Top 100 Simple Ideas Quotes
#1. Motivation 2.0 is similar. At its heart are two elegant and simple ideas: Rewarding an activity will get you more of it. Punishing an activity will get you less of it.
Daniel H. Pink
#3. The 4 "I" in Simple Ideas: Involve individuals; Inspire crowds; Instil creativity; Innovate humanity !
Miguel Reynolds Brandao
#4. I am a great believer in the simplicity of things and as you probably know I am inclined to hang on to broad & simple ideas like grim death until evidence is too strong for my tenacity.
Ernest Rutherford
#5. Simple ideas become obsessions, almost like a meditation.
Mary Heilmann
#6. The best ideas and the most useful and ground-breaking are often, though not always, in one sense, very simple ideas.
Joe Grant
#8. Simple ideas are easier to understand. Ideas that are easier to understand are repeated. Ideas that are repeated change the world.
Simon Sinek
#9. The recalling of beautiful things, whether they are your own experiences or the acheivements of others, is a creative act. Simple ideas can be restated by rote; but profound ideas must be recreated by will and imagination.
Robert Grudin
#11. It was a most rewarding experience! I learned and saw how with a few simple ideas and concepts the same presentation can go from being standard and ordinary to interesting and involving.
Jeff Keane
#12. If we trace the progress of our minds, and with attention observe how it repeats, adds together, and unites its simple ideas received from sensation or reflection, it will lead us farther than at first, perhaps, we should have imagined.
John Locke
#13. Genius is making complex ideas simple, not making simple ideas complex
Albert Einstein
#14. Finally there are simple ideas of which no definition can be given; there are also axioms or postulates, or in a word primary principles, which cannot be proved and have no need of proof.
Gottfried Leibniz
#15. The television industry doesn't like to see the compexity of the world. It prefers simple reporting, with simple ideas: this is white, that's black; this is good, that's bad.
Krzysztof Kieslowski
#16. Yet, if our simplification of the gospel message is our main way of communicating these ideas, our faith and the faith of those we lead will be shallow, thus only wading in simple ideas of a complex God.
Sanejo I. Leonard
#17. Paul's lack of concern with the historical Jesus is not due, as some have argued, to his emphasis on Christological rather than historical concerns. It is due to the simple fact that Paul had no idea who the living Jesus was, nor did he care.
Reza Aslan
#18. There are many ways of understanding simple things, but generally the opposite is true for difficult ideas
Miyamoto Musashi
#19. The idea part is simple but the visual perception is complex.
Sol LeWitt
#20. The mind is not only capable of knowing [innate ideas], but further of finding them in itself; and if it had only the simple capacity to receive knowledge ... it would not be the source of necessary truths ...
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
#21. Government is force, pure and simple. There's no way to sugar-coat that. And because government is force, it will attract the worst elements of society - people who want to use government to avoid having to earn their living and to avoid having to persuade others to accept their ideas voluntarily.
Harry Browne
#22. Generally speaking, only simple conceptions can grip the mind of a nation. An idea that is clear and precise even though false will always have greater power in the world than an idea that is true but complex.
Alexis De Tocqueville
#23. Common sense is not a simple thing. Instead, it is an immense society of hard-earned practical ideas - of multitudes of life-learned rules and exceptions, dispositions and tendencies, balances and checks.
Marvin Minsky
#24. There is no "era" of simple, focused, concept-driven identity design. There is only design that grows out of understanding audiences for specific problems, and that evolves from an idea. This is an approach that does not depend on any specific time period or its technology.
Ivan Chermayeff
#25. I started modeling at 14. It's simple. You respond to what the photographer wants and wear other people's ideas. I got bored with it, though, so I went to university.
Lily Cole
#26. What tribes are, is a very simple concept that goes back 50 million years. It's about leading and connecting people and ideas. And it's something that people have wanted forever.
Seth Godin
#27. So now you be facing me for ideas, eh? What makes you think a simple, brainless woman like myself would have any idea on how to accomplish men's work? Why, I feel faint just trying to think any thought at all. (Cat)
Kinley MacGregor
#28. Scarcity is a captivating book, overflowing with new ideas, fantastic stories, and simple suggestions that just might change the way you live.
Steven Levitt
#29. Whenever I attempt to frame a simple idea of time, abstracted from the succession of ideas in my mind, which flows uniformly, and is participated by all beings, I am lost and embrangled in inextricable difficulties.
