C.N. Douglas, comp. Forty Thousand Quotations: Prose and Poetical. 1917.
Ideas
The very coinage of your brain.
Our ideas are transformed sensations.
Every idea must have a visible enfolding.
Ideas in the head set hands about their several tasks.
An idea, like a ghost (according to the common notion of ghosts), must be spoken to a little before it will explain itself.
Ideas are pitiless.
It is not my periods that I polish, but my ideas.
The persistence of an all-absorbing idea is terrible.
A fixed idea ends in madness or heroism.
Words are daughters of earth, but ideas are sons of heaven.
Ideas are like beards: men do not have them until they grow up.
In these days we fight for ideas, and newspapers are our fortresses.
Our ideas, like pictures, are made up of lights and shadows.
We live in an age in which superfluous ideas abound and essential ideas are lacking.
Our land is not more the recipient of the men of all countries than of their ideas.
The material universe exists only in the mind.
If the ancients left us ideas, to our credit be it spoken that we moderns are building houses for them.
A sublime idea remains the same, from whatever brain or in whatever region it has its birth.
Ideas must work through the brains and the arms of good and brave men, or they are no better than dreams.
Ideas often flash across our minds more complete than we could make them after much labor.
Ideas once planted in the brain fructify, and bear their harvest more or less bountiful and rich as they are fertilized by thought.
To have ideas is to gather flowers. To think is to weave them into garlands.
Great ideas travel slowly, and for a time noiselessly, as the gods whose feet were shod with wool.
Our ideas, like orange-plants, spread out in proportion to the size of the box which imprisons the roots.
One should conquer the world, not to enthrone a man, but an idea; for ideas exist forever.
Time is but the measure of the difficulty of a conception. Pure thought has scarcely any need of time, since it perceives the two ends of an idea almost at the same moment.
To be fossilized is to be stagnant, unprogressive, dead, frozen into a solid. It is only liquid currents of thought that move men and the world.
Whatsoever the mind perceives of itself, or is the immediate object of perception, thought, or understanding, that I call an idea.
Events are only the shells of ideas; and often it is the fluent thought of ages that is crystallized in a moment by the stroke of a pen or the point of a bayonet.
Ideas go booming through the world louder than cannon. Thoughts are mightier than armies. Principles have achieved more victories than horsemen and chariots.
Ideas are, like matter, infinitely divisible. It is not given to us to get down, so to speak, to their final atoms, but to their molecular groupings the way is never ending, and the progress infinitely delightful and profitable.
Many ideas grow better when transplanted into another mind than in the one where they sprung up. That which was a weed in one intelligence becomes a flower in the other, and a flower again dwindles down to a mere weed by the same change.
By what strange law of mind is it that an idea long overlooked, and trodden underfoot as a useless stone, suddenly sparkles out in new light, as a discovered diamond?