Every great invention, innovation, entrepreneurial venture, and breakthrough, started with a single idea. An Idea is a major tool used by an entrepreneur to add value in the marketplace. We all have ideas, executing relentlessly is what differentiates the successful from the non-successful.
Here are 30 great quotes on Ideas:
- The difficulty lies not so much in developing new ideas as in escaping from old ones. – John Maynard Keynes
- There falls a shadow between the conception and the creation. In the annals of innovation, new ideas are only part of the equation. Execution is just as important. - T.S. Eliot
- The oak sleeps in the acorn. The bird waits in the egg, and in the highest vision of the soul, a waking angel stirs. Dreams are the seedlings of reality. - Napoleon Hill, Think and Grow Rich
- One’s mind, once stretched by a new idea, never regains its original dimensions. - Oliver Wendell Holmes
- Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen. - John Steinbeck
- An idea not coupled with action will never get any bigger than the brain cell it occupied. – Arnold H. Glasgow
- An idea is not necessarily good because it is old, or necessarily bad because it is new, but if an old idea works, then the weight of the evidence is all in its favor. Ideas are of themselves extraordinarily valuable, but an idea is just an idea. Almost anyone can think up an idea. The thing that counts is developing it into a practical product. - Henry Ford
- Good ideas are common – what’s uncommon are people who will work hard enough to bring them about. - Ashleigh Brilliant
- It is a lesson which all history teaches wise men, to put trust in ideas, and not in circumstances. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
- An idea, like a ghost, must be spoken to a little before it will explain itself. - Charles Dicken
- Ideas are like slippery fish. They seem to have a peculiar knack of getting away from us. Because of this, the creative person always has a pad and a pencil handy. When he gets an idea, he writes it down. He knows that many people have found their whole lives changed by a single great thought. By capturing ideas immediately, he doesn’t risk forgetting them. - Earl Nightingale, Creative People Win: How to Problem Solve by Mind
- Nothing else in the world…not all the armies…is so powerful as an idea whose time has come. - Victor Hugo, The Future of Man
- A pile of rocks ceases to be a rock when somebody contemplates it with the idea of a cathedral in mind. - Antoine De St-Exupery
- Capital isn’t that important in business. Experience isn’t that important. You can get both of these things. What is important is ideas. - Harvey S. Firestone.
- Don’t worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you’ll have to ram them down people’s throats. - Howard Aiken
- New ideas pass through three periods: 1) It can’t be done. 2) It probably can be done, but it’s not worth doing. 3) I knew it was a good idea all along! - Arthur C. Clarke
- Daring ideas are like chessmen moved forward; they may be beaten, but they may start a winning game. - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
- A man may die, nations may rise and fall, but an idea lives on. Ideas have endurance without death. - John F. Kennedy
- All men dream: but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake up in the day to find it was vanity, but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dreams with open eyes, to make it possible. - T.E. Lawrence
- A mediocre idea that generates enthusiasm will go further than a great idea that inspires no one. - Mary Kay Ash
- Ideas won’t keep. something must be done about them. - Alfred North Whitehead
- The great accomplishments of man have resulted from the transmission of ideas of enthusiasm. - Thomas J. Watson
- Great minds discuss ideas. Average minds discuss events. Small minds discuss people. - Eleanor Roosevelt
- I know quite certainly that I myself have no special talent; curiosity, obsession, and dogged endurance, combined with self-criticism, have brought me to my ideas. - Albert Einstein
- A good idea is a network. A specific constellation of neurons—thousands of them—fire in sync with each other for the first time in your brain, and an idea pops into your consciousness. -Steven Johnson. Where Good Ideas Come From
- After the event, a revolutionary new idea can look so obvious − surely no one could possibly have doubted it? At their conception, though, new ideas are not blindingly obvious. They are fragile things in need of encouragement and nurturing against doubting Thomases, know-it-alls, and so-called experts. - James Dyson, Invention: A Life
- No idea is so outlandish that it should not be considered with a searching but at the same time a steady eye. - Winston Churchill
- All achievements, all earned riches, have their beginning in an idea. - Napoleon Hill
- To have a great idea, have a lot of them. - Thomas Edison
Have you got an idea that you want to work on? We want to help you through the journey. That is why we created our accelerator program(s) to help you achieve your dreams. Join our 12-week cohort of tech startups for Black founders by Black industry experts.