All this marked them as vaguely liberal, although their ideas would never congeal into anything like a firm ideology; in this, too, they were American.
The commerce between India and Africa will be of ideas and services, not of the manufactured goods against raw materials after the fashion of the Western exploiters.
The ideas of ancient Greece helped inspire America's founding fathers as they reached for democracy. Our revolutionary ideas helped inspire Greeks as they sought their own freedom.
You and I and everything in the universe are that Absolute, not parts, but the whole. You are the whole of that Absolute, and so are all others, because the idea of part cannot come into it.
When you are secure in who you are, you set the trend for your own life, and do not look to others to tell you how to live.
When you know that every truth you seek is available within you,
you will not place someone else's idea of how you should live, above your own.
We're always thinking of eternity as an idea that cannot be understood, something immense. But why must it be? What if, instead of all this, you suddenly find just a little room there, something like a village bath-house, grimy, and spiders in every corner, and that's all eternity is. Sometimes, you know, I can't help feeling that that's what it is.
The idea of a world commonweal has to be established as the criterion of political institutions, and also as the criterion of general conduct in hundreds of millions of brains. It has to dominate education everywhere in the world. When that end is achieved, then the world state will be achieved.
Music, when combined with a pleasurable idea, is poetry; music, without the idea, is simply music; the idea, without the music, is prose, from its very definitiveness.