Skip to content


100 Awesome Quotes on What It Really Takes To Innovate

Today, one of my closest friends and mentors is getting a prestigious leadership award from the Leadership and Management Division of SLA.  Jane Dysart is oe of the nost innovative people I know and she’s sustained innovation adeptness and an incredible network of mentees through and long and brilliant career as an international librarian, information innovation leader and conference guru.  In her honour, I’ll post snippets of this blog post from Mitch Ditkoff:

100 Awesome Quotes on What It Really Takes To Innovate

http://www.ideachampions.com/weblogs/archives/2012/07/100_awesome_quo.shtml

“1. “I want to put a ding in the universe.” – Steve Jobs

2. “Ideas won’t keep. Something must be done about them.” – Alfred North Whitehead

3. “Intuition will tell the thinking mind where to look next.” – Jonas Salk

4. “If you have always done it that way, it is probably wrong.” – Charles Kettering

5. “Security is mostly a superstition. Life is either a daring adventure or nothing.” – Helen Keller

6. “If you can dream it, you can do it.” – Walt Disney (One of Jane’s favourite quotes)

9. “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

11. “If you lose the power to laugh, you lose the power to think.”
– Clarence Darrow

12. “Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen.” – John Steinbeck

15. “There’s no good idea that cannot be improved on.” – Michael Eisner

16. “We don’t see things as they are, we see things as we are.” – Anais Nin

18. “The best vision is insight.” – Malcolm Forbes

19. “Genius is infinite painstaking.” – Michelangelo

22. “Swipe from the best, then adapt.” – Tom Peters

24. “You can expect no influence if you are not susceptible to influence.” – Carl Jung

27. “Sit, walk, or run, but don’t wobble.” – Zen proverb

29. “We don’t know who discovered water, but we’re certain it wasn’t a fish.” – John Culkin

30. “I will act as if what I do will make a difference.” – William James

31. “There is no such thing as a long piece of work, except one that you dare not start.” – Charles Baudelaire

33. “Remember, a dead fish can float down a stream, but it takes a live one to swim upstream.” – W.C. Fields

36. “Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts.” – Albert Einstein

37. “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

41. “The greatest invention in the world is the mind of a child.” – Thomas Edison

47. “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

48. “Without a deadline, baby, I wouldn’t do nothing.” – Duke Ellington

49. “You miss 100 percent of the shots you never take.” – Wayne Gretzky

50. “In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities; in the expert’s mind there are few.” – Shunryu Suzuki

51. “Never tell people how to do things. Tell them what to do and they will surprise you with their ingenuity.” – General George Patton

59. “Systems die; instincts remain.” – Oliver Wendell Holmes

60. “You will never find the time for anything. If you want time, you must make it.” – Charles Burton

63. “The lightning spark of thought generated in the solitary mind awakens its likeness in another mind.” – Thomas Carlyle

64. “I failed my way to success.” – Thomas Edison

65. “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

66. “The way to succeed is to double your failure rate.” – Thomas Watson, (Founder of IBM)

67. “Innovation opportunities do not come with the tempest but with the rustling of the breeze.” – Peter Drucker

68. “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

70. “No idea is so outlandish that it should not be considered.” – Winston Churchill

71. “Conclusions arrived at through reasoning have very little or no influence in altering the course of our lives.” – Carlos Casteneda

73. “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

75. “Nothing is more dangerous than an idea when it is the only one you have.” – Emile Chartier

78. “Our best ideas come from clerks and stockboys.” – Sam Walton

79. “The gift of fantasy has meant more to me than my talent for absorbing positive knowledge.” – Albert Einstein

80. “Every act of creation is, first of all, an act of destruction.” – Pablo Picasso

82. “Imagination is more important than knowledge.” – Albert Einstein

85. “The best way to predict the future is to create it.” – Alan Kay

86. “If you go to your grave without painting your masterpiece, it will not get painted. No one else can paint it.” – Gordon MacKenzie

87. “Taking a new step, uttering a new word, is what people fear most.” – Fyodor Dostoevsky

89. “We have approximately 60,000 thoughts in a day. Unfortunately, 95% of them are thoughts we had the day before.” – Deepak Chopra

90. “Confusion is a word we have invented for an order that is not yet understood.” – Henry Miller

91. “I refuse to be intimidated by reality anymore. What is reality? Nothing but a collective hunch.” – Lily Tomlin

92. “Now that we have met with paradox we have some hope of making progress.” – Niels Bohr

95. “If I have a thousand ideas and only one turns out to be good, I am satisfied.” – Alfred Noble

96. “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

97. “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

98. “I am looking for a lot of people who have an infinite capacity to not know what can’t be done.” – Henry Ford

99. “You can have brilliant ideas, but if you can’t get them across, your ideas won’t get you anywhere.” – Lee Iacocca

100. “I can’t understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I’m frightened of the old ones.” – John Cage” (My favourite quote)

Congratulations Jane. (http://www.dysartjones.com)

Stephen

0 Shares

Posted on: July 17, 2012, 7:25 am Category: Uncategorized

One Response

Stay in touch with the conversation, subscribe to the RSS feed for comments on this post.

  1. Thank you Stephen! You told me you were writing something but I’m just now seeing it! Lovely words, thoughts and actions. Appreciate it my friend.