"Thinker" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... replied Kincaide promptly. One of the best officers in the Service, Kincaide. Level-headed, and a straight thinker. He was a man for any emergency. I remember—but ...
— The God in the Box • Sewell Peaslee Wright
... I heard a living thinker of some eminence say that he considered Christianity to have been a misfortune. Intellectually, he said, it was absurd; and practically, it was an offence, over which he stumbled. It would have been far better for mankind, he thought, if ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... have lately pointed out that Buffon's original remark was le style c'est de l'homme. That only proves that, like many other good sayings, it has been polished and brought to perfection by the process of attrition in numerous minds, instead of being struck out at a blow by a solitary thinker. From a purely logical point of view, Buffon may be correct; but the very essence of an aphorism is that slight exaggeration which makes it more biting whilst less rigidly accurate. According to Buffon, the style might belong to ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... party opposing Calvin he called the Libertines—a word then meaning something like "free-thinker" and gradually getting {176} the bad moral connotation it has now, just as the word "miscreant" had formerly done. [Sidenote: January, 1547] One of these men, James Cruet, posted on the pulpit of St. Peter's church at Geneva a warning to Calvin, in no very civil terms, to leave the city. ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... inward Harmony; revealing this, by act or by word, through all his outward endeavours, be they high or low? Highest of all, when his outward and his inward endeavour are one; when we can name him Artist; not earthly Craftsman only, but inspired Thinker, who with heaven-made Implement conquers Heaven for us! If the poor and humble toil that we have Food, must not the high and glorious toil for him in return, that he have Light, have Guidance, Freedom, Immortality?—These two, in all their degrees, I honour: all else ...
— The Ontario Readers: Fourth Book • Various
... Luther. I cannot go into might-have-beens. We have to deal with facts. A conspiracy of silence is impossible about matters which have been vehemently discussed for centuries. We have to take sides; and we at least have agreed to take the side of the downright thinker, who will say nothing that he does not believe, and hide nothing that he does believe, and speak out his mind without reservation or economy and accommodation. Indeed, as things are, any other course seems to me to be impossible. I ...
— Social Rights and Duties, Volume I (of 2) - Addresses to Ethical Societies • Sir Leslie Stephen
... of affairs, this sudden stoppage of the wheels of industry, this unforeseen and wide spread of the conditions of war portend? Emerson has said: "When a great thinker comes into the world all things are at risk." There is potency in this, and also in a variation of Emerson's text which we shall venture to make: "When a great war comes upon the world all things are at risk." Everything which we have looked upon as fixed and stable quakes as if ...
— A History of The Nations and Empires Involved and a Study - of the Events Culminating in The Great Conflict • Logan Marshall
... shape to the life and thought of man, Agriculture and Architecture. Of the two, it would be hard to know which has been the more intimately interwoven with the inner life of humanity; for man is not only a planter and a builder, but a mystic and a thinker. For such a being, especially in primitive times, any work was something more than itself; it was a truth found out. In becoming useful it attained some form, enshrining at once a thought and a mystery. Our present study has ...
— The Builders - A Story and Study of Masonry • Joseph Fort Newton
... regard to women, the charge that she keep silent, that she obey, that she be meek and lowly—all grew out of the fear of the power she exercised at the period these teachings were given—a power which the saints believed prejudicial to good order and good morals. There is more than one profound thinker of our own period who has arraigned her influence—Strindberg and Nietzsche among them. You cannot turn a page of history that the woman is not on it or behind it. She is the most subtle and binding thread in the pattern ...
— The Business of Being a Woman • Ida M. Tarbell
... again silent, and there was a deeper air of reflection on his face than almost seemed natural to it, for he looked more of a soldier than a thinker. ...
— Sunrise • William Black
... Goethe's own statement, during the years 1773-4—the distracted period, that is to say, which followed his experiences at Wetzlar, and of which Werther and Clavigo are the characteristic products—he came under the influence of a thinker who transformed his conceptions, equally of the conduct of life and of man's relations to the universe—the Jewish thinker, Benedict Spinoza. The passage in which he expresses his debt to Spinoza is one of the best known in all his writings, and is, moreover, ...
— The Youth of Goethe • Peter Hume Brown
... o' neevarious. It were like the end o' a wooden leg with an iron ring at the bottom an' consid'able weight on it. An Injun wouldn't have a wooden leg, least ways not one with an iron ring at the butt. My ol' thinker had been chawin' that cud all day an' o' a sudden it come to me that a white man were runnin' the hull crew. That's how I had gained ground with the red scout I took him out in the aidge o' the bush ...
— In the Days of Poor Richard • Irving Bacheller
... any means for the first time—felt regret that Canon Wrottesley's influence upon his wife had not made her a more orthodox thinker. A woman who criticized the Prayer Book was surely not fitted to be the wife of a clergyman. Miss Abingdon liked to lean on a spiritual guide, and she thought that this was the graceful and ...
— Peter and Jane - or The Missing Heir • S. (Sarah) Macnaughtan
... which is most excellent,... and the mind perceives itself by participating of its own object of perception; but it is a sort of coalescence of both that, in the Divine Mind, creates a regular identity between the two, so that with God both (the thinker and the thought, the subject and object) are the same. In possession of this prerogative, He subsists in the exercise of energy; and the contemplation of his own perfections is what, to God, must be most agreeable and ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... Meanwhile they were content to linger in that wide field of speculation which the development of the physical sciences had recently opened to philosophic thought. As, at the Revival of Learning, the thinker imprisoned in mediaeval dialectics suddenly felt under his feet the firm ground of classic argument, so, in the eighteenth century, philosophy, long suspended in the void of metaphysic, touched earth again and, Antaeus-like, drew fresh life from the contact. It was clear that ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... His loose-limbed ease of bearing in his shabby clothes, his rugged head, and pile of reddish hair, above a thinker's brow, made him an impressive figure in the half light—gave him a kind ...
