Nothing is more dangerous than an idea, when it's the only one we have.
The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.
An idea is a meteor.
There is something real in ideas, through which the true are distinguished from the false.
If you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange apples then you and I will still each have one apple. But if you have an idea and I have an idea and we exchange these ideas, then each of us will have two ideas.
The idea of the future, pregnant with an infinity of possibilities, is thus more fruitful than the future itself, and this is why we find more charm in hope than in possession, in dreams than in reality.
Do not have too artificial an idea of man but judge him naturally. Don't consider him too good or too bad.
For it must not be supposed that merely because the justness of an idea has been proved it can be productive of effective action even on cultivated minds. This fact may be quickly appreciated by noting how slight is the influence of the clearest demonstration on the majority of men.
Where does this idea come from? It is like a pair of glasses on our nose through which we see whatever we look at. It never occurs to us to take them off.
Geometry, is not concerned with the relation of the ideas involved in it to objects of experience, but only with the logical connection of these ideas among themselves.
Poetry is the universal art of the spirit which has become free in itself and which is not tied down for its realization to external sensuous material; instead, it launches out exclusively in the inner space and the inner time of ideas and feelings.
Perhaps a man really dies when his brain stops, when he loses the power to take in a new idea.
All men are interdependent. Every nation is an heir of a vast treasury of ideas and labor to which both the living and the dead of all nations have contributed.
A new idea comes suddenly and in a rather intuitive way. But intuition is nothing but the outcome of earlier intellectual experience.
When people speak of ideas that revolutionize society, they do but express the fact that within the old society, the elements of a new one have been created, and that the dissolution of the old ideas keeps even pace with the dissolution of the old conditions of existence.
Every idea I get I have to deny, that's my way of testing it.
Art repeats the eternal Ideas apprehended through pure contemplation, the essential and abiding element in all the phenomena of the world.
Ideas are cheap. It's only what you do with them that counts.
It is only afterward that a new idea seems reasonable. To begin with, it usually seems unreasonable.
Ideas, being only accessible to crowds after having assumed a very simple shape, must often undergo the most thoroughgoing transformations to become popular. It is especially when we are dealing with somewhat lofty philosophic or scientific ideas that we see how far-reaching are the modifications they require in order to lower them to the level of the intelligence of crowds.
Architecture has recorded the great ideas of the human race. Not only every religious symbol, but every human thought has its page in that vast book.
What moves those of genius, what inspires their work is not new ideas, but their obsession with the idea that what has already been said is still not enough.
Greater than the tread of mighty armies is an idea whose time has come.
