Life & Wisdom Quote by Thomas More

Originality is a seductive myth, and Thomas More punctures it with a line that sounds almost like a sigh from inside the Renaissance engine room. “An absolutely new idea” is phrased like a legal standard: absolute, unqualified, nearly impossible to prove. That’s the trick. More isn’t merely doubting human creativity; he’s redefining the terms of intellectual pride. The sentence doesn’t deny innovation so much as it demotes it, insisting that what we call genius is usually recombination, refinement, or rediscovery.

The subtext carries a quiet warning for an age newly obsessed with novelty. More lived at a moment when Europe was bingeing on “newness”: new trade routes, new religious arguments, new scientific methods, new print culture. But he also saw how quickly “new ideas” became political weapons. In the early tremors of the Reformation, novelty could read as heresy, and insistence on radical originality could be both a badge and a liability. Calling truly new ideas “rarest” reins in the ego and, more pointedly, encourages skepticism toward anyone selling a total break from the past.

There’s also a humanist humility embedded here. More’s world prized classical inheritance; wisdom was often a conversation with dead authorities. The line flatters tradition without turning reactionary: if ideas are seldom ex nihilo, then the moral question becomes what we do with our inheritances. More, author of Utopia, knew that even the boldest imagined society is stitched from familiar threads.