When we put down ideas of what life should be like, we are free to wholeheartedly say yes to our life as it is.

- Tara Brach

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

- John Cage

A society of sheep must in time beget a government of wolves.

- Henry de Jouvenel

First comes thought; then organization of that thought, into ideas and plans; then transformation of those plans into reality. The beginning, as you will observe, is in your imagination.

- Napoleon Hill

An idea that is developed and put into action is more important than an idea that exists only as an idea.

- Buddha

A man is but the product of his thoughts. What he thinks, he becomes.

- Mohandas K. Gandhi

To think and to be fully alive are the same.

- Hannah Arendt

We are more connected than ever before, more able to spread our ideas and beliefs, our anger and fears. As we exercise the right to advocate our views, and as we animate our supporters, we must all assume responsibility for our words and actions before they enter a vast echo chamber and reach those both serious and delirious, connected and unhinged.

- Bill Clinton

I do not go to a meeting merely to give my own ideas. If that were all, I might write my fellow members a letter. But neither do I go simply to learn other people's ideas. If that were all, I might ask each to write me a letter. I go to a meeting in order that all together we may create a group idea, an idea which will be better than all of our ideas added together. For this group idea will not be produced by any process of addition, but by the interpenetration of us all.

- Mary Parker Follett

If you realized how powerful your thoughts are, you would never think a negative thought.

- Peace Pilgrim

Ideas may drift into other minds, but they do not drift my way.
I have to go and fetch them. I know no work manual or mental to equal the
appalling heart-breaking anguish of fetching an idea from nowhere.

- A. A. Milne

It isn't where you come from, it's where you're going that counts.

- Ella Fitzgerald

If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you. If you really make them think, they'll hate you.

- Don Marquis

You can kill a man but you can't kill an idea.

- Medgar Evers

Thinking is easy, acting is difficult, and to put one's thoughts into action is the most difficult thing in the world.

- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Our lack of compassion stems from our inability to see deeply into the nature of things.

- Lama Surya Das



All ideologies end up killing people. If you separate love from nonviolence you turn nonviolence into an ideology, a gimmick. Structures that are not inhabited by justice and love have no liberating or reconciling force, and are never sources of life.

- Jean Goss



Nobody can be so amusingly arrogant as a young man who has just discovered an old idea and thinks it is his own.

- Sydney J. Harris



Intuition and concepts constitute ... the elements of all our knowledge, so that neither concepts without an intuition in some way corresponding to them, nor intuition without concepts, can yield knowledge.

- Immanuel Kant



For an idea ever to be fashionable is ominous, since it must afterwards be always old-fashioned.

- George Santayana



You have to have a lot of ideas. First, if you want to make discoveries, it's a good thing to have good ideas. And second, you have to have a sort of sixth sense -- the result of judgment and experience -- which ideas are worth following up. I seem to have the first thing, a lot of ideas, and I also seem to have good judgment as to which are the bad ideas that I should just ignore, and the good ones, that I'd better follow up.

- Linus Pauling



If you are possessed by an idea, you find it expressed everywhere, you even smell it.

- Thomas Mann



If you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange these apples then you and I will still each have one apple. But if you have an idea and I have an idea and we exchange these ideas, then each of us will have two ideas.

- George Bernard Shaw



Put the argument into a concrete shape, into an image, some hard phrase, round and solid as a ball, which they can see and handle and carry home with them, and the cause is half won.

- Ralph Waldo Emerson



I have never had so many good ideas day after day as when I worked in the garden.

- John Erskine



Ideas are great arrows, but there has to be a bow. And politics is the bow of idealism.

- Bill Moyers



A man is not idle because he is absorbed in thought. There is a visible labor and there is an invisible labor.

- Victor Hugo



If I were required to guess off-hand, and without collusion with higher minds, what is the bottom cause of the amazing material and intellectual advancement of the last fifty years, I should guess that it was the modern-born and previously non-existent disposition on the part of men to believe that a new idea can have value.

- Mark Twain



Just once in a while let us exalt the importance of ideas and information.

- Edward R. Murrow



Indeed, to some extent it has always been necessary and proper for man, in his thinking, to divide things up, if we tried to deal with the whole of reality at once, we would be swamped. However when this mode of thought is applied more broadly to man's notion of himself and the whole world in which he lives, (i.e. in his world-view) then man ceases to regard the resultant divisions as merely useful or convenient and begins to see and experience himself and this world as actually constituted of separately existing fragments. What is needed is a relativistic theory, to give up altogether the notion that the world is constituted of basic objects or building blocks. Rather one has to view the world in terms of universal flux of events and processes.

- David Bohm



Great ideas often receive violent opposition from mediocre minds.

- Albert Einstein



The only force that can overcome an idea and a faith is another and better idea and faith, positively and fearlessly upheld.

- Dorothy Thompson



The best way to have a good idea is to have lots of ideas.

- Linus Pauling