— Helena • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... I am even—permit me to say—a thinker, though to be sure, this name nowadays seems to be the monopoly of hawkers of revolutionary wares, the slaves of some French or German thought—devil knows what foreign notions. But I am not an intellectual mongrel. I think like a Russian. I think faithfully—and I take the liberty ...
— Under Western Eyes • Joseph Conrad
... titles to distinction are as a vigorous writer and a liberal thinker; she did not qualify herself for a place among great female travellers until unhappy events exiled ...
— Celebrated Women Travellers of the Nineteenth Century • W. H. Davenport Adams
... all Space," continued the little soliloquizing Creature, "and what It fills, It is. What It thinks, that It utters; and what It utters, that It hears; and It itself is Thinker, Utterer, Hearer, Thought, Word, Audition; it is the One, and yet the All in All. Ah, the happiness ah, ...
— Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions (Illustrated) • Edwin A. Abbott
... sets of Lives, four volumes, to some other friends, to Lord Hailes first. His second volume lies by my bed-side; a book surely of great labour, and to every just thinker of great delight. Write me word to whom I shall send besides[1123]; would it please Lord Auchinleck? Mrs. Thrale waits ...
— The Life Of Johnson, Volume 3 of 6 • Boswell
... opinions of well-known writers, bring into prominence certain facts which cannot fail to be interesting. From the number of tribes and nationalities by which the country has at various times been overrun, it is impossible for an unprejudiced thinker to come to any other conclusion than that, like ourselves, the Roumanians are a mixed race, although the Latin undoubtedly predominates; and to the evidence of history may be added that of the language and customs of the country. The language not only presents a variety ...
— Roumania Past and Present • James Samuelson
... Socrates, who found in the "extravagant love of liberty" the preface to tyranny. And they would not have been frightened even if they had been familiar with his doctrine of democracy. They little dreamed that they were exemplifying the doctrines of a French philosopher or refuting those of a Greek thinker. ...
— The French in the Heart of America • John Finley
... simply because they towered head and shoulders above their contemporaries. These are Cotton Mather and Jonathan Edwards; the one the most busy man of his age in politics, religion, education and all philanthropic endeavor; the other a profound thinker, who was in the world but not of it, and who devoted the great powers of his mind to such problems as the freedom of the human will and the origin of the religious ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... a stamp-collector, an engager of lady-helps instead of servants, an amateur reciter and skirt dancer, an owner of a lock of Paderewski's hair—torn fresh from the head personally at a concert—an admirer of George Bernard Shaw as a thinker but a hater of him as a humourist, a rationalist and reader of Punch, an atheist and table-turner, a friend of all who think that women don't desire to be slaves, a homoeopathist and Sandowite, an enemy of babies—as ...
— The Prophet of Berkeley Square • Robert Hichens
... He was always in the sanctum sanctorum of his spirit, striving to attain the truth; with Hamlet-like irresolution he poised in mind before the antinomies of the universe, alert to see around a subject, having the modern thinker's inability to be partisan. This way of thought is obviously unhealthy, or at least has in it something of the morbid. It implies the undue introspection which is well-nigh the disease of this century. There is in it the failure to lose one's life in objective incident ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... to his talk" — I quote again from Mr. Somerset — "he was a spendthrift. I mean that he never saved anything up as those writer fellows so often do. He was quite inconsequent and just rippled on, but was always ready to attack a careless thinker. On the other hand, he was extremely tolerant of fools, even bad poets who are the worst kind of fools — or rather the hardest to bear — but ...
— The Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke • Rupert Brooke
... the smaller part of what he actually wrote. He was always writing, and always leaving deposits of his manuscripts in the various lodgings where it was his habit to bestow himself. The greater part of De Quincey's writing was of a kind almost as easily written by so full a reader and so logical a thinker as an ordinary newspaper article by an ordinary man; and except when he was sleeping, wandering about, or reading, he was always writing. It is, of course, true that he spent a great deal of time, especially in his last years of ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... railway, or the mine, not as a feudal castle belonging to a lord, but as an institution of public utility which the public has the right to control. The idea of possession in common has not been worked out from the slow deductions of some thinker buried in his private study, it is a thought which is germinating in the brains of the working masses, and when the revolution, which the close of this century has in store for us, shall have hurled confusion ...
— The Place of Anarchism in Socialistic Evolution - An Address Delivered in Paris • Pierre Kropotkin
... not to be classed with the Scholastics; he never subordinated his philosophy to theology; but approached the problems of existence from a high, sane, and Theosophic standpoint: an independent and illuminated thinker. He taught at the court of Charles the Bald of France; and was invited to Oxford by Alfred in 877, and died abbot of Malmesbury five years later,—having in his time propounded many tough nuts of propositions for churchmen to crack and digest if they could. As, that authority should ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... she was in a position to wave a wand and make things happen on any big scale. The financing of a theatrical production had always been to her something mysterious and out of the reach of ordinary persons like herself. Fillmore, that spacious thinker, had brought it into the sphere ...
— The Adventures of Sally • P. G. Wodehouse
... light Repeats one mystery till conjecture ends; The stream of time, known by birth-bursting bubbles; The gulf of silence, empty even of nought; Thought's high-walled maze, which the outed owner troubles Because the string's lost and the plan forgot: When I think on this and that here I stand, The thinker of these thoughts, emptily wise, Holding up to my thinking my thing-hand And looking at it with thought-alien eyes, The prayer of my wonder looketh past The universal darkness ...
— 35 Sonnets • Fernando Pessoa
... been feeling for this wreck of a once fine thinker nothing but a gentle pity. These words jarred the Wooster ...
— Right Ho, Jeeves • P. G. Wodehouse
... greatest scientists that the world has known have concentrated attention to the smallest conceivable part of this world, pieces so small that the microscope alone revealed them to the eye. There is a chance for the thinker in most any of these places that have grown out of this process of finest subdivision of work. The hardship comes only when the mind cannot get interested in the work. In many cases this is undoubtedly due to a misfit, but in most cases it seems to be due to a false ...
