"Thinker" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Philosophic type, the hand of the thinker and philosopher, the usual position of the Line of Mentality is long and sloping, but if found straight or level it indicates a mental development of the logical and practical qualities which might not be expected in such a class ...
— Palmistry for All • Cheiro
... 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
... forms of mythology, which he uses as symbols or translates into figures of speech. He has no implements of observation, such as the telescope or microscope; the great science of chemistry is a blank to him. It is only by an effort that the modern thinker can breathe the atmosphere of the ancient philosopher, or understand how, under such unequal conditions, he seems in many instances, by a sort of inspiration, to have ...
— Timaeus • Plato
... mansion whose door was plated with copper.[FN525] I stood behind the door, whilst the old woman cried out in Persian, and ere I knew it a damsel ran up with light and nimble step. She had tucked up her trousers to her knees, so that I saw a pair of calves that confounded thinker and lighter, and the maid herself was as saith the ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... currency with instinctive readiness. Two things had made him clearly the intellectual superior of his fellows—the advantages of his early years by which he learned to read, and the habit of meditation which the solitude of his stricken life induced. This had made him a thinker, a philosopher far more profound than his general attainments would naturally produce. With the super-sensitiveness which always characterizes the afflicted, also, he had become a most acute and subtle observer of the human countenance, and read its infinite variety of expression ...
— Bricks Without Straw • Albion W. Tourgee
... 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 of the style passing from one intelligence ...
— Montaigne and Shakspere • John M. Robertson
... a freshness and singleness of purpose about him, which, with the charm of his handsome young face and the genial simplicity of his manners, made him everywhere a favorite, and carried him into circles where a graver man and a deeper thinker could not find entrance; but let twenty years pass by, and Felix, she said to herself, would be nothing but a commonplace country clergyman, looking after his glebe lands and riding lazily about his parish, talking with old women and consulting ...
— Cobwebs and Cables • Hesba Stretton
... 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, ...
— Flatland • Edwin A. Abbott
... outward marks, would really have been confounded in the mind of Anytus, or Callicles, or of any intelligent Athenian, with the splendid foreigners who from time to time visited Athens, or appeared at the Olympic games. The man of genius, the great original thinker, the disinterested seeker after truth, the master of repartee whom no one ever defeated in an argument, was separated, even in the mind of the vulgar Athenian, by an 'interval which no geometry can express,' from the balancer of sentences, the interpreter and reciter ...
— Sophist • Plato
... I are. It is all a mistake. We have lost nothing that they had which was worth the keeping; and we have gained a great deal which they had not. We have not to compare our relation to Christ with theirs, as we might do our relation to some great thinker or poet, with that of his contemporaries, but we have Christ in a better form, if I may so speak; and we, on whom the ends of the world are come, may have a deeper and a fuller and a closer intimacy ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: St. John Chaps. XV to XXI • Alexander Maclaren
... The inspired thinker sends out a thought to the world, it is taken up and passed through other brains, it becomes distorted or is recognized by them in its integrity according to the caliber of mind, or the idiosyncrasies of the one representing it. A thought ...
— Insights and Heresies Pertaining to the Evolution of the Soul • Anna Bishop Scofield
... such a science as psychometry—"the dawn of a new civilization," as it is considered by its adepts and its friends,—is alone an imperative demand for a journal to assist the diffusion and illustration of a science, which no honorable and logical thinker, after accepting its well-established facts, can regard as anything less than the beginning of an intellectual revolution, the magnitude of which is astounding to a conservative mind; for the revolutionary science of the last forty years has been concealed from the conservative majority, ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, February 1887 - Volume 1, Number 1 • Various
... while the mayor of Cambridge holds his office subject to removal by the President of the United States, we may safely predict further extensive changes in the character of the American people and their government. It was not for nothing that our profoundest political thinker, Thomas Jefferson, attached so much importance to the ...
— Civil Government in the United States Considered with - Some Reference to Its Origins • John Fiske
... So much so that in the last of the series a soured sportsman on one of the benches near the roof began in satirical mood to whistle the "Merry Widow Waltz." It was here that the red-jerseyed thinker for the first and last time came out of his meditative trance. He leaned over the ropes, ...
— Psmith, Journalist • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... wearing sandals and simple raiment, a raw tomato held firmly in his right hand, and says, "The affections of family and country alike are hindrances to the fuller development of human love;" but the plain thinker will only answer him, with a wonder not untinged with admiration, "What a great deal of trouble you must have taken in order to feel like that." High living will reject the tomato. Plain thinking will equally decisively reject the idea of the invariable sinfulness ...