George Berkeley
#30. Ideas are refined and multiplied in the commerce of minds. In their splendor, images effect a very simple communion of souls.
Gaston Bachelard
#31. I write from my knowledge not my lack, from my strength not my weakness. I am not interested if anyone knows whether or not I am familiar with big words, I am interested in trying to render big ideas in a simple way. I am interested in being understood not admired.
Lucille Clifton
#32. Every long sentence can be broken up into shorter ones, and if you don't know how - if you don't see within your long sentences groupings of simple, clear ideas - it will show.
June Casagrande
#33. That is a complicated matter. The heart of the tale and the ideas behind it are simple. Time has altered and condensed their nuances, made them more than story, greater than the sums of their parts. But that requires time. The truest tales require time and familiarity to become what they are.
Erin Morgenstern
#34. Saying no", argues the author Kevin Ashton, "has more creative power than ideas, insights and talent combined. No guards time, the thread from which we weave our creations. The math of time is simple: you have less than you think and need more than you know.
Kevin Ashton
#35. Two-thirds of all growth takes place in cities because, by simple fact of population density, our urban spaces are perfect innovation labs. The modern metropolis is jam-packed. People are living atop one another; their ideas are as well.
Peter Diamandis
#36. Most ideas that are successful are ludicrously simple. Successful ideas generally have the appearance of simplicity because they seem inevitable. In terms of idea the artist is free to even surprise himself. Ideas are discovered by intuition.
Sol LeWitt
#37. The Q I loathe and despise, the Q every single writer I know loathes and despises, is this one: 'Where,' the reader asks, 'do you get your ideas?' It's a simple question, and my usual response is a kind of helpless, 'I don't know.'
Ayelet Waldman
#38. I had so many ideas that I wanted to get out at once that it led to simple little drawings and paintings.
Neil Farber
#39. There are simple rules of engagement: You need to have your voice, but it has to be very intentional - be brief and to the point, with fresh ideas. Don't restate things someone else has said. Make eye contact with the person who has the floor.
Sylvia Ann Hewlett
#40. This was, I thought, the language of shy men, men too much alone with their reading and their ideas - politics, war, distant countries, tyrants. Men who would bury their heads in such stuff just to avert their eyes from a woman's simple heartache.
Alice McDermott
#41. A snowball is simple, direct and familiar to most of us. I use this simplicity as a container for feelings and ideas that function on many levels.
Andy Goldsworthy
#42. We live in a society either scarred by scarcity or spoiled by luxury. We have no idea how much is enough. We don't know when to quit.
Sharif Abdullah
#43. I didn't even write the lyrics down. I got in the booth, I put down a little guitar riff and the idea I had was it was going to be really simple, I just want it to be all about the lyrics and I just literally sang the lyrics.
Benji Madden
#44. I just used a very simple way to explain what are deep ideas, and why can't that be literature?
Mian Mian
#45. As far as where I go when I die, the concept that I am simple going to flick out, like a light bulb, to me is not only spiritually impossible to believe, but logically it is laughable - the idea that we simply die and nothing happens.
Stephen King
#46. The idea that the universe is running down comes from a simple observation about machines. Every machine consumes more energy than it renders.
Jacob Bronowski
#47. If you're stuck on a problem, don't sit there and think about it; just start working on it. Even if you don't know what you're doing, the simple act of working on it will eventually cause the right ideas to show up in your head.
Mark Manson
#48. The idea of Disneyland is a simple one. It will be a place for people to find happiness and knowledge.
Walt Disney
#49. Why did it take so long for a Darwin to arrive on the scene? What delayed humanity's tumbling to that luminously simple idea which seems, on the face of it, so much easier to grasp than the mathematical ideas given us by Newton two centuries earlier - or, indeed, by Archimedes two millennia earlier?
Richard Dawkins
#50. I think that's the direction we [the americans] are going to have to go, the idea of people understanding that if you see something, say something, as simple as it sounds.
William Bratton
#51. The safest way to try to get what you want is to try to deserve what you want. It's such a simple idea. It's the golden rule. You want to deliver to the world what you would buy if you were on the other end.
Charlie Munger
#52. Quite apart from the prestige of technology, people do, after all, prefer a simple idea to a complex one.
Bernard Crick
#53. The ideas behind the words are simple ones that work in everyday life; find what we most want to do; do it, no matter what; and in the doing be guaranteed a very difficult and a very happy lifetime.