— Industrial Progress and Human Economics • James Hartness
... the influence is from the very start of that high sort in which he that takes becomes co-thinker with him that gives, Shakspere's absorption of Montaigne being as vital as Montaigne's own assimilation of the thought of his classics. The process is one not of surface reflection, but of kindling by contact; and we seem to see even the vibration ...
— Montaigne and Shakspere • John M. Robertson
... do, but the rationalizing is secondhand ornament to blind impulse; it is an attempt to persuade ourselves that our actions spring out of the experience which we lack. There is among us an incessant activity both of thought and of art; but much of it is entirely wilful. The thinker makes theories to justify what is done; he, too, sees all life in terms of action, he is the parasite of action. For a German professor the whole process of history was but a prelude to the wilfulness of Germany; he could not experience the past except in terms of what Germany willed to ...
— Essays on Art • A. Clutton-Brock
... and recalls to his mind the strange notions and false opinions that swayed his actions at that time, that he may wonder at them; so should society, for its edification, look back to the opinions which governed the ages fled. He is but a superficial thinker who would despise and refuse to hear of them merely because they are absurd. No man is so wise but that he may learn some wisdom from his past errors, either of thought or action; and no society has made such advances as to be capable ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... first time in several years he saw much of his brother Brooks in Quincy, and was surprised to find him absorbed in the same perplexities. Brooks was then a man of forty-five years old; a strong writer and a vigorous thinker who irritated too many Boston conventions ever to suit the atmosphere; but the two brothers could talk to each other without atmosphere and were used to audiences of one. Brooks had discovered or developed a law of history that ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... the channels for knowledge of that sort to be poured out amongst them. There is one line of work you might well take up, and the country Lodges might do the same, winning down from London now and again some thinker who would come and give the benefit of his study; and if you were known all over England as the places where such knowledge might be gained, and the bringers of such within the reach of your fellow-townsmen, the Society would profit by your labor as well as those who immediately benefit ...
— London Lectures of 1907 • Annie Besant
... more. On the lofty heights, the pure light of mind could be seen flickering. A magnificent, useful, and charming spectacle. For a space of fifteen years, those great principles which are so old for the thinker, so new for the statesman, could be seen at work in perfect peace, on the public square; equality before the law, liberty of conscience, liberty of speech, liberty of the press, the accessibility of all aptitudes to all functions. Thus it proceeded until 1830. The Bourbons were ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... favorite of "the general reader." For the most part, the general reader of the present day does not exactly know what distance he goes; he only knows that he does not go "too far." Of any remarkable thinker, whose writings have excited controversy, he likes to have it said that "his errors are to be deplored," leaving it not too certain what those errors are; he is fond of what may be called disembodied opinions, that ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... not break this shell of doctrine, and find the vital truths which it contains. And if it be said, "Who made you a judge or a divider on these subjects?" we reply, that only by contributions from all quarters can a final judgment be reached. Meantime, it is the right and duty of every serious thinker to add his own opinion to the common stock; willing to be refuted when wrong,—glad, if right, to be helpful in any degree towards the ...
— Orthodoxy: Its Truths And Errors • James Freeman Clarke
... singular opacity. Emotionally, the Japanese child appears incomparably closer to us than the Japanese mathematician, the peasant than the statesman. Between the most elevated class of thoroughly modernised Japanese and the Western thinker anything akin to intellectual sympathy is non-existent: it is replaced on the native side by a cold and faultless politeness. Those influences which in other lands appear most potent to develop the higher emotions seem here ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan • Lafcadio Hearn
... gross sophisms, its absolute emptiness. This deep-seated and complex evil, this enervation of the Christian spirit, this anaemia (cette anemie) of so many among us, are an object of sorrowful anxiety (preoccupation) for the Catholic thinker" (pp. x, xxv). ...
— To My Younger Brethren - Chapters on Pastoral Life and Work • Handley C. G. Moule
... MacLeod was a thinker—aware of the movements of his own heart, and able to reflect on others the movements of their hearts; hence, although in the main he treated the weariness and oppression from which Jesus offered to set them free, ...
— Malcolm • George MacDonald
... short train journey back to Lacville they hardly spoke. Each thought that the other was doing a strange and unreasonable thing—a thing which the thinker could have done much ...
— The Chink in the Armour • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... some very wise man and if there ever was a phrase that rang with truth this does. It means that the thought of success, the courage that comes with success, leads to more and more success. It means that the thinker of these thoughts is living in a clean, wholesome atmosphere along with those who are determined and in earnest. It means that they have caught the fervor of true life ... a healthy, contagious fervor which permeates the blood swiftly once it gets ...
— Laugh and Live • Douglas Fairbanks
... a study for deep contemplation. A study to perplex the ordinary thinker, and task to the utmost the analysis of more profound reflection. William Gawtrey had possessed no common talents; he had discovered that his life had been one mistake; Lord Lilburne's intellect was far keener than Gawtrey's, and he had never made, and if ...
— Night and Morning, Volume 4 • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... he stood upon that scaffold! Dempsey, on the other hand, was sullen and sombre; when they spoke together he seemed embarrassed and kept his face averted. As the hands were bandaged and gloves put on, he sat with lowered head, his dark poll brooding over his fists, not unlike Rodin's Thinker. Carpentier, at the opposite corner, was apparently at ease; sat smilingly in his gray and black gown, watching ...
— Plum Pudding - Of Divers Ingredients, Discreetly Blended & Seasoned • Christopher Morley
... heart; she did not dare to question God's will, to ask why He had not spared, pitied, saved, why He had punished her beyond her guilt, if she were guilty. Each of us is guilty by the fact that he lives; and there is no one so great a thinker, so great a benefactor of mankind that he might hope to have a right to live for the service he has done.... Still Elena could not ...
— On the Eve • Ivan Turgenev
... quick thinker, and a man of more even disposition and affable demeanor than Mr. Fulton. So Mr. Maynard, with a nod at his friend, jumped up on a chair and began to address the crowd, as if he were ...