— Heretics • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... the eyes, we should be able to see distinctly that strange thing that each one individual of the human race corresponds to some one of the species of the animal creation; and we could easily recognize this truth, hardly perceived by the thinker, that from the oyster to the eagle, from the pig to the tiger, all animals exist in man, and that each one of them is in a man. Sometimes even several of ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... telling;—and it is also apparent that this is his most vulnerable point as novelist. We get more from him just because he shoots beyond the fiction target. He is that rare thing in English novel-making, a notable thinker. Of all nineteenth century novelists he leads for intellectual stimulation. With fifty faults of manner and matter, irritating, even outrageous in his eccentricities, he can at his best startle with a brilliance that is alone of its kind. It is because ...
— Masters of the English Novel - A Study Of Principles And Personalities • Richard Burton
... justify the doctrine of karma. Whatever be that which makes consciousness, its relation to all the past and to all the future is unquestionable. Nor can the doctrine of Nirvana ever cease to command the profound respect of the impartial thinker. Science has found evidence that known substance is not less a product of evolution than mind,—that all our so-called "elements" have been evolved out of "one primary undifferentiated form of matter." And this evidence is startlingly suggestive ...
— Kokoro - Japanese Inner Life Hints • Lafcadio Hearn
... regarded as his daughter. He called her his Fannikin; and she in return called him her dear Daddy. In truth, he seems to have done much more than her real parents for the development of her intellect; for though he was a bad poet, he was a scholar, a thinker, and an excellent counsellor. He was particularly fond of the concerts in Poland Street. They had, indeed, been commenced at his suggestion, and when he visited London he constantly attended them. But when he grew old, and when ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... thinker," he said, "you are rather a pusillanimous jackass. A man of your convictions to shy at a shadow! Fie, sir, fie! What if the room were empty? The place was full enough of traps to permit ...
— At a Winter's Fire • Bernard Edward J. Capes
... leader of his people, not a patent-insides recorder of social functions, but a vigorous and independent thinker and writer. The subscribers to the newspaper published in the section were higher in proportion to population than in the State of New York and not greatly inferior to those of New England, although such eastern papers as the New York Tribune had an extensive circulation throughout ...
— The Frontier in American History • Frederick Jackson Turner
... came of a distinguished family. Her father, Dr. Richard Whately, for many years Archbishop of Dublin, was one of the most remarkable and prominent men of the first half of the nineteenth century, a voluminous writer, a strenuous thinker, and a statesmanlike ecclesiastic. Her mother, Elizabeth, daughter of Mr. W. Pope of Uxbridge, was, says Miss E.J. Whately, a woman of "grace and dignity of character, delicacy of mind and sensitive refinement, which ...
— Excellent Women • Various
... a profound thinker and a secret reader of sensational detective stories, had at one time made a report against John Minute for some technical offense, and had made it in fear and trembling, expecting his sergeant promptly to squash this ...
— The Man Who Knew • Edgar Wallace
... of scientific or expert thinking is, in large part, concerned with devices for enabling the thinker more securely to trace the obscure and remote connections between actions and their consequences, between causes and effects. But, whether simple or complex, the essential feature of reflective activity is ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman
... of burden, Ursus preferred Homo to a donkey. He would have felt repugnance to having his hut drawn by an ass; he thought too highly of the ass for that. Moreover he had observed that the ass, a four-legged thinker little understood by men, has a habit of cocking his ears uneasily when philosophers talk nonsense. In life the ass is a third person between our thoughts and ourselves, and acts as a restraint. As a friend, Ursus preferred ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... I come to the end of my letter I may repent of my temerity and unsay my charge. For are not all our circlets of will as so many little eddies rounded in by the great Circle of Necessity, and could the Truth-speaker, perhaps now the best Thinker of the Saxon race, have written otherwise? And must not we say that Drunkenness is a virtue rather than that ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, - 1834-1872, Vol. I • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... thinker, Sir,—a student and a philosopher. You are not one of those kings who treat their kingship as a license for the free exercise of intolerant humours and vicious practices. Were you no monarch at all, you would still be a sane and thoughtful ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... must leave Flaubert, the thinker. He never passes beyond that point in his vision of reconstruction: a "legitimate aristocracy" established in contempt of the average man—with the Academy of ...
