Ideas

To invent, you need a good imagination and a pile of junk

If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.

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

You were made perfectly to be loved - and surely I have loved you, in the idea of you, my whole life long.

Books serve to show a man that those original thoughts of his aren’t very new after all.

Every now and then a man's mind is stretched by a new idea or sensation, and never shrinks back to its former dimensions

Communism is like prohibition, it's a good idea but it won't work.

To imagine is everything, to know is nothing at all

Everyone is a genius at least once a year. The real geniuses simply have their bright ideas closer together

True happiness comes from the joy of deeds well done, the zest of creating things new

All intelligent thoughts have already been thought; what is necessary is only to try to think them again

That deep emotional conviction of the presence of a superior reasoning power, which is revealed in the incomprehensible universe, forms my idea of God

If you want to succeed you should strike out on new paths, rather than travel the worn paths of accepted success

Men have as exaggerated an idea of their rights as women have of their wrongs

A healthful hunger for a great idea is the beauty and blessedness of life

When men are easy in their circumstances, they are naturally enemies to innovations

The hours of a wise man are lengthened by his ideas

Words, when well chosen, have so great a force in them that a description often gives us more lively ideas than the sight of things themselves

Everything that is new or uncommon raises a pleasure in the imagination, because it fills the soul with an agreeable surprise, gratifies its curiosity, and gives it an idea of which it was not before possessed