— Marjorie's Busy Days • Carolyn Wells
... Daniel were really very nice people. "A little countrified, of course. You must expect that. But they are very kind hearted and immensely wealthy—oh, immensely." She was kind enough to add that Serena was quite an exceptional person and an advanced thinker, considering her opportunities. "The club people were going to take them up, and so I felt that we should get in first," she explained. "If they should prove to be impossible we can drop them at ...
— Cap'n Dan's Daughter • Joseph C. Lincoln
... be the German emperor was to be the greatest man in Europe, after the Pope. But to Schlegel the middle ages were something more. The glory of Germany to the patriot, they were the glory of Europe to the thinker. Modern wits have laughed at the enthusiasm of the Crusades. Did they weep over the perfidy of the partition of Poland? Do they really trust themselves to persuade a generous mind that the principle ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 54, No. 335, September 1843 • Various
... our aged bachelor and that old maiden-lady yonder, who now wander along so young, smile so young, and speak so youthfully to each other, not be a married couple before the cuckoo sings again next year? See—that is what I should like to know! and the smile played around the thinker's mouth, but she did not speak her thoughts. The straws were separated—consequently the bachelor and the old maid also. "It may, however, happen nevertheless," she certainly thought: it was apparent in the smile; ...
— Pictures of Sweden • Hans Christian Andersen
... smoking poker on the floor, and turned the damper in the pipe as he answered: "That's what I can't seem to make out. You know old Emerson says a man doesn't amount to much as a thinker until he has doubted the existence of matter. And I just got to thinking about it, and wondering if this was a real world after all—or just my idea of one." The two men smiled at the notion, and Ward went on: "All right, laugh if you want to, but if this is a real ...
— A Certain Rich Man • William Allen White
... abundance of just classification and subtle analysis, abundance of wit and eloquence, abundance of verses and even of good ones; but little poetry. Men will judge and compare, but they will not create." It is a fashion nowadays to make little of Macaulay as a thinker, to damn him with faint praise as a brilliant rhetorician. It is not to join unreservedly in that censure, if we remark that Macaulay pronounced his dictum on poetry when he was very young. But, young or not, he utterly misses a sound view of the nature and scope of poetry. He asserts ...
— Platform Monologues • T. G. Tucker
... course of this conversation, lieutenant Lismahago dropt some hints by which it appeared he himself was a free-thinker. Our aunt seemed to be startled at certain sarcasms he threw out against the creed of saint Athanasius — He dwelt much upon the words, reason, philosophy, and contradiction in terms — he bid defiance to the eternity of hell-fire; and even threw ...
— The Expedition of Humphry Clinker • Tobias Smollett
... said elsewhere(260) after Ricardo (the thinker who has done most toward clearing up this subject),(261) "it is not a difference in the absolute cost of production which determines the interchange, but a difference in the comparative cost. It may be to our ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • John Stuart Mill
... for its own sake: one to whom woman was, indeed, the most important thing in the world, but to whom nothing in the world was indifferent. The bust which gives us the most lively notion of him shows us a great, vivid, intellectual face, full of fiery energy and calm resource, the face of a thinker and a fighter in one. A scholar, an adventurer, perhaps a Cabalist, a busy stirrer in politics, a gamester, one 'born for the fairer sex,' as he tells us, and born also to be a vagabond; this man, who is remembered ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... original thinker, Comte was like the rest in considering himself the High Priest of his own religion. He sought to make converts, and wrote to many of the reigning sovereigns, including the Tsar; and he even suggested an alliance, for the good of ...
— Modern Saints and Seers • Jean Finot
... close to my heart. As a scholar and a thinker, I feel that I should give the fruits of my leisure to the world. Er—in fact, Peter, that is why I sent for you to come ...
— Birthright - A Novel • T.S. Stribling
... seemings,—Cardinal Felix Bonpre, known favourably, and sometimes alluded to jestingly at the Vatican, as "Our good Saint Felix." Tall and severely thin, with fine worn features of ascetic and spiritual delicacy, he had the indefinably removed air of a scholar and thinker, whose life was not, and never could be in accordance with the latter-day customs of the world; the mild blue eyes, clear and steadfast, most eloquently suggested "the peace of God that passeth all understanding";—and the sensitive intellectual lines of the ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... reputation for sobriety of judgement by resolutely refusing to have definite views on any subject; so safe a man was he considered, that while still quite young he had been appointed to the lucrative post of Thinker in Ordinary to the Royal Family. There was Mr. Principal Crank, with his sister Mrs. Quack; Professors Gabb and Bawl, with their wives and two ...
— Erewhon Revisited • Samuel Butler
... silent but intense pride of family of the nobler sort. He followed with disquiet and distrust the quick motions and conclusions of Hallin's intellect. Temperament and the Cambridge discipline made him a fastidious thinker and a fine scholar; his mind worked slowly, yet with a delicate precision; and his generally cold manner was the natural protection of feelings which had never yet, except in the case of his friendship with Edward Hallin, led him ...
— Marcella • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... Mystic, I would briefly endeavor to define, as aiming at the illustration of fact on the highest imaginative principles. It takes a scene, for instance, from history, and represents that scene as exactly and naturally as possible. And here the ordinary thinker might be apt to say, Art Mystic has done enough." ("So it has," muttered Mr. Hemlock.) "On the contrary, Art Mystic has only begun. Besides the representation of the scene itself, the spirit of the age"—("Ah! quite right," said Lady Brambledown; "yes, yes, the spirit of the age.")—"the ...
— Hide and Seek • Wilkie Collins
... his credit. The man is spiritually warped who is incapable of a deep and abiding friendship with one of his own sex; and to go a step farther, that man is utterly to be distrusted whose only friends are among women. We may not be prepared to accept the radical position of a certain young thinker, who proclaims, in season, but defiantly, that 'men are the idealists, after all;' yet it is easy to comprehend how one may take this point of view. The friendships of men are a vastly more interesting and poetic ...