— The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters • George Sand, Gustave Flaubert
... imitate Alfieri, who, although it is the prevailing fashion to admire him, is too bold and manly a thinker to be tolerated on the stage. They have produced some single pieces of merit, but the principles of tragic art which Alfieri followed are altogether false, and in the bawling and heartless declamation of their actors, this tragic poetry, ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... began life as a sailor. After a few years came the desperate poverty of his early married life in California, as here described. His work as a printer led to casual employment as a journalist. This was the first step in his subsequently life-long career as an independent thinker, writer, and speaker. ...
— Stories of Achievement, Volume IV (of 6) - Authors and Journalists • Various
... countries and two courses. Ireland had cast him out and England would none of him. He hated Catholicism and Protestantism alike, and Protestants and Catholics alike disowned him. To every Church and every sect he was a free thinker, destitute of all religion. Yet few men were more religious. His enemies called him a turner and a twister; yet on any one of his lines no man ever ...
— The Tree of Heaven • May Sinclair
... whole tragedy and to justify its great victim is to feel something of the strain which comes to every thinker and fighter who, like Lassalle, writes and speaks persistently to vast audiences, often against great odds, and always with the prospect of a prison before him. That his nerves were utterly unstrung, that he ...
— Immortal Memories • Clement Shorter
... shop opposite to mine. This same John Titcomb, my very good friend, is a character peculiar to Yankeedom. He is part owner and landlord of the house I rent, and connected by birth with all the best families in town; a man of real intelligence, and good education, a great reader, and quite a thinker. Being of an ingenious turn he does painting, gilding, staining, upholstery jobs, varnishing, all in addition to his primary trade of carpentry. But he is a man studious of ease, and fully possessed with the idea that man wants but ...
— The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe • Charles Edward Stowe
... and rather sad expression occupied for a moment the mobile face. He interested Dick greatly. He seemed to him scholar and thinker as well as soldier. He and Warner long afterward attended the inauguration of this man as President of the ...
— The Guns of Shiloh • Joseph A. Altsheler
... the varnish of philosophical unbelief or finite reasoning. "In my opinion," says one of the characters in the Dialogue, (to be identified as the author,) "profound minds are the most likely to think lightly of the resources of human reason; and it is the pert superficial thinker who is generally strongest in every kind of unbelief. The deep philosopher sees changes of causes and effects, so wonderfully and strangely linked together, that he is usually the last person to decide upon the impossibility ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction—Volume 13 - Index to Vol. 13 • Various
... all the time —most always about religion, because Dan'l's a Dunker Baptist and Jinny's a shouting Methodist, and Jinny believes in special Providences and Dan'l don't, because he thinks he's a kind of a free-thinker—and they play and sing plantation hymns together, and talk and chatter just eternally and forever, and are sincerely fond of each other and think the world of Mulberry, and he puts up patiently with ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... thinker and writer has said: "Whatever the mind is set upon, or whatever it keeps most in view, that it is bringing to it, and the continual thought or imagining must at last take form and shape in the world ...
— The Higher Powers of Mind and Spirit • Ralph Waldo Trine
... overseer for the caravan, who is mounted on a good riding-donkey, and wearing a canoe-like tepee and sea-boots; and lastly, on, the splendid bay horse presented to me by Mr. Goodhue, myself, called Bana Mkuba, "the "big master," by my people—the vanguard, the reporter, the thinker, ...
— How I Found Livingstone • Sir Henry M. Stanley
... Aeschylus, the nascent democracy were his ideal and he was evidently put out by the ending of the period of "Periclean calm." He then has no solution for the problems in front of him. But it might be asked whether a dramatist's business is not rather to leave solutions to the thinker, concerning himself only with mirroring men's natures. With singular courage and at no small personal risk this man attacked the great ones of his day, scourging their hypocrisies and exposing the real tendencies ...
— Authors of Greece • T. W. Lumb
... to speak out will be quickly relegated to private life. Successful merchants depending on a local constituency find it expedient to cater to popular superstitions by heading subscription-lists for the support of things in which they do not believe. No avowed independent thinker would be tolerated as chief ruler of any of ...
— Little Journeys To The Homes Of Great Teachers • Elbert Hubbard
... writer" to Carlyle is merely absurd—is one of those caprices which somebody once told us are the eternal foes of art—he is not unjust in denying that title to Emerson. But after justifying his policy of not "cracking up" by still further denying his subject the title of a great philosophic thinker, he proceeds to find a pedestal for him at last as a friend and leader of those who would "live in the spirit." With such a judgment one has no fault to find, because it must be in all cases an almost purely personal one. To some Gautier, with his ...
