IDEAS
An invasion of armies can be resisted, but not an idea whose time has come.
—Victor Hugo
Ideas are very much like children—your own ideas are wonderful.
Don’t lose heart if one of your pet ideas is killed. If it’s right it will come back to life.
You can’t pass a law against an idea. The only way to fight an idea is to show a better one.
Many ideas grow better when transplanted into another mind than the one where they sprang up.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes
Don’t hoard ideas. The more you radiate, the more you germinate.
Ideas are capital that bears interest only in the hands of talent.
—Antoine Rivaroli
Irrigate widely but dig your wells deep.
—Kenneth L. Pike
New ideas can be good or bad, just the same as old ones.
—Franklin D. Roosevelt
The man with a new idea is a crank, until the idea succeeds.
—Mark Twain
Fear of ideas makes us impotent and ineffective.
—William O. Douglas
Men possessed with an idea cannot be reasoned with.
—James Anthony Froude
To welcome new ideas, avoid these “killer phrases”:
It’s not in the budget.
Who thought of that?
We tried that before.
We’re not ready for it yet.
Not timely.
Too hard to administer.
Too theoretical.
Doesn’t conform to our policy.
Takes too much time.
Takes too much work.
Let’s wait and see.
Let’s form a committee.
Has anyone ever tried it?
What you are saying is …
IDLENESS
Never be idle, but either be reading, or writing, or praying, or meditating, or endeavoring something for the public good.
—Thomas á Kempis
He who is busy is bothered by only one devil; he who is lazy is bothered by a thousand.
—Spanish proverb
IDOLATRY
A man’s god is that for which he lives, for which he is prepared to give his time, his energy, his money, that which stimulates him and rouses him, excites, and enthuses him.
—D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones
A rabbi was explaining to his pupils how strongly God condemns the worship of idols. One of them asked, “If God so abhors idolatry, why does He not destroy the idols that men worship?” The rabbi replied, “Because some of them, the sun and the moon for example, are an essential part of the fabric of God’s economy.” After a moment’s pause, the student said, “Then why does He not at least destroy those that are not essential?” To which the rabbi answered, “Because it would then appear He was condoning the worship of the idols He did not destroy.”
—Arthur C. Custance
IF
If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or, being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or, being hated, don’t give way to hating,
And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise;
If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;
If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet up with triumph and disaster
and treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave up your life to broken,
And stoop and build ’em up with worn out tools;
If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the will which says to them, “Hold on”;
If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with kings—nor lose the common touch;
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you;
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run—
Yours is the earth and everything that’s in it,
and—which is more—you’ll be a man, my son!
—Rudyard Kipling
IGNORANCE
Teach your tongue to say, “I do not know.”
—A rabbi
To be ignorant of one’s ignorance is the malady of ignorance.
—A. A. Alcott
We don’t know one millionth of one percent of anything.
—Thomas Edison
Ignorance is an unhappy human condition in which all of us share much too richly.
IMAGINATION
Imagination is more important than knowledge.
—Albert Einstein
Imagination is more than knowledge. It is a preview of life’s coming attractions.
—Albert Einstein
IMITATION
Imitation is the tribute that mediocrity pays to genius.
Imitation is the sincerest flattery.
—C. C. Colton
IMMORTALITY
The late first lady Eleanor Roosevelt once wrote in her syndicated column, “Almost every person with whom I have ever talked in my world travels has believed in life after death.”
If there is no immortality, I shall hurl myself into the sea.
—Alfred Tennyson
The belief that death is the door to a better life is the oldest, strongest, and most insistent wish of mankind.
—Sigmund Freud
Albert Einstein scorned the idea of immortality. The New York Times of April 19, 1955, quotes him as saying, “Neither can I believe that the individual survives the death of his body, although feeble souls harbor such thoughts through fear or religious egotism.”
The manuscripts of radio sermons in Britain must be submitted to the Director of Religious Broadcasting before they are broadcast to the people.
The late director, Dr. Welch, in speaking at a conference on evangelism, stated that out of six thousand manuscripts he had read only one, as far as he could recall, which dealt with the hope of immortality.
IMPATIENCE
There are two cardinal sins from which all the others spring: one is impatience and the other is laziness.
—Franz Kafka
IMPRESSIONS
First impressions never have a second chance.
—Chuck Swindoll
INCARNATION
An eminent naturalist believed in a “Supreme Being” but found it impossible to believe that the God who had created the wonders of the universe could be known by man.
One day as he was walking in his garden, he came on an ant hill covered with a swarm of ants that seemed greatly agitated as his shadow fell on them. “If only these ants knew how kindly I feel towards them,” he thought, “they would not be disturbed at my presence.”
Following this line of thought, he found himself wondering if a man would ever communicate his thoughts to ants. “No,” he decided. “That is impossible. For a human to teach an ant what he is like, and to convey to them his thoughts, he would have to become an ant.” Then, like a flash of lightning came this thought—“That is it exactly; the God of this universe, infinitely high as He is above us in His being and in His thoughts, had to become a man to teach man to know Him, and to know His thoughts.”
If one were desiring to communicate with another person concerning business, and the recipient of the news did not understand the letter, nor even the telegram, then the best thing would be that the person sending the news would go to the other person. So it is with God. In order for us to understand God, it is necessary that He come down to our level and reveal Himself.