Richard Bach
#54. Life is very, very simple and easy to understand, but we complicate it with the beliefs and ideas that we create.
Don Miguel Ruiz
#55. It's a simple thing he [Frank Daniel] taught me. If you want to make a feature film, you get ideas for 70 scenes. Put them on 3-by-5 cards. As soon as you have 70, you have a feature film.
David Lynch
#56. Ideas for songs can come from something as simple as a photograph and letting my imagination run wild on an old photograph that I found, or to a film that I have seen or to just most of the time, just daily walking through life and keeping your eyes open.
PJ Harvey
#57. Keep it simple. Trust your imagination. Discover what is unique about your imagination. Don't simply read a story and copy it.
I go into myself. Then I transcribe what visions I have. If those ideas are original, and you are devoted, you will go far.
Clive Barker
#58. Politicians must be simple and clear about how their ideas will serve the national cause. We can no longer use the complexity of today's problems as an excuse for inaction, rhyme or rhetoric that does not meet the challenges before us.
Alan Siegel
#59. From this simple phenomenon, this idea of saying something twice, more often, as often as possible, in order to make oneself understood - the most artful things developed ... the principle of repetition!
Anton Webern
#60. The old-fashioned idea that the simple piling up of experiences, one on top of another, can make you an artist, is, of course, so much rubbish. If acting were just a matter of experience, then any busy harlot could make Garbo's Camille pale.
Helen Hayes
#61. Complex ideas must be made simple, or they'll remain ideas and never be put into action.
Nathaniel Fick
#62. A hundred people is rather a large handful for the four of us to take on," Malcolm pointed out. "Do you have any ideas about how we're going to handle that task?"
"Simple," Halt told him. "We'll surround them.
John Flanagan
#63. The idea, which constitutes the actual being of the human mind, is not simple, but compounded of a great number of ideas.
Baruch Spinoza
#64. Angelo is a brilliant jazz talent. His receptivity, seriousness, his ability to execute ideas simple or complex, combined with his love and feel for the substance of jazz reveal why he is an exceptional artist.
Mulgrew Miller
#65. I am suggesting to you the simple idea that people work harder and smarter if they find their work satisfying and know that it is appreciated.
Robert Six
#66. It's a simple idea: We all do better when we work together and invest in our future.
Elizabeth Warren
#67. You have to remember that I was a bright but simple fellow from Canada who seldom, if ever, met another writer, and then only a so-called literary type that occasionally sold a story and meanwhile worked in an office for a living.
A.E. Van Vogt
#68. People aren't very good listeners, by nature ... Part of being a good communicator is recognizing and understanding that and trying to make the complex simple. I try to capture a concept, an idea or a moment in a few words. If they remember it, job done.
Mike Tomlin
#69. The central problem of brand-building is getting a complex organization to execute a simple idea.
Marty Neumeier
#70. Usually, I make a simple beat, throw in the acapella, and then I just improvise on the piano. Whatever comes up, I record the result, and I rework on it. Sometimes it takes a while to come with an idea, but mostly it comes naturally because I already have a connection with the song.
Shook
#71. The idea that somehow we're better off today than the day that Barack Obama was inaugurated president of the United States is totally an alternative universe. The simple fact is that the world has been torn asunder.
Jeb Bush
#72. My natural tendency is to complicate everything
and then to spray words and ideas onto everything afterwards. I've had to develop the habit of keeping things simple.
Anne Lamott
#73. And yet the point of view from which his ideas on art had sprung was a simple one: for him, literary schools did not exist; the only thing that mattered was the temperament of the artist; the only thing of interest was the way his brain worked, regardless of the subject he was treating.
Joris-Karl Huysmans
#74. No one doubts the enormity of the social challenges we face around the world but one critical element of our response must be the generation of new thinking and ideas. Yet creating the conditions that make this possible is not simple.
Simon Mainwaring
#75. Kant was probably the worst writer ever heard of on earth before Karl Marx. Some of his ideas were really quite simple, but he always managed to make them seem unintelligible. I hope he is in Hell.
H.L. Mencken
#76. The basic idea of integral transformative practice (ITP) is simple: the more aspects of our being that we simultaneously exercise, the more likely that transformation will occur.
Ken Wilber
#77. The roots of effective leadership lie in simple things, one of which is listening. Listening to someone demonstrates respect; it shows that you value their ideas and are willing to hear them.