— Matthew Arnold • George Saintsbury
... that the apprentice system instills thoroughness. This may be true; but it also does another thing: It makes the man a mere machine. The true workman is a thinker. He is ever on the alert to find easier, quicker and more efficient means ...
— Practical Mechanics for Boys • J. S. Zerbe
... years of age. He was the head of the Sukarchakia misl, which had its headquarters at Gujranwala. Mean in appearance, his face marked and one eye closed by the ravages of smallpox, he was the one man of genius the Jat tribe has produced. A splendid horseman, a bold leader, a cool thinker untroubled with scruples, an unerring judge of character, he was bound to rise in such times. He set himself to put down every Sikh rival and to profit by the waning of the Durani power to make himself master of their possessions in the Panjab. Pluck, patience, and ...
— The Panjab, North-West Frontier Province, and Kashmir • Sir James McCrone Douie
... 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 which ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... the mind. All his paradoxes and false analogies and inconsistencies come from this craving for a forceful expression. He apparently brought to bear all the skill he possessed of this kind on all occasions. One must regard him, not as a great thinker, nor as a disinterested seeker after the truth, but as a master in the art of vigorous and picturesque expression. To startle, to wake up, to communicate to his reader a little wholesome shock, is his aim. Not the novelty ...
— The Last Harvest • John Burroughs
... is ace high, Mac. Fancy costumes and masks. Y'u can rent the costumes over to Slauson's for three per. Texas, he's going to call the dances. Music from Gimlet Butte. Y'u want to get it tucked away in your thinker that this dance ain't on the order of culls. No, ...
— Wyoming, a Story of the Outdoor West • William MacLeod Raine
... profound student of history, somewhat dull as a narrator, but of unerring historic judgment. I suppose he would be placed by all our writers of history with great unanimity at the head of American historic investigators. James Walker was a great preacher and a profound thinker. In the judgment of his hearers, young and old, he was probably deemed nearly or quite the foremost ...
— Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2 • George Hoar
... I perceive," said Miss Loring, with a smile, "and must have been a thinker, in some degree, to ...
— The Hand But Not the Heart - or, The Life-Trials of Jessie Loring • T. S. Arthur
... 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 ...
— Under Western Eyes • Joseph Conrad
... them are deserving of praise. Not unfrequently, indeed, a public man must take his choice whether by fully identifying himself with the existing conditions around him and employing them to the best advantages he will lead a useful and practical life, or whether as an advanced thinker he will associate himself with the cause that is one day to conquer, place himself in the van of progress and at the sacrifice of much present influence deserve the credit ...
— Historical and Political Essays • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... patient, often commonplace endeavour; and the true lesson of scientific history lies in the close connection which it discloses between the most brilliant developments of knowledge and the faithful accomplishment of his daily task by each individual thinker and worker. ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke
... quick thinker, but he had never thought more quickly in his life. This young fellow had beaten him. There was no doubt of it. He might have principles, but he declined to let his principles hamper him. There was something about ...
— Stories of a Western Town • Octave Thanet
... and successful career as a writer and diplomatist would seem to be evidence of the presence of qualities of a high order, and yet no one who was near him accepted that opinion. His conversation was not instructive, certainly not in later years, nor was he an original thinker upon any subject. He was an enthusiast in politics in early and middle life, and while his mental faculties remained unimpaired his interest in political movements was great—and usually it was in sympathy with the Democratic Party. He was an adhesive man in politics, ...
— Reminiscences of Sixty Years in Public Affairs, Vol. 2 • George S. Boutwell
... a brilliant man. He was neither a thinker, like Seward, nor an orator, like Granger; but he was wise, wealthy, and eminently respectable, with enough of the statesman in him to be able to accept established facts and not to argue with the inexorable. Years before, he had founded the Albany Argus, editing ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... of Watts. Again Millais gives us the noble features, the extravagant 'hure'[35] of the Tennyson whom his contemporaries saw, alive, glowing with force; Watts has exalted this conception to a higher level and has portrayed the thinker whom the world will honour many centuries hence. Some will perhaps prefer the more objective treatment; and it is certain that Watts's ambition led him into difficult paths. Striving to represent the soul of his sitter, he was conscious at times that he failed—that ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore
... is Ethel! They both just love music, and they kept me whistling until I was tired. And how they do love stories! I 'magined for them till my thinker ran empty. I couldn't help wishing I was you, so's I could tell them all the beau-ti-ful fancies you make up as you lie here under the trees day in and day out. I told 'em about you and pictured this garden for 'em, and the flowers which Hicks cuts by the bushel-basket, ...
