Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. Ideas Quotations

To think great thoughts you must be heroes as well as idealists.

Any new formula which suddenly emerges in our consciousness has its roots in long trains of thought; it is virtually old when it first makes its appearance among the recognized growths of our intellect.

The ideas of the classics, so far as living, are our commonplaces. It is the modern books that give us the latest and most profound conceptions. It seems to me rather a lazy makeshift to mumble over the familiar.

Every real thought on every real subject knocks the wind out of somebody or other.

The very minute a thought is threatened with publicity it seems to shrink towards mediocrity.

There was never an idea started that woke up men out of their stupid indifference but its originator was spoken of as a crank.

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

To an imagination of any scope the most far reaching form of power is not money, it is the command of ideas

A new and valid idea is worth more than a regiment and fewer men can furnish the former than command the latter.

The thing I want to do is put as many new ideas into the law as I can, to show how particular solutions involve general theory, and to do it with style. I should like to be admitted to be the greatest jurist in the world.

To be civilized is to be potentially master of all possible ideas, and that means that one has got beyond being shocked, although one preserves one's own moral aesthetic preferences.

The ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideas [and] the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market.

Many ideas grow better when transplanted into another mind than in the one where they sprung up.

The only condition of peace in this world is to have no ideas, or, at least not to express them.

Every idea is an incitement. It offers itself for belief, and if believed it is acted on unless some other belief outweighs it or some failure of energy stifles the movement at its birth. The only difference between the expression of an opinion and an incitement is the speaker's enthusiasm for the result.