Robert Henri Quotes

It is pleasant to be admitted into the birth-chamber of a great idea destined to be translated into action.

Nothing drives progress like the imagination. The idea precedes the deed. The only exceptions are accidents and natural selection.

True change takes place in the imagination.

Comes over one an absolute necessity to move. And what is more, to move in some particular direction. A double necessity then: to get on the move, and to know whither.

If you cry 'forward', you must without fail make plain in what direction to go.

The great thing about ideas is that every new idea leads to two more new ones. It’s the opposite of a gold rush, where the more people who show up in 1849 to get that gold in California, the faster the gold runs out. Ideas are not like that; ideas breed.

We have to imagine change before we can begin to move toward it.

Whatever you do in your daily life - driving from here to there, trying to reach someone on the phone, doing this or that - you always are going toward somewhere. That's inevitable.

I think it's better to have ideas.

If you're in the idea business, it doesn't matter where you're from. It matters if we care about the change you're making.

The idea is more important than the style you're playing in.

The ideas aren't that important. Really they aren't. Everyone's got an idea for a book, a movie, a story, a TV series.

I keep on having ideas and developments. Some happen and some don't, but I still always have a way of telling a story.

We were all delighted, we all realized we were leaving confusion and nonsense behind and performing our one and noble function of the time, move.

If you don't imagine, nothing ever happens at all.

....This world needs Utopias as it needs fairy stories. It does not matter so much where we are going, as long as we are making consciously for some definite goal. And a Utopia, however strange or fanciful, is the only possible beacon upon the uncharted seas of the distant future.

I always felt like I was on the move, that I was going towards something.

Everything, at first, is an idea, a special creation.

You don't make progress by standing on the sidelines, whimpering and complaining. You make progress by implementing ideas.

The task of the leader is to get his people from where they are to where they have not been.

I begin with an idea and then it becomes something else.

It's amazing how ideas start out, isn't it?

Let me just tell you how thrilling it really is, and how, what a challenge it is, because in 1988 the question is whether we're going forward to tomorrow or whether we're going to go past to the - to the back!

We are not doing celebrity, personality, abusive politics - we are doing ideas. This is about hope.

At the root of everything I do is a fascination with ideas - what ideas are for, what jobs they do.