the anguish⁷ and despair occasioned by forgetting ideas which one had no time to write down.

Hector Berlioz (1803 - 1869)

College isn't the place to go for ideas.

Helen Keller (1880 - 1968)

This is my answer to the gap between ideas and action - I will write it out.

Hortense Calisher

Don't worry about people stealing an idea. If it's original, you will have to ram⁸ it down their throats.

Howard Aiken (1900 - 1973)

Good ideas are not adopted automatically. They must be driven into practice with courageous⁹ patience.

Hyman Rickover (1900 - 1986)

So many new ideas are at first strange and horrible, though ultimately valuable that a very heavy responsibility rests upon those who would prevent their dissemination¹⁰.

J. B. S. Haldane (1892 - 1964)

Do something. If it doesn't work, do something else. No idea is too crazy.

Jim Hightower, The New York Times, March 9, 1986

When ideas fail, words come in very handy.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749 - 1832)

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

John Cage (1912 - 1992)

Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen.

John Steinbeck (1902 - 1968)

A handsome parson is fit for nothing but ti put ideas into the young woman's heads.

Judith Brocklehurst, Darcy And Anne

Lack of money is no obstacle. Lack of an idea is an obstacle.

Ken⁶ Hakuta

People laugh at me because I use big words. But if you have big ideas you have to use big words to express them, haven't you?

L. M. Montgomery (1874 - 1942), Anne of Green Gables, 1908

Man's mind, once stretched by a new idea, never regains¹¹ its original dimensions.

Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809 - 1894)

The human mind treats a new idea the same way the body treats a strange protein; it rejects it.

P. B. Medawar (1915 - )

All opening moves were the same, like in chess. You don't have to come up with anything new, there's no point, because you're both after the same thing anyway. The game soon finds its own way and it's only at that point that you need a strategy.

Paolo Giordano, The Solitude¹² of Prime Numbers: A Novel

The key to every man is his thought.... He can only be reformed by showing him a new idea which commands his own.

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803 - 1882), Circles, Essays: First Series, 1903

I had a monumental idea this morning, but I didn't like it.

Samuel Goldwyn (1882 - 1974)

The best ideas are common property.

Seneca (5 BC - 65 AD), Epistles

A committee is a cul-de-sac down which ideas are lured¹³ and then quietly strangled.

Sir Barnett Cocks (1907 - 1989)