— The Bibliotaph - and Other People • Leon H. Vincent
... And when they do yield to the force of evidence and accept extraordinary new discoveries, they either do it in a blundering and perverted manner, or they try to appropriate it as their own and continue to rob the pioneer thinker. ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, November 1887 - Volume 1, Number 10 • Various
... a great thinker (Degerando, "Du Perfectionment Moral," chapter ix., "On the Difficulties we encounter in Self-Study")—"if one concentrates reflection too much on one's self, one ends by no longer seeing anything, or seeing only what one wishes. By the very act, as ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... passage in Lucretius at the end of his fifth book on the Nature of Things is so true and brilliant and anticipates so many points in later thought that it is worth quoting at some length, and the poet's close relation with Cicero, the typical Greco-Roman thinker, gives his ideas the more weight as ...
— Progress and History • Various
... events, so devotedly and so proudly the Englishman, that with such associates as he gathered about him at his own fireside, I don't see how the little blind girl, whose face was ever turned up towards the unseen speaker, and whose mind opened to every passing remark, could avoid becoming a thinker, a reasoner, a tory, and a patriot. Sometimes a tough disputant crossed our threshold; one of these was Dr. Parr, and brilliant were the flashes resulting from such occasional collision with antagonists of that calibre. I am often charged ...
— Personal Recollections • Charlotte Elizabeth
... common sense of mankind. One late writer defines it thus: "LANGUAGE is any means by which one person communicates his ideas to another."—Sanders's Spelling-Book, p. 7. The following is the explanation of an other slack thinker: "One may, by speaking or by writing, (and sometimes by motions,) communicate his thoughts to others. The process by which this is done, is called LANGUAGE.—Language is the expression of thought ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... to lend a man of that build a little money than to hire him. As a matter of fact, I have never known a fellow who was smart enough to think for the house days and for himself nights. A man who tries that is usually a pretty poor thinker, and he isn't much good to either; but if there's any choice the house gets the worst ...
— Letters from a Self-Made Merchant to His Son • George Horace Lorimer
... birth to the people, to the literary world by talent, to the aristocracy by rank, the three elements of the Revolution mingled or contended in her. Her genius was like the antique chorus, in which all the great voices of the drama unite in one tumultuous concord. A deep thinker by inspiration, a tribune by eloquence, a woman in attraction, her beauty, unseen by the million, required intellect to be admired, and admiration to be felt. Hers was not the beauty of form and ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine
... the canon's western ridge, There stands a girl! She beholds the bridge Smitten and broken; she sees the need For a warning swift, and a daring deed. See then the act of a simple girl; Learn from it, thinker, and priest, and churl. See her, the lantern between her teeth, Crossing the quivering trap of death. Hand over hand on a swaying rail, Sharp in her ears and her heart the wail Of a hundred lives; and she has no fear Save that her prayer be not granted her. Cold is the ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... pronounced, especially on Croesus, distressed him visibly, but the sadness soon vanished from his quickly-changing features, and gave place to thought; this in its turn was quickly followed by a joyful look, which could only betoken that the thinker had arrived at a satisfactory result. His dignified gravity vanished in a moment; he laughed aloud, struck his forehead merrily, seized the hand of the astonished captain, ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... at least the credit of making it a thing of national interest, and of freeing it from a false philosophy. To find out by incessant and unwearying search what the world really was, and not to make known facts fit in with the ideas of some thinker on what the world ought to be, this we found to be the main difference between Cosmas or even Ptolemy and any true leader of discovery. For a real advance of knowledge, fancy must follow experiment, and no merely hypothetical system or Universe as ...
— Prince Henry the Navigator, the Hero of Portugal and of Modern Discovery, 1394-1460 A.D. • C. Raymond Beazley
... this country sea thoughts followed the thinker far inland; whereas in most other parts of the island, at five miles from the ocean, he has all but forgotten the existence of such an element as salt water. The great Greenland trade of the coasting towns was the main and primary cause of this, no ...
— Sylvia's Lovers, Vol. I • Elizabeth Gaskell
... plaints might have proved more effectual. It is a cry of avarice, of jealousy, and very often of extreme laziness as well. Every socialistic theory that we have yet heard of is self-damning. Each real thinker, whether he be Croesus or pauper, comprehends that to empower the executive with greater responsibility than it already possesses would mean to tempt national ruin, and that until mankind has become ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 20, July, 1891 • Various
... place, I was trained for the work by a medical man—my friend Mr. James Hinton—first in his own branch of the London profession, and a most original thinker. To him the degradation of women, which most men accept with such blank indifference, was a source of unspeakable distress. He used to wander about the Haymarket and Piccadilly in London at night, and break his heart over the sights he saw and the tales he heard. The words ...
— The Power of Womanhood, or Mothers and Sons - A Book For Parents, And Those In Loco Parentis • Ellice Hopkins
... with their characteristics and their needs, and fits his ministrations to them. Especially does he carry comfort to the sick and soothe the suffering and the dying. No other can quite fill his place; no other so builds himself into the hearts of the people. He may not be a great thinker or preach polished sermons; his hands may be rough and his clothes ill-fitting; but if he is a loyal friend and ministers to real spiritual need, he is saint and prophet to those ...
— Society - Its Origin and Development • Henry Kalloch Rowe
... Socrates failed. They went home to drink wine and feast, while Socrates went to the jail to drink a cup of poison. But who succeeded? The judges whose names are written low down and bespattered with dirt—or Socrates, whose name fills the sky and who has become the thinker for ...
— The Blot on the Kaiser's 'Scutcheon • Newell Dwight Hillis
... feature of American society upon which I think no foreigner has remarked, or if he have, it has been so cursorily as plainly to show that he was far from appreciating its importance: I mean the fact that here the thinker is also the worker. In England and the European States, the working class is distinct from the consumers, and there must be almost as great a contrast in the intellectual as in the physical condition of the two. All the refinement, the cultivation, ...