— The Lilac Lady • Ruth Alberta Brown
... at Paisley in the year 1788. His progenitors are said to have been remarkable for their acquaintance with the arts, and relish for elegant literature. His eldest brother, the late Dr Carlile of Dublin attained much eminence as a profound thinker and an accomplished theologian. Having received a liberal education, first at the grammar-school of Paisley, and afterwards in the University of Glasgow, the subject of this sketch settled as a ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... a modern thinker who does not agree that government, organized authority, or the State, is necessary ONLY to maintain or protect property and monopoly. It has proven efficient in that ...
— Anarchism and Other Essays • Emma Goldman
... inside the right foul line, pulling the first baseman away back almost to right field. Princeman stood gaping at that bingle in paralyzed dismay; but the batsman, who was a slow runner and slow thinker, stood a fatal second to see whether the ball was fair or foul. Almost at the crack of the bat Sam Turner started, raced down to first, caught the right fielder's throw and stepped on the stone, one handsome stride ahead of the runner! Then, as Blackrock, speechless ...
— The Early Bird - A Business Man's Love Story • George Randolph Chester
... was 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
... Physiology are both good things. But water is one thing to drink, and another to be drowned in. In like manner, though Physiology is a large and noble science and a yet larger symbol, furnishing analogies to the thinker quite as often as uses to the medical doctor, nevertheless, Physiology in the form of a deluge, overflowing, swamping, drowning almost everything else, and leaving only Body, the sole ark, afloat,—this ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 79, May, 1864 • Various
... almost the first classically arranged one in the eighteenth century: and it must be confessed that the collection was both curious and valuable. Bridges was succeeded by ANTHONY COLLINS,[379] the Free Thinker; a character equally strange and unenviable. Book-fanciers now and then bid a few shillings, for a copy of the catalogue of his library; and some sly free-thinkers, of modern date, are not backward in shewing ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... 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 please ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald
... said to himself aloud, as he turned his horse's head and rode leisurely away, "if the old volk are right after all, and if there is a God." Frank Muller was sufficiently impregnated with modern ideas to be a free-thinker. "It almost seems like it," he went on, "else how did it come that the one bullet passed under his belly and the other just touched his head without harming him? I aimed carefully enough too, and I could make the shot nineteen times out of ...
— Jess • H. Rider Haggard
... the cow, however, nor how poor our ability to milk, there is still the milkman—we can read what others have seen and felt and thought. Often, indeed, such records will kindle within us that pre-essential and vital spark, the desire to be a thinker. ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... there shall come a form of union so much more close, intimate, all-pervading, and all-encircling, as that the present union with Him by faith, precious as it is, shall be, as the Apostle calls it in our context, 'absence from the Lord.' 'We have to be discharged,' says an old thinker, 'of a great deal of what we call body, and then we shall be more truly ourselves,' and more truly united to Him who, if we are Christian people at all, is the self of ourselves and the life of our lives. No man knows how close he can nestle to the bosom of Christ when the film of flesh ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: Romans Corinthians (To II Corinthians, Chap. V) • Alexander Maclaren
... The hearer went away with its expressive inflections and cadences still sounding in his ears. But his voice was not his only forte. He had a mind as full of sanctified wit and quick perception as an egg is full of food. A clear thinker, a cogent reasoner, and I may add, full of love and the Holy Ghost, it is not a matter of wonder that he excelled. What he might have achieved had he lived to an advanced age, God only knows. His death ...
