100 Awesome Quotes on What It Takes To Innovate

GUEST POST from Mitch Ditkoff

“I want to put a ding in the universe.” – Steve Jobs
“Ideas won’t keep. Something must be done about them.” – Alfred North Whitehead
“Intuition will tell the thinking mind where to look next.” – Jonas Salk
“If you have always done it that way, it is probably wrong.” – Charles Kettering
“If you can dream it, you can do it.” – Walt Disney
“Security is mostly a superstition. Life is either a daring adventure or nothing.” – Helen Keller
“You can’t solve a problem on the same level that it was created. You have to rise above it to the next level.” – Albert Einstein
“Do not fear mistakes. There are none.” – Miles Davis
“The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect, but by the play instinct arising from inner necessity. The creative mind plays with the object it loves.” – Carl Jung
“There is only one thing stronger than all the armies of the world: and that is an idea whose time has come.” – Victor Hugo
“If you lose the power to laugh, you lose the power to think.” – Clarence Darrow
“Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen.” – John Steinbeck
“To accomplish great things we must dream as well as act.” – Anatole France
“It is the essence of genius to make use of the simplest ideas.” – Charles Peguy
“There’s no good idea that cannot be improved on.” – Michael Eisner
“We don’t see things as they are, we see things as we are.” – Anais Nin
“We don’t know a millionth of one percent about anything.” – Thomas Edison
“The best vision is insight.” – Malcolm Forbes
“Genius is infinite painstaking.” – Michelangelo
“Nothing will change the fact that I cannot produce the least thing without absolute solitude.” – Goethe
“Neither a lofty degree of intelligence, nor imagination, nor both together, go to the making of genius. Love, Love, Love. That is the soul of genius.” – Mozart
“Swipe from the best, then adapt.” – Tom Peters
“Give me the young man who has brains enough to make a fool of himself.” – Robert Louis Stevenson
“You can expect no influence if you are not susceptible to influence.” – Carl Jung
“Whether or not you can observe a thing depends upon the theory you use. It is the theory which decides what can be observed.” – Albert Einstein
“Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it.” – Goethe
“Sit, walk, or run, but don’t wobble.” – Zen proverb
“The greater the contrast, the greater the potential. Great energy only comes from a correspondingly great tension of opposites.” – Carl Jung
“We don’t know who discovered water, but we’re certain it wasn’t a fish.” – John Culkin
“I will act as if what I do will make a difference.” – William James
“There is no such thing as a long piece of work, except one that you dare not start.” – Charles Baudelaire
“What is now proved was once only imagined.” – William Blake
“Remember, a dead fish can float down a stream, but it takes a live one to swim upstream.” – W.C. Fields
“99 percent of success is built on failure.” – Charles Kettering
“If the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail.” – Abraham Maslow
“Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts.” – Albert Einstein
“The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.” – F. Scott Fitzgerald
“The ultimate creative thinking technique is to think like God. If you’re an atheist, pretend how God would do it.” – Frank Lloyd Wright
“I start where the last man left off.” – Thomas Edison
“Never confuse motion with action.” – Ernest Hemingway
“The greatest invention in the world is the mind of a child.” – Thomas Edison
“No matter how well you perform, there’s always somebody of intelligent opinion who thinks it’s lousy.” – Sir Laurence Olivier
“You must do the thing you think you cannot do.” – Eleanor Roosevelt
“I’ll play it first and tell you what it is later.” – Miles Davis
“The way to get good ideas is to get lots of ideas and throw the bad ones away.” – Linus Pauling
“Discovery is seeing what everybody else has seen, and thinking what nobody else has thought.” – Albert Szent-Gyorgi
“A pile of rocks ceases to be a rock pile when somebody contemplates it with the idea of a cathedral in mind.”- Antoine Saint-Exupery
“Without a deadline, baby, I wouldn’t do nothing.” – Duke Ellington
“You miss 100 percent of the shots you never take.” – Wayne Gretzky
“In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities; in the expert’s mind there are few.” – Shunryu Suzuki
“Never tell people how to do things. Tell them what to do and they will surprise you with their ingenuity.” – General George Patton
“The man with a new idea is a crank – until the idea succeeds.” – Mark Twain
“A problem well stated is a problem half solved.” – Charles Kettering
“The best thinking has been done in solitude. The worst has been done in turmoil.” – Thomas Edison
“Don’t be afraid to take a big step when one is indicated. You can’t cross a chasm in two small jumps.” – David Lloyd George
