Top 100 Great Ideas Sayings
#1. I don't think Philadelphia's challenge is in coming up with great ideas or having great founders. I think the real challenge is keeping them here.
Josh Kopelman
#2. Ideas must be put to the test. That's why we make things, otherwise they would be no more than ideas. There is often a huge difference between an idea and its realisation. I've had what I thought were great ideas that just didn't work.
Andy Goldsworthy
#3. There's at least a hundred times more people with great ideas than people that are willing to put in the effort to execute them well.
Sam Altman
#4. Any leader who asks the right questions of the right people has the potential to discover and develop great ideas.
John C. Maxwell
#5. A free society cherishes nonconformity. It knows that from the non-conformist, from the eccentric, have come many of the great ideas of freedom. A free society fertilizes the soil in which non-conformity and dissent and individualism can grow.
Henry Steele Commager
#6. Picasso had a saying - 'good artists copy, great artists steal' - and we have always been shameless about stealing great ideas.
Walter Isaacson
#7. This is the mark of great ideas: they unify people and they also act to unify the disparate parts of the human being; they speak of a social order that is possible on the basis of an ordering within the individual self.
Jacob Needleman
#8. I think students should know something about religion as a historical phenomenon, in the same way that they should know something about socialism and humanism and the other great ideas that have shaped political philosophies and therefore the course of human events.
Steven Pinker
#9. If you don't keep track of great ideas, you'll stop noticing you have them.
Bogdan Vaida
#10. [mannerism is when] you think you have all these great ideas, and none of them are good at the end of the day. But while you are pursuing those other things subconsciously happen.
Ryan Gosling
#11. Great men need to be lifted upon the shoulders of the whole world, in order to conceive their great ideas or perform their great deeds. That is, there must be an atmosphere of greatness round about them. A hero cannot be a hero unless in an heroic world.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
#12. Living movements do not come of committees, nor are great ideas worked out through the post, even though it had been the penny post.
John Henry Newman
#13. The finest piece of mechanism in all the universe is the brain of man. The wise person develops his brain, and opens his mind to the genius and spirit of the world's great ideas. He will feel inspired with the purest and noblest thoughts that have ever animated the spirit of humanity.
Alfred Armand Montapert
#14. We often hear what seem to be great ideas capable of transforming the world. But they are mere words devoid of emotion, empty of Love, which is why they do not touch us, however logical and intelligent they may seem.
Paulo Coelho
#15. From the political angle, I'm trying to be apolitical if you will. I mean people say, 'Are you a red state or blue state?', I say, 'I'm purple.' I think there are great ideas on both sides of the aisle and neither side has cornered the market.
Brad Thor
#16. I am spellbound by the plays of Shakespeare. And I am spellbound by the second law of thermodynamics. The great ideas in science, like the Cro-Magnon paintings and the plays of Shakespeare, are part of our cultural heritage.
Alan Lightman
#17. I'm always looking for directors who are very strong, they have great ideas, but on the other hand, that need help. It means they rely mostly on my eyes.
Vilmos Zsigmond
#19. Blade Runner was the godfather of all these fantastic movies that occur today. What's frustrating is that we're short of really great writing and great ideas. Blade Runner was full of them.
Ridley Scott
#20. We need innovation. We need great ideas that can be simply and effectively produced all over the place.
Helen Clark
#22. Great ideas come into the world as gently as doves.
Albert Camus
#23. The responsibility of leadership is not to come up with all the ideas but to create an environment in which great ideas can thrive.
Simon Sinek
#24. Great minds with great ideas usually share in the midst of their persecution
Jeremy Aldana
#25. You ask me if I keep a notebook to record my great ideas. I've only ever had one.
Albert Einstein
#26. Being on a successful show is kind of like being a sea turtle. Every year, sea turtles lay hundreds and hundreds of eggs, but only a few manage to survive and mature. It's the same with TV pilots. There are so many great ideas, but for whatever reason only the lucky ones get picked up.
Keiko Agena
#27. I have great ideas, but the follow through is always really difficult for me. As my kid gets a little bit older, if I feel like I have a little bit more time on my hands, I'd like to get more into developing ideas and writing things.
Busy Philipps
#28. Research your idea. See if there's a demand. A lot of people have great ideas, but they don't know if there's a need for it. You also have to research your competition.
Magic Johnson
#29. I love thinking, I love coming up with great ideas. I just get excited. Sometimes if I get a big idea, I'm just like a kid, like I've found a new toy.
Dolly Parton
#30. Safety is a basic human need. People with a sense of security and belonging are stabilized for learning, creating, innovating. A group of wonderfully cared for, confident individuals will generate great ideas.
John Sweeney
#31. All great ideas should be followed by an exclamation mark - a warning signal similar to the skull and crossbones drawn on high-voltage transformers.