— Life and Labors of Elder John Kline, the Martyr Missionary - Collated from his Diary by Benjamin Funk • John Kline
... for liberty." For the next twenty years he threw himself into the contest, and poured forth a succession of tracts, in English and Latin, upon the various public questions at issue. As a political thinker, Milton had what Bacon calls "the humor of a scholar." In a country of endowed grammar schools and universities hardly emerged from a mediaeval discipline and curriculum, he wanted to set up Greek gymnasia ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... increased with The Patriot's circulation), he deemed it advisable to moderate some of the more blatant features, on the same principle which had induced him to reform the Veridian lumber mill abuses, lest they be brought up to his political detriment later. A long-distance thinker, Tertius Marrineal. ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... the actual things heard, the actual facts mastered, is the lecture-system valuable to the student, as for the method of study which he derives from it. He is no longer like an automaton, a school-boy guided by his teacher and text-book, but is spoken to as an independent thinker. Authorities are quoted, which he may consult at his leisure. No subject is exhausted,—it is only touched upon. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 41, March, 1861 • Various
... a misty grandiose picture of the universe; but gradually they felt the want of some logical basis for their speculations, and Hegel became their favourite. Gallantly they struggled with the uncouth terminology and epigrammatic paradoxes of the great thinker, and strove to force their way through the intricate mazes of his logical formulae. With the ardour of neophytes they looked at every phenomenon—even the most trivial incident of common life—from the philosophical point of view, talked day and night about principles, ideas, subjectivity, ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... said, was a slow thinker, and the junior partner as a mathematical master was a novel and strange idea which she did not take in at once. 'I don't understand. How can Mr. Jones teach you algebra?' ...
— A City Schoolgirl - And Her Friends • May Baldwin
... happens that no writer names more authors, except Prynne,[279] than the learned Selden. La Mothe le Vayer's curious works consist of fifteen volumes; he is among the greatest quoters. Whoever turns them over will perceive that he is an original thinker, and a great wit; his style, indeed, is meagre, which, as much as his quotations, may have proved fatal to him. But in both these cases it is evident that even quoters who have abused the privilege of quotation are not necessarily writers of a ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... assassin's look, my dear little friend; but he is a great thinker. That is the sort of beau I recommend you to get ...
— The Youth of Jefferson - A Chronicle of College Scrapes at Williamsburg, in Virginia, A.D. 1764 • Anonymous
... Halberstadt, John: "It is not a thinker like Boehme, who will compensate us for the lost summer of our life; but a magician like John of Halberstadt, who can, at any moment, ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson
... brain to his faculty of introspective vision or second sight, and it is of interest to observe that all the more important discoveries in this department of physiology during the last two centuries are clearly anticipated by him. The scientific works of this great thinker are far too little known by the majority, who are apt to regard him only as a ...
— Second Sight - A study of Natural and Induced Clairvoyance • Sepharial
... answered the abbot—"Bernard of Clairvaux, the greatest man, the greatest thinker, the greatest preacher, and the greatest saint of ...
— Via Crucis • F. Marion Crawford
... tropical climates. Their ugly appearance, their destructive habits, but, above all, the pain of their sting, or rather bite—for ants do not sting as wasps, but bite with the jaws, and then infuse poison into the wound—all these render them very unpopular creatures. A superficial thinker would suppose that such troublesome insects could be of no use, and would question the propriety of Nature ...
— Popular Adventure Tales • Mayne Reid
... custom (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, 'the most fleeting of all things,' ...
— Philebus • Plato
... that a thinker who could so clearly discern the secret of the great spiritual movements of human history, should fail to perceive that the same law governs and explains all the minor movements in which wide communities have been suddenly agitated ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 8: France in the Eighteenth Century • John Morley
... the majesty of a whole race, could be thus revived in a man, and my stupefaction increased after an hour's conversation. I could quite understand why such a Colossus had not wished for the Countess as his Egeria; she was a mere silly child to have dreamt of acting such a part to such a thinker. She had not felt the profoundness of that horrible philosophy which was hidden under that material activity, nor had she seen the prophet under that man of the barricades. Or, perhaps, he had not thought it advisable to reveal himself to her like ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume III (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... to 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 study than the friendships of men ...
— The Bibliotaph - and Other People • Leon H. Vincent
... of a Quaker had subjected the whole fabric to a battery of violent rhetoric. It is scarcely too much to call Thomas Paine the Rousseau of English democracy. For, if his arguments lacked the novelty of those of the Genevese thinker (and even they were far from original), they equalled them in effectiveness, and excelled them in practicability. "The Rights of Man" (Part I) may be termed an insular version of the "Contrat Social," with this difference, that the English writer ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... a little hard to undertake to write about the personality of a thinker whose ideas one does not share, and whose reading of the events and tendencies of our time was in most respects directly opposite to one's own. But literature is neutral ground. Character is more than opinion. Here we may forget the loud cries and sounding strokes, the watchwords and the tactics ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 7: A Sketch • John Morley
... produced by the stream of half-conscious, involuntary thoughts which the majority of mankind allow to flow idly through their brains, so that the intelligence is obviously not derived from the mind of the thinker; and we certainly cannot credit the elemental essence itself, which belongs to a kingdom further from individualization even than the mineral, with any sort of awakening of the manasic quality. Yet it does possess a marvellous adaptability which often seems to come very near ...