“The silly question is the first intimation of some totally new development.” – Alfred North Whitehead
“A man is not idle because he is absorbed in thought. There is a visible labor and there is an invisible labor.” – Victor Hugo
“Money never starts an idea; it is the idea that starts the money.” – William J. Cameron
“Systems die; instincts remain.” – Oliver Wendell Holmes
“You will never find the time for anything. If you want time, you must make it.” – Charles Burton
“Whenever anything is being accomplished, it is being done, I have learned, by a monomaniac with a mission.” – Peter Drucker
“One of the illusions of life is that the present hour is not the critical, decisive one.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson
“The lightning spark of thought generated in the solitary mind awakens its likeness in another mind.” – Thomas Carlyle
“I failed my way to success.” – Thomas Edison
“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.” – Margaret Mead
“The way to succeed is to double your failure rate.” – Thomas Watson, (Founder of IBM)
“Innovation opportunities do not come with the tempest but with the rustling of the breeze.” – Peter Drucker
“The enterprise that does not innovate ages and declines. And in a period of rapid change such as the present, the decline will be fast.” – Peter Drucker
“You can only be as good as you dare to be bad.” – John Barrymore
“No idea is so outlandish that it should not be considered.” – Winston Churchill
“Conclusions arrived at through reasoning have very little or no influence in altering the course of our lives.” – Carlos Casteneda
“After years of telling corporate citizens to ‘trust the system,’ many companies must relearn instead to trust their people – and encourage their people to use neglected creative capacities in order to tap the most potent economic stimulus of all: idea power.” – Rosabeth Moss Kanter
“If the creator has a purpose in equipping us with a neck, he surely would have meant for us to stick it out.” – Arthur Koestler
“If you do not express your own original ideas, if you do not listen to your own being, you will have betrayed yourself.” – Rollo May
“Nothing is more dangerous than an idea when it is the only one you have.” – Emile Chartier
“There’s always an element of chance and you must be willing to live with that element. If you insist on certainty, you will paralyze yourself.” – J.P. Getty
“Almost all really new ideas have a certain aspect of foolishness when they are just produced.” – A.N. Whitehead
“Our best ideas come from clerks and stockboys.” – Sam Walton
“The gift of fantasy has meant more to me than my talent for absorbing positive knowledge.” – Albert Einstein
“Every act of creation is, first of all, an act of destruction.” – Pablo Picasso
“Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.” – Groucho Marx
“Imagination is more important than knowledge.” – Albert Einstein
“Genius, in truth, means little more than the faculty of perceiving in an unhabitual way.” – William James
“Vision is the art of seeing things invisible.” – Jonathan Swift
“The best way to predict the future is to create it.” – Alan Kay
“If you go to your grave without painting your masterpiece, it will not get painted. No one else can paint it.” – Gordon MacKenzie
“Taking a new step, uttering a new word, is what people fear most.” – Fyodor Dostoevsky
“There is a vitality, a life force, that is translated to you into action, and because there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium, and will be lost.” – Martha Graham
“We have approximately 60,000 thoughts in a day. Unfortunately, 95% of them are thoughts we had the day before.” – Deepak Chopra
“Confusion is a word we have invented for an order that is not yet understood.” – Henry Miller
“I refuse to be intimidated by reality anymore. What is reality? Nothing but a collective hunch.” – Lily Tomlin
“Now that we have met with paradox we have some hope of making progress.” – Niels Bohr
“Microsoft is always two years away from failure.” – Bill Gates
“We’ve reached the end of incrementalism. Only those companies that are capable of creating industry revolutions will prosper in the new economy. – Gary Hamel
“If I have a thousand ideas and only one turns out to be good, I am satisfied.” – Alfred Noble
“I’ve been doing a lot of abstract painting lately, extremely abstract. No brush, no paint, no canvas, I just think about it.” – Steven Wright
“You can’t just ask customers what they want and then try to give that to them. By the time you get it built, they’ll want something new.” – Steve Jobs
“I am looking for a lot of people who have an infinite capacity to not know what can’t be done.” – Henry Ford
“You can have brilliant ideas, but if you can’t get them across, your ideas won’t get you anywhere.” – Lee Iacocca
“I can’t understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I’m frightened of the old ones.” – John Cage