Emile M. Cioran
#32. Great ideas behave like the Sun. Even in the middle of nowhere, they find people and shine on them!
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#33. Analysis paralysis is an epidemic that cripples countless dreams and great ideas. Be swift, decisive, and always move forward!
Matthew Loop
#34. The close relationships we form between researchers and product groups have already shown we can move the great ideas as they come along, without a schedule, into the products.
Bill Gates
#35. Great ideas often have no reference points.
We have nothing to compare them to. They are original, and awkward. And so they are the most vulnerable to people trying to kill them. They do not conform to what exists, so they challenge us.
David Hieatt
#36. The truth is you have to have great ideas that solve problems to make money. If you do, you will attract money like a magnet.
Steve Siebold
#38. Strategy equals execution. All the great ideas and visions in the world are worthless if they can't be implemented rapidly and efficiently. Good leaders delegate and empower others liberally, but they pay attention to details, every day.
Colin Powell
#39. It is through aversion to hardship that great ideas are born, but it is only through acceptance of it that these ideas can be implemented
Agona Apell
#40. Great minds birth great ideas.
Extraordinary minds birth extraordinary ideas.
Transcendent minds birth transcendent ideas.
Matshona Dhliwayo
#41. When people feel trusted, they'll begin to understand they are contributors--and you'll get great ideas and happy people.
Eunice Parisi-Carew
#42. I do value my work awfully; but in reality only consider this: all this world of ours is nothing but a speck of mildew, which has grown up on a tiny planet. And for us to suppose we can have something great - ideas, work - it's all dust and ashes.
Leo Tolstoy
#44. Many great ideas go unexecuted, and many great executioners are without ideas. One without the other is worthless.
Tim Blixseth
#45. So let your latest grand ideas cool off for a while first. By all means, have as many great ideas as you can. Get excited about them. Just don't act in the heat of the moment. Write them down and park them for a few days. Then, evaluate their actual priority with a calm mind.
Jason Fried
#46. Laugh if you will ... They laughed at all great ideas and inventions. They laughed at nitrous oxide.
John Sladek
#47. To defeat all their enemies and be victorious! This is the unpreventable destiny of all the great ideas! ~
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#48. The role of a leader is not to come up with all the great ideas. The role of a leader is to create an environment in which great ideas can happen.
Simon Sinek
#50. Scenius." Under this model, great ideas are often birthed by a group of creative individuals - artists, curators, thinkers, theorists, and other tastemakers - who make up an "ecology of talent.
Austin Kleon
#51. We can't be creative if we refuse to be confused. Change always starts with confusion; cherished interpretations must dissolve to make way for what's new. Great ideas and inventions miraculously appear in the space of not knowing.
Margaret J. Wheatley
#52. Not every dream grows on every land, so you got to watch out! "Sugar cane" dreams should find the environment where there is flooding of great ideas from great people. It will die off if it is planted at the place where the drought of discouragement is a well cherished culture!
Israelmore Ayivor
#53. Ads which ran 30-50 years ago, even a hundred years ago, are often better than those you see today. You'll get great ideas to use in your marketing.
Ted Nicholas
#54. Every idea travels to somewhere but some ideas travel to everywhere, the great ideas!
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#55. Not every innovation in transportation is going to come from government or even a large enterprise. There are smart people out there with tools and skills to come up with great ideas.
Anthony Foxx
#56. People are often led to causes and often become committed to great ideas through persons who personify those ideas. They have to find the embodiment of the idea in flesh and blood in order to commit themselves to it.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#57. In music, which was my world before, you've got thousands and thousands of years of great ideas that have already been thought of. But the internet is basically 20 years old. So you can be way stupider and still have world-changing ideas.
Andrew Mason
#58. You can have many great ideas in your head, but what makes the difference is the action. Without action upon an idea, there will be no manifestation, no results, and no reward
Miguel Ruiz
#59. The emergence of a hardware product from an African company marks a phase-change point for tech invention. The BRCK shows that great ideas can come from anywhere, that innovation comes from solving real problems with constrained resources.
Erik Hersman
#60. The fine arts, both in those who cultivate and those only who admire them, open and expand the mind to great ideas. They inspire liberal feelings, create a harmony of temper, favorable to a sense of justice and a habit of moderation in our social intercourse.
Joel Barlow
#61. Compassionate leaders honor the complexity of human relationships, nurture authenticity and create common grounds for blooming great ideas of individuals.
Amit Ray
#62. My job is to find great ideas, exaggerate them, and spread them like hell around the business with the speed of light ... And to put resources in to support them. Keep finding ideas. That's the job of just about all of our CEOs.
Jack Welch
#63. Style and Structure are the essence of a book; great ideas are hogwash.
Vladimir Nabokov
#64. The easiest thing about writing a book is coming up with the idea. We all have tons of great ideas for books, right? The issues come AFTER we have the great idea.
