Life & Wisdom Quote by Mark Van Doren

Van Doren’s line turns the mind into a court: not a sterile workshop for “useful” thoughts, but a hospitable palace where even odd visitors get a seat at the table. The verb choice is the tell. You don’t “evaluate” ideas, you “entertain” them, and not politely - royally. That’s a poet’s jab at the modern impulse to audition every thought for productivity, correctness, or immediate payoff. He’s arguing that creativity isn’t born from gatekeeping; it’s born from generosity.

The subtext is a warning against intellectual impatience. Most ideas arrive badly dressed: half-formed, embarrassing, impractical, maybe even wrong. If you demand credentials at the door, you’ll filter out the very strangeness that later becomes breakthrough. Van Doren’s “one of them may be the king” is a deliberately old-fashioned flourish that smuggles in a probabilistic truth: you can’t predict which notion will rule your thinking until you’ve let it linger, argue, seduce, and evolve.

Context matters here. Van Doren lived through an American century obsessed with efficiency, expertise, and ideological sorting - from industrial Taylorism to Cold War conformity. His career in letters (and teaching) puts him in a long humanist tradition that treats attention as an ethical act: you owe the world, and your own inner life, a fair hearing.

It works because it flatters and chastens at once: you are sovereign enough to host ideas, but wise enough to admit you don’t know which guest will end up wearing the crown.