Idleness is an inlet to disorder, and makes way for licentiousness. People who have nothing to do are quickly tired of their own company.

In idleness there is a perpetual despair.

Too many people run out of ideas long before they run out of words.

"What made the deepest impression upon you?" inquired a friend one day of Lincoln, "when you stood in the presence of the Falls of Niagara, the greatest of natural wonders?" ---- "The thing that stuck me most forcibly when I saw the Falls," Lincoln responded with the characteristic deliberation, "was where in the world did all that water come from?"

Ideas are the factors that lift civilization. They create revolutions. There is more dynamite in an idea than in many bombs.

There is nothing in the world more powerful than an idea. No weapon can destroy it; no power can conquer it except the power of another idea.

A cold in the head cause less suffering than an idea.

It is useless to close the gates against ideas; they overlap them.

The thinker dies, but his thoughts are beyond the reach of destruction. Men are mortal, but ideas are immortal.

An idea, to be suggestive, must come to the individual with the force of revelation.