Jean Nicole Rivers
#65. A great idea is usually original to more than one discoverer. Great ideas come when the world needs them. Great ideas surround the world's ignorance and press for admission.
Elizabeth Stuart Phelps
#66. There's no shortage of great ideas. There's a shortage of execution.
Seth Godin
#67. If you have a great day at work and you've been hit with all these great ideas and there's a lot of excitement on your team, your mind doesn't turn off. For years I've kept a pad of paper and pen by me at night, because things just occur to you.
Anne Sweeney
#68. I call it predicament humor. You don't do anything that cuts the star off at the knees or worse. You make him intelligent; you give him great ideas and great things to do.
Glen A. Larson
#69. The religion itself may have some great ideas, but I can't take it seriously if it's blatantly exclusionary.
David O. Russell
#70. Senior men have no monopoly on great ideas. Nor do creative people. Some of the best ideas come from account executives, researchers and others. Encourage this, you need all the ideas you can get.
David Ogilvy
#71. In the future, as in the past, the great ideas [of mathematics] must be simplifying ideas, the creator must always be one who clarifies, for himself, and for others, the most complicated issues of formulas and concepts.
Andre Weil
#72. To die for one's great ideas is glorious - and easy. The horror is to outlive them. That is our worst capability.
Pearl Mary Teresa Craigie
#74. Since many things we see were once an idea, let us create good ideas today because they will be the realities of tomorrow! When you create an idea, do not forget that you shape the future! Idea is your God side! With ideas, you can change the universe, but only with very great ideas!
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#75. It is not sufficient for the young to devote their enthusiasm, their courage, their ambition, their self-sacrifice to the great ideas of the time; the young must not only preserve but increase their powers if they are to be really equal to their eternal task: that of drawing the age in advance.
Ellen Key
#76. Everybody has his own great ideas about what my art should be. But I can do whatever I like and there aren't many constraints to the way I work, whether I'm using a brush with ink or paint.
Raymond Pettibon
#77. Inside the calm minds, great ideas swim serenely like the morning geese of the misty lakes!
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#78. I love working with Darren Lynn Bousman. He is such a cool director with really great ideas.
Alexa Vega
#79. History is littered with people who came up with great ideas and saw others profit from them. You need to make sure you don't join their ranks.
Joey Reiman
#80. The essential key for writing is to write regularly - like it or not - great ideas come often by writing; releasing the subconscious - waiting for inspiration and ideas will not work, but it does help to have a notebook with you all the time for sudden brainstorms or inspiration.
Robert Marc Friedman
#81. Some people have great ideas maybe once or twice in their life, and then they discover electricity or fire or outer space or something. I mean, the kind of brilliant ideas that change the whole world.
Some people never have them at all ... I get them two or three times a week.
Neil Gaiman
#82. We are always looking for a grand program of action full of great ideas, when the thing is to begin by obeying the little ideas.
Paul Tournier
#83. Ridicule has historically proven itself a rickety fence for great ideas.
Vanna Bonta
#85. In our office, we have a whiteboard with all of our ideas and things we want to write on it - great ideas we have that we haven't had the time to get around to yet.
Erich Hoeber
#86. There was absolutely no intention of splitting up. We had so many great ideas to use on the new album. John Paul Jones was incredible, coming to the studio each day with new instruments to play.
John Bonham
#88. It may be easily shown, and is of no small significance, that the two great ideas of which the Anglo-Saxon is the exponent are having a fuller development in the United States than in Great Britain.
Josiah Strong
#90. I'm of the mindset that most people who have kids are, which is, 'Hey, I want another me. I like me. I'm pretty cool, and I've got really great ideas, and the way I think is the right way to think. Let's put another one of me out there.' So I'll have kids one day.
David Cross
#91. Every great religion is, in truth, a concentration of great ideas, capable, as all ideas are, of infinite expansion and adaptation.
Mary Augusta Ward
#92. Small minds cannot grasp great ideas; to their narrow comprehension, their purblind vision, nothing seems really great and important but themselves.
James George Frazer
#93. It's fun to be loose. Just like on stage, all of your great ideas come from looseness.
Debra Winger
#94. Great ideas have no attachment to either money or class.
Ian Schrager
#95. You do not say someone is holy because he puts forth great ideas concerning the knowledge of God and the attributes of God.
Michael Molinos
#96. I have found that great ideas come when you have a great desire to have them.
Charlie Chaplin
#97. Republicans are as capable of coming up with great ideas and moving this country along as anyone - they just don't do it.
Alan Alda
#98. Cheap is the last refuge of a product developer or marketer who is out of great ideas.
Seth Godin
#99. There are two excellent challengers against darkness in this universe: Powerful lights and great ideas!
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#100. He's threatening to breed polo ponies, but he's always been a man of great ideas, but little action, so I don't suppose he will.
Rosamunde Pilcher
