The idea that to make a man work you’ve got to hold gold in front of his eyes is a growth, not an axiom. We’ve done that for so long that we’ve forgotten there’s any other way.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Mankind is not a circle with a single center but an ellipse with two focal points of which facts are one and ideas the other.

Victor Hugo

An invasion of armies can be resisted, but not an idea whose time has come.

Victor Hugo

A person with a new idea is a crank until the idea succeeds.

Mark Twain

So far as hypotheses are concerned, let no one expect anything certain from astronomy, which cannot furnish it, lest he accept as the truth ideas conceived for another purpose, and depart from this study a greater fool than when he entered it.

Nicolaus Copernicus

Pure mathematics is in its way the poetry of logical ideas.

Albert Einstein

Our ideas must be as broad as Nature if they are to interpret Nature.

Arthur Conan Doyle

Acting is nothing more or less than playing. The idea is to humanize life.

George Eliot

Be less curious about people and more curious about ideas.

Marie Curie

Fear is death, fear is sin, fear is hell, fear is unrighteousness, and fear is wrong life. All the negative thoughts and ideas that are in the world have proceeded from this evil spirit of fear.

Swami Vivekananda

He was a wise man who originated the idea of God.

Euripides

The mind that opens to a new idea never returns to its original size.

Albert Einstein

One can resist the invasion of an army but one cannot resist the invasion of ideas.

Victor Hugo

When I am traveling in a carriage, or walking after a good meal, or during the night when I cannot sleep; it is on such occasions that ideas flow best and most abundantly.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

No other question has ever moved so profoundly the spirit of man; no other idea has so fruitfully stimulated his intellect; yet no other concept stands in greater need of clarification than that of the infinite.

David Hilbert

The difficulty lies not so much in developing new ideas as in escaping from old ones.

John Maynard Keynes

Some pacifists have carried the sound idea of the prime importance of security too far, to the point of declaring that any consideration of disarmament is superfluous and pointless as long as eternal peace has not been attained.

Ludwig Quidde

Ideas shape the course of history.

John Maynard Keynes

Ridicule is the only weapon which can be used against unintelligible propositions. Ideas must be distinct before reason can act upon them; and no man ever had a distinct idea of the trinity. It is the mere Abracadabra of the mountebanks calling themselves the priests of Jesus.

Thomas Jefferson

He can compress the most words into the smallest ideas of any man I ever met.

Abraham Lincoln

I have known a vast quantity of nonsense talked about bad men not looking you in the face. Don’t trust that conventional idea. Dishonesty will stare honesty out of countenance any day in the week, if there is anything to be got by it.

Charles Dickens

An idea, like a ghost, must be spoken to a little before it will explain itself.

Charles Dickens