John Baldoni
#78. I think he's much funnier in many ways than some of the things that I've done. Because it's a little bit more layered. He's constantly trying to teach Luke what he thinks are really deep philosophical ideas, but they're really simple.
Sean William Scott
#79. I think one of the saddest things that's happening to literature is that it's getting over-simplified by this diet of simple political ideas.
Arundhati Roy
#80. If you take a sophisticated idea, reduce it to the simplest possible terms so that it's accessible to everybody, and don't get simple mixed up with simplistic, it's how you mount and present something that makes it engaging.
Gordon Willis
#81. The World requires at least ten years to understand a new idea, however important or simple it may be.
Ronald Ross
#82. What strikes me most about Best Buddies International is the simplicity and magnitude of the mission. Friendship is a simple idea.
Tom Brady
#83. Where do new ideas come from? The answer is simple: differences. While there are many theories of creativity, the only tenet they all share is that creativity comes from unlikely juxtapositions. The best way to maximize differences is to mix ages, cultures, and disciplines.
Nicholas Negroponte
#84. I only wished to say that ideas that have great results are always simple ones. The whole of my idea is that if vicious people are united and constitute a power, then honest folk must do the same. Now that's simple enough.
Leo Tolstoy
#85. I started passing out the schematics and the code listings for the computer, telling everyone here it is. It's small, it's simple, it's inexpensive: Build your own. No idea to start a company. Steve Jobs came by later and say, you know, people are interested. Why don't we start a company?
Steve Wozniak
#86. The simple reason that most people fail financially is not because of the lack of a plan, it's not because of good advice, it's not even because of a lack of capital. It is for one reason - they attach more pain to the idea of having money, than NOT having it.
Tony Robbins
#87. The idea for Not For Sale originated as a simple brand to tell as many people as possible about what we are trying to achieve - "people are not for sale". The brand is a straight forward message and communicates the mission clearly.
David Batstone
#88. Angry Birds is a very simple idea but its one of those games that I immediately appreciated when I first started playing, before wishing that I had been the one to come up with the idea first.
Shigeru Miyamoto
#89. Hang ideas! They are tramps, vagabonds, knocking at the back-door of your mind, each taking a little of your substance, each carrying away some crumb of that belief in a few simple notions you must cling to if you want to live decently and would like to die easy!
Joseph Conrad
#90. Discussion and argument are essential parts of science; the greatest talent is the ability to strip a theory until the simple basic idea emerges with clarity.
Albert Einstein
#91. I am fascinated by language in daily life: the way it can evoke an emotion, a visual image, a complex idea, or a simple truth.
Amy Tan
#92. But she grasped points quickly and put them in simple terms. There is a type of mind, like Willi's, that can only accept ideas if they are put in the language he would use himself.
Doris Lessing
#93. It was astonishing when at one point, I got the idea of how to make artifical clouds with a collaborator, we had pictures made which were theoretically completely artificial pictures based upon that one very simple idea. And this picture everybody views as being clouds.
Benoit Mandelbrot
#94. The value of a scientific publication goes beyond this simple benefit, of all relevant information appearing, unambiguously, in one place. It's also a way to communicate your ideas to your scientific peers, and invite them to express an informed view.
Ben Goldacre
#95. In life and in love, there is only that moment, the NOW. The only reality we know is what we experience this very second. Reality is not what has passed or what has yet to come into being. Grabbing hold of this simple idea makes life magical because it brings love alive.
Leo Buscaglia
#96. When an idea is not robust enough to stand expression in simple terms, it is a sign that it should be rejected.
Luc De Clapiers
#97. Mantras have an important place in meditation. But the idea has become somewhat prevalent in the West, and in the East to some extent, that the simple repetition of a mantra will eventually cause enlightenment
Frederick Lenz
#98. It took me a long time to understand the relationship between ideas and between objective facts. But after I clearly understood this relationship, I didn't fool around with other wild ideas. That is one of the main reasons why I just make my scheme as simple as possible.
Ludwig Mies Van Der Rohe
#99. String theory is based on the simple idea that all the four forces of the universe: gravity, the electromagnetic force and the two nuclear forces, can be viewed, as music.
Michio Kaku
#100. Intellectuals are judged not by their morals, but by the quality of their ideas, which are rarely reducible to simple verdicts of truth or falsity, if only because banalities are by definition accurate.
Perry Anderson