— Evenings at Donaldson Manor - Or, The Christmas Guest • Maria J. McIntosh
... indomitable courage. His conscientiousness was almost morbid. His temperament was melancholy, and his life was lonely. In early life he was twice in love, but poverty forbade his marriage. He was a clear and logical thinker, much given to refined exposition of constitutional theories, but deficient in large culture and philosophy. He held the doctrine of State sovereignty, but from first to last he opposed secession as against ...
— The Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement • George S. Merriam
... berry; if anything, his cold grey eyes were harder and more penetrating than in the days when they looked out from a whiter countenance. He was a strong, dominant figure despite, the estate to which he had fallen,—a silent, sinister figure that might well have been described as "The Thinker." ...
— West Wind Drift • George Barr McCutcheon
... lady who said she was a free thinker and wasn't ashamed of it; guessed she knew as much as the minister 'bout this world or the next; liked nothing better than to set down Sunday afternoons after she'd fed her hens and read Ingersoll. "What books of his have ...
— Adopting An Abandoned Farm • Kate Sanborn
... Park, two stand out with special prominence, by reason of their unusual mental qualities. They differed widely from each other. One was a born actor and imitator, who loved human partnership in his daily affairs. The other was an original thinker and reasoner, with a genius for invention, and at all times impatient of training and restraint. The first was named Rajah, the latter was ...
— The Minds and Manners of Wild Animals • William T. Hornaday
... well discriminate between the genuine servant of Christ and the mere sounding professor, while at the same time scientific studies had rather tended to make him undervalue clear dogmatic teaching as set forth in the revealed Word of God. Yet he was too profound a thinker to adopt that popular scepticism which is either the refuge of those who, consciously or unconsciously, use it as a screen, though it proves but a semi-transparent one at the best, to shut out the light ...
— True to his Colours - The Life that Wears Best • Theodore P. Wilson
... "Good Emperors," Marcus Aurelius, was a thinker and a student, but he enjoyed little opportunity for meditation. His reign was filled with an almost uninterrupted series of campaigns against the Parthians on the Euphrates and the Germans on the Danube and the Rhine. These wars revealed the weakness of the frontiers and rapidly growing strength ...
— EARLY EUROPEAN HISTORY • HUTTON WEBSTER
... lectures at which I myself being in a state of exaltation, called forth in my audience, especially in my nervous lady visitors, a mood of intense agitation, which turned into hysterical laughter and tears. Of course I am not a prophet; I am merely a modest thinker, but no one would succeed in convincing my lady admirers that there is no prophetic meaning and ...
— The Crushed Flower and Other Stories • Leonid Andreyev
... the day has been darkened for the Bahai Brotherhood all over the world. Words fail me for the adequate expression of my sorrow at the adjournment of the hope of Peace. Yet the idea has been expressed, and cannot return to the Thinker void of results. The estrangement of races and religions is only the fruit of ignorance, and their reconciliation is only a question of ...
— The Reconciliation of Races and Religions • Thomas Kelly Cheyne
... called a philosophy of the motive for crime; it may be a pseudo philosophy—at least it is an entertaining one—which cannot be said about all serious attempts at moulding the universe into a tiresome system, that is uprooted generally by the next thinker. The book opens with a very strong gale that ends with the arrival at a boarding house of a man who can stand on his head and has the name of Innocent Smith. He is somewhat like the person in the 'Passing of the Third Floor Back,' in that he revolutionizes the household, who cannot ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... who thought more of the virtue of cleanliness. On this subject my aunt was a deep and tireless thinker. She kept a watchful eye upon us. In her view men-folks were like floors, furniture and dishes. They were in the nature of a responsibility—a tax upon women as it were. Every day she reminded me of the duty of keeping my body clean. Its members had often suffered the tyranny of ...
— The Light in the Clearing • Irving Bacheller
... have little more to say, except, that what is generally the experience of your countrymen will probably be yours in Merleville. You have some disappointing discoveries to make among us, you who are an earnest man and a thinker." ...
— Janet's Love and Service • Margaret M Robertson
... at least of its more important sides, and the thought of men before the Restoration there is a great gulf fixed. A political thinker in the present day would find it equally hard to discuss any point of statesmanship with Lord Burleigh or with Oliver Cromwell. He would find no point of contact between their ideas of national life or national welfare, their conception of government or the ends of government, ...
— History of the English People, Volume VI (of 8) - Puritan England, 1642-1660; The Revolution, 1660-1683 • John Richard Green
... (1877), Political Institutions (1882), and Man versus the State (1884). His works have been translated into most European languages—some of them into Chinese and Japanese. The most characteristic qualities of S. as a thinker are his powers of generalisation and analysis. He left an autobiography, in which he subjects his own personality to analysis ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin
... direction of theologians, and placed upon the Roman Index. Although he gave new and striking arguments to prove the existence of God, and humbled himself before the Jesuits, he was condemned by Catholics and Protestants alike. Since Roger Bacon, perhaps, no great thinker had been so completely abased and ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... the old Greek Professor was said to call it) was announced to be brought on the stage with the whole force of the Faculty, read by our Frederick, (no such person, of course,) than say the best things I might by any chance find myself capable of saying. Of course, if I come across a real thinker, a suggestive, acute, illuminating, informing talker, I enjoy the luxury of sitting still for a ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 15, January, 1859 • Various
... health. The others followed her example, and Comus drained his glass with a brief "thank you all very much." The sense of constraint which hung over the company was not, however, marked by any uncomfortable pause in the conversation. Henry Greech was a fluent thinker, of the kind that prefer to do their thinking aloud; the silence that descended on him as a mantle in the House of Commons was an official livery of which he divested himself as thoroughly as possible in private life. He did not propose to ...
