Antoine De Saint-Exupéry, French author (1900-1944)
Genius
One machine can do the work of fifty ordinary men. No machine can do the work of one extraordinary man.
Elbert Hubbard, US publisher, editor (1856-1915)
Genius is that energy which collects, combines, amplifies and animates.
Samuel Johnson, British poet, critic, lexicographer (1709-1784)
It takes a lot of time to be a genius; you have to sit around so much doing nothing, absolutely nothing.
Gertrude Stein, US author (1874-1946)
When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him.
Jonathan Swift, Irish clergyman, poet, satirist (1667-1745)
In the republic of mediocrity, genius is dangerous.
Robert G Ingersoll, US politician, orator (1833-1899)
Jealousy is the tribute mediocrity pays to genius.
Fulton John Sheen, US clergyman, evangelist (1895-1979)
Genius begins great works; labour alone finishes them.
Joseph Joubert, French essayist, moralist (1754-1824)
Genius, in truth, means little more than the faculty of perceiving in an unhabitual way.
William James, US philosopher, psychologist (1842-1910)
Talent is that which is in a man’s power; genius is that in whose power a man is.
John Russell Lowell, US poet, critic, statesman (1819-1891)
Towering genius disdains a beaten path. It seeks regions hitherto unexplored.
Abraham Lincoln, US President (1809-1865)
Adversity reveals genius, prosperity conceals it.
Horace, Roman poet, satirist (65-8 BC)
Innovators and men of genius have almost always been regarded as fools at the beginning (and very often at the end) of their careers.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Russian author, essayist (1821-1881)
Habit
Forgive him, for he believes that the customs of his tribe are the laws of nature.
George Bernard Shaw, Irish playwright, essayist (1856-1950)
If you have always done it that way, it’s probably wrong.
Charles F Kettering, US engineer, inventor (1876-1958)
If you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you’ve always got.
Ed Foreman, US politician, entrepreneur (b. 1933)
New opinions are always suspected and usually opposed, without any other reason but because they are not already common.
John Locke, English philosopher (1632-1704)
It is hard to let old beliefs go. They are familiar. We are comfortable with them and have spent years building systems and developing habits that depend on them. Like a man who has worn eyeglasses so long that he forgets he has them on, we forget that the world looks to us the way it does because we have become used to seeing it that way through a particular set of lenses. Today, however, we need new lenses. And we need to throw the old ones away.
Kenichi Ohmae, Japanese management consultant (b. 1943)
It seems, in fact, as though the second half of a man’s life is made up of nothing but the habits he has accumulated during the first half.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Russian author, essayist (1821-1881)
Conventional people are roused to fury by departure from convention, largely because they regard such departure as criticism of themselves.
Bertrand Russell, British philosopher, mathematician (1872-1970)
We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence then, is not an act, but a habit.
Aristotle, Greek philosopher, scientist, physician (384-322 BC)
It is never too late to give up your prejudices.
Henry David Thoreau, US essayist, poet (1817-1862)
Ideas
If you want to have a great idea, have lots of ideas.
Linus Pauling, US chemist, double Nobel Prize winner (1901-1994)
If I have a thousand ideas and only one turns out to be good, I am satisfied.
Alfred Nobel, Swedish chemist, businessman (1833-1896)
If at first the idea is not absurd, then there is no hope for it.
Albert Einstein, German physicist (1879-1955)
The need to be right all the time is the biggest bar to new ideas. It is better to have enough ideas for some of them to be wrong than to be always right by having no ideas at all.
Edward de Bono, Maltese psychologist, author (b. 1933)
The idea that is not dangerous is not worthy of being called an idea at all.
Elbert Hubbard, US publisher, editor (1856-1915)
Daring ideas are like chessmen moving forward; they may be beaten, but they may start a winning game.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, German poet, letter-writer (1749-1832)
You can’t crush ideas by suppressing them. You can only crush them by ignoring them.
Ursula K Le Guin, US author (b. 1929)
You cannot put a rope around the neck of an idea; you cannot put an idea up against the barrack-square wall and riddle it with bullets; you cannot confine it in the strongest prison cell your slaves could ever build.
Sean O’Casey, Irish dramatist, nationalist (1880-1964)
A new idea is delicate. It can be killed by a sneer or a yawn; it can be stabbed to death by a joke or worried to death by a frown on the right person’s brow.
Charles Brown, US explorer, adventurer (1863-1945)
Lack of money is no obstacle. Lack of an idea is an obstacle.
Ken Hakuta, US-Japanese entrepreneur (b. 1950)
An idea, to be suggestive, must come to the individual with the force of revelation.
Franklin D Roosevelt, US President (1882-1945)
Ideas are the raw materials of progress. Everything first takes shape in the form of an idea. But an idea by itself is worth nothing. An idea, like a machine, must have power applied to it before it can accomplish anything.
Bertie Charles Forbes, British journalist, founder of Forbes Magazine (1880-1954)
The barriers to innovation in many companies are social as much as they are organisational; whole categories of people are ignored as sources of ideas.
Rosabeth Moss Kanter, US academic, management author (b. 1943)
If you want to get an idea across, wrap it up in a person.
Ralph Bunche, US diplomat (1904-1971)