— The Unbearable Bassington • Saki
... passing through the thoroughfare of life, where the mystic language of his books was necessarily mixed up with the babble of the multitude, so that both one and the other were apt to lose any sense that might have been properly their own. He considered himself a thinker, and was certainly of a thoughtful turn, but, with his own path to discover, had perhaps hardly yet reached the point where an educated man begins to think. The true value of his character lay in that deep consciousness of inward strength, which made all his past ...
— The House of the Seven Gables • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... theoretical, transcendental stuff, stuff that at its best is pure hypothesis, and at its worst an outrage on the sane intelligence of his readers, stuff, mind you, utterly lacking in simplicity, sensuousness and passion, that writer may be a thinker, a mystic, a metaphysician of unspeakable profundity, but he is not a poet. He stands condemned in the interests ...
— The Creators - A Comedy • May Sinclair
... about it from that angle at all, Mart.... You're still the ground-and-lofty thinker of the outfit, ain't you? Now that you mention it, though, we may find that the Last of the Mohicans ain't entirely toothless, at that. But say, Mart, how come I'm as wild and cock-eyed as I ever was? Rovol's a slow and thoughtful old codger, and with his accumulation ...
— Skylark Three • Edward Elmer Smith
... attracted to Concord by the great original thinker who was Hawthorne's near neighbour, the romancer speaks with less delicate sympathy: "Never was a poor little country village infested with such a variety of queer, strangely dressed, oddly behaved mortals, most of whom look upon themselves ...
— The Romance of Old New England Rooftrees • Mary Caroline Crawford
... O.M. Yes. As a thinker and planner the ant is the equal of any savage race of men; as a self-educated specialist in several arts she is the superior of any savage race of men; and in one or two high mental qualities she is above the reach of any man, savage ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... it is, waking up in the morning always the same person. I wish I were unflinching and emphatic, and had big, bushy eyebrows and a Message for the Age. I wish I were a deep Thinker, or a great Ventriloquist. ...
— Trivia • Logan Pearsall Smith
... treatise which will confirm the highest expectations of those who have expected much from this alert observer and virile thinker. Beyond a reasonable doubt, the volume is the ablest and most thoroughly satisfactory treatise on the subject in ...
— Essentials of Economic Theory - As Applied to Modern Problems of Industry and Public Policy • John Bates Clark
... year 1819, Thomas Gray—a deep thinker with a mind of comprehensive grasp—was travelling in the North of England when he saw a train of coal-wagons drawn by steam along a colliery tramroad. "Why," he questioned the engineer, "are not these tramroads laid down all over England, so as to supersede our common ...
— Railway Adventures and Anecdotes - extending over more than fifty years • Various
... ago Herbert Spencer wrote an article on "The Coming Slavery," which conveyed the impression that the great thinker saw what he thought to be signs of the inevitable triumph of Socialism. All over the world Socialists were cheered by this admission from their implacable enemy. In this connection it is worthy of note ...
— Socialism - A Summary and Interpretation of Socialist Principles • John Spargo
... determination not to make the same mistake again seems to have induced similar effects and methods for their attainment in the case of his intellectual development. Whatever the connection, both regenerations proceeded apace. Lincoln at first was a shallow thinker, accepting without examination the views of others, especially popular statesmen, such as Henry Clay, whose magnetic personality was drawing to himself the high-spirited young men of the West. Some of the political ...
— The Poets' Lincoln - Tributes in Verse to the Martyred President • Various
... in every respect with the Law of Moses, as proved by the enemity between Jews and Christians. How, then, could I, knowing all this, express myself as a fanatic, or as an ignorant monk? I do not exact from any monk the speech of a free-thinker and therefore, they should not exact that I express myself as a monk would. Why do they want me to consolidate under one name two distinct things, which, to a certain extent contradict each other? Let the Christians ...
— The Story of the Philippines and Our New Possessions, • Murat Halstead
... the old creeds are swept away for a new, and a grander, wider, purer form of faith is accepted by the people. For religion in Al-Kyris to-day is a hollow mockery,—a sham, kept up partly from fear,—partly from motives of policy,—but every thinker is an atheist at heart, . . our splendid civilization is tottering towards its fall, . . and should the fore-doomed destruction of this city come to pass, vast ages of progress, discovery, and invention will be swept away as ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... the last great Muslim thinker, summing up and carrying to its conclusions the thought of four hundred years. The philosophy of Islam, which flourished first in the East, in Basra and Bagdad (800-1100), and then in the West, Cordova, Toledo, etc. (1100-1200), was a mixture of Aristotelianism and Neo-Platonism, borrowed, ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... difficult and bewildering problem. There was little Miss Tallant, an assiduous guild worker whom he had thought the most orthodox of persons; Miss Ramsay, who taught the children of the Italian mothers; Mr. Carton, the organist, a professed free-thinker, with whom Hodder had had many a futile argument; and Martha Preston, who told him that he had made her think about religion seriously for the first ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... conscientious study of Heiberg's philosophical writings and honestly endeavoured to make myself familiar with his speculative logic. As Heiberg's Prose Writings came out, in the 1861 edition, they were studied with extreme care. Heiberg's death in 1860 was a great grief to me; as a thinker I had loved and revered him. The clearness of form and the internal obscurity of his adaptation of Hegel's Teachings, gave one a certain artistic satisfaction, at the same time that it provoked an ...
— Recollections Of My Childhood And Youth • George Brandes
... of crime, Watson. He is the organizer of half that is evil and of nearly all that is undetected in this great city. He is a genius, a philosopher, an abstract thinker. He has a brain of the first order. He sits motionless, like a spider in the center of its web, but that web has a thousand radiations, and he knows well every quiver of each of them. He does little himself. He only plans. But his agents are numerous and splendidly organized. ...
— Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... went to the first lecture he attended, in the schools attached to the friary, where the great works of Augustine and Aquinas formed the text books; no Creek as yet. He passed from Latin to Logic, as the handmaid of theology. The great thinker Aristotle supplied the method, not the language or matter, and became the ally of Christianity, under the rendering of ...
— The House of Walderne - A Tale of the Cloister and the Forest in the Days of the Barons' Wars • A. D. Crake
... indefatigable worker, this philosopher, this thinker, this poet, this genius has lived amongst us that life of storms, of struggles, of quarrels, of combats, which has always been the common lot of all great men. Today we see him at peace. He has escaped from controversies and enmities. He has entered, ...
— Honor de Balzac • Albert Keim and Louis Lumet
... loss of moral dignity. Altogether, this humiliating affair showed me what a trap for the conscience these subscriptions are: how comfortably they are passed while the intellect is torpid or immature, or where the conscience is callous, but how they undermine truthfulness in the active thinker, and torture the sensitiveness of the tenderminded. As long as they are maintained, in Church or University, these institutions exert a positive influence to deprave or eject those who ought to be their most useful ...
— Phases of Faith - Passages from the History of My Creed • Francis William Newman
... Mr. Raymount's utterance may perhaps seem obscure to a better thinker. He concluded merely that his host was talking for talk's sake, so talking rubbish. The girl came in again, and the conversation dropped. Mr. Raymount went to his writing, Vavasor toward the piano. Willing to ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald
... from all other persons whom David had yet seen in Paris. In physique, too, he was totally unlike the ordinary Parisian type. He was a young athlete, vigorous, robust, broad-shouldered, tanned by sun and wind. Only his blue eye—so subtle, melancholy, passionate—revealed the artist and the thinker. ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... occult or mystical literature the name Boehme was utterly unknown to me, and at this point I asked Mr. U., "Did you ever hear of anyone by the name of B-o-e-h-m-e?" spelling the word. "Certainly," he replied, "Jacob Boehme, he was a German thinker who died—" my hand began to move just then, and he paused, and while the following was being written my mind reverted hazily to a German philosophical writer, who had died within a few years, and of whose life one of our friends had written a sketch. His name began with B, and I thought he ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 21, August, 1891 • Various
... that the Socialists make the claim that manual labor alone creates wealth when applied to natural objects. That statement is not true. He even dared say that a great and profound thinker like Karl Marx believed and taught that silly notion. The newspapers of America hailed Mr. Mallock as the long-looked-for conqueror of Marx and his followers. They thought he had demolished Socialism. But did they know that ...
— The Common Sense of Socialism - A Series of Letters Addressed to Jonathan Edwards, of Pittsburg • John Spargo
... this story when hearing a living thinker of some eminence once say that he considered Christianity to have been a misfortune. Intellectually it was absurd, and practically an offence, over which he stumbled; and it would have been far better ...
— Froude's Essays in Literature and History - With Introduction by Hilaire Belloc • James Froude
... his new gift of reason, inventing tools and weapons and language, harnessing the physical forces to his own ends, and putting all things under his feet,—man the wonder-worker, the beholder of the stars, the critic and spectator of creation itself, the thinker of the thoughts of God, the worshiper, the devotee, the hero, spreading rapidly over the earth, and developing with prodigious strides when once fairly launched upon his career. Can it be possible, we ...
— Time and Change • John Burroughs
... (like the use of other words which at first referred only to the body, and then by a figure have been transferred to the mind), still, why should we make an ambiguous word the corner-stone of moral philosophy? To the higher thinker the Utilitarian or hedonist mode of speaking has been at variance with religion and with any higher conception both of politics and of morals. It has not satisfied their imagination; it has offended their taste. To elevate pleasure, ...
— Philebus • Plato
... was bold, it was consistent, for its time it was wonderful. But Lucretius's philosophy, like all the philosophies of the older world, was a mere speculative idea, a fancy picture of the development of things, not dependent upon observation of facts at all, but wholly evolved, like the German thinker's camel, out of its author's own pregnant inner consciousness. The Roman poet would no doubt have built an excellent superstructure if he had only possessed a little straw to make his bricks of. As it was, however, scientific brick-making ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... Merging the senses having the mind for their sixth and all the objects of the senses into the inner Soul by the aid of the Understanding, and reflecting upon the three states of consciousness, viz., the object thought, the act of thinking, and the thinker, and abstaining by contemplation from every kind of enjoyment, equipping his mind with the knowledge that he is Brahma's self, laying aside at the same time all consciousness of puissance, and thereby making his soul perfectly tranquil, the Yogin obtains that to ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... called barbarous, pagan, mediaeval, by those who condemn them out of traditional habit. Year after year the researches of science afford us new proof that the savage, the barbarian, the idolater, the monk, each and all have arrived, by different paths, as near to some point of eternal truth as any thinker of the nineteenth century. We are now learning also, that the theories of the astrologers and of the alchemists were but partially, not totally, wrong. We have reason even to suppose that no dream of the invisible world has ever been dreamed, that no hypothesis of ...
— The Wrack of the Storm • Maurice Maeterlinck
... could tell any insane person whatever from a sane one, and vice versa. This was the most remarkable part of the trial, to see this shrewd old judge extracting from a real observer and logical thinker those positive indicia of sanity and insanity, which exist, but which no lawyer has ever yet been able to extract from any psychological physician in the witness-box. At last, he was relieved, and sat sucking an orange among ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... strangely. He was an odd combination of a thinker and an athlete, half literary man, half gladiator. The common phrase 'an old head on young shoulders' described him as well as any phrase could. The shoulders were perhaps the more remarkable, but the head was not to be despised. ...
— Casa Braccio, Volumes 1 and 2 (of 2) • F. Marion Crawford
... occasion seemed to demand; but there was a world of meaning in those three words. We should be obliged to employ many if we attempted to express a tithe of what he had recently learned to believe through the instrumentality of a noble thinker. ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie
... who has not lived and fought with him, the Englishman appears to be distant, reserved, a slow thinker, and lacking in humor, but from my association with the man who inhabits the British Isles. I find that this opinion is unjust. To me, Tommy Atkins has proved himself to be the best of mates, a pal, and bubbling over with a fine sense of humor, a man with a ...
— Over The Top • Arthur Guy Empey |