— The Astral Plane - Its Scenery, Inhabitants and Phenomena • C. W. Leadbeater
... points of view, are but fractional and imperfect expressions of one essential unity, from which they all proceed—crude endeavors or distorted parts, to be regarded both as distinct and united. In short (to put it in our own form, or summing up,) that thinker or analyzer or overlooker who by an inscrutable combination of train'd wisdom and natural intuition most fully accepts in perfect faith the moral unity and sanity of the creative scheme, in history, science, ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... found it cheaper 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 ...
— Letters from a Self-Made Merchant to His Son • George Horace Lorimer
... it 'Plain Thoughts of a Practical Thinker?'" suggested Morgan. "And perhaps you might add a sub-title—'An attempt to investigate some questions of primary importance that are usually shelved.' How does that ...
— Cleo The Magnificent - The Muse of the Real • Louis Zangwill
... various phases of movement and change. The vicissitudes of his own inner or outer life he did not analyze. He was not given to introspection. Romanticism and mysticism were foreign to his nature. His temperament was rather that of the objective thinker. Not his own passions, hopes, and fears, but those of others invited his curiosity. With an humane attitude, the young Hegel approached religious and historical problems. The dramatic life and death of Jesus, the tragic fate of "the glory that was Greece and the grandeur that ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... tall man swinging along at a tremendous pace, "that this bell—there it is again, confound it; yet no, not confound it—can resemble that other bell I used to know. No, quite impossible. Is it likely that anything here," and the thinker spreads both long arms out to take in the entire landscape, "can resemble or remotely suggest the Old Country, or, as people call it, home? Home? Why this is home. That four-roomed and convenient, if not commodious, ...
— Crowded Out! and Other Sketches • Susie F. Harrison
... measures for the gradual abolition of slavery and the immediate abolition of the foreign slave-trade. On this great question the state of public opinion in America was more advanced than in England. So great a thinker as Edmund Burke, who devoted much thought to the subject, came to the conclusion that slavery was an incurable evil, and that there was not the slightest hope that the trade in slaves could be stopped. ...
— The Critical Period of American History • John Fiske
... will make everybody stop and listen to him, cablegrams and all. Horace Greeley and Samuel Bowles and Charles A. Dana have passed from the press, and the march of the crowd through the miles of their columns every day is trampling on their graves. The newspaper is the mass machine, the crowd thinker. To and fro, from week to week and from year to year, its flaming headlines sway, now hither and now thither, where the greatest numbers go, or the best guess of where they are going to go; and Personality, creative, triumphant, masterful, imperious Personality—is ...
— Crowds - A Moving-Picture of Democracy • Gerald Stanley Lee
... citizens of the several States in their most sacred rights—to think, reason, and decide all questions of religion and conscience for themselves, without fear or favor from the government. Popular sentiment and church persecution is all that an advanced thinker in science and religion should be called on to combat. The State should rather throw its shield of protection around those uttering liberal, progressive ideas; for the nation has the same interest in every new thought as it has in the invention of new machinery to lighten labor, in the ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... devotion as a means. This comes out very plainly in Patanjali. He has given many means whereby Yoga may be followed, and curiously, "devotion to Isvara'' is one of several means. There comes out the spirit of the scientific thinker. Devotion to Isvara is not for him an end in itself, but means to an endthe concentration of the mind. You see there at once the difference of spirit. Devotion to Isvara is the path of the mystic. He attains ...
— An Introduction to Yoga • Annie Besant
... neighbourhood in which we live. A wise man wrote: 'All reforms begin with man and not with men.' The first important step is to think good thoughts; for 'thoughts have wings,' and, when expressed, they are readily impressed upon the minds of those in sympathy with the thinker." ...
— Pictures of Jewish Home-Life Fifty Years Ago • Hannah Trager
... and peddles them, in printed form, in the streets; contributes, anonymously, to the "New England Courant," and temporarily edits that paper; becomes a free-thinker, ...
— The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin • Benjamin Franklin
... occasionally seek the society of ladies, by way of recovering some of that native gaiety of heart which had hitherto kept him alive. 'I blow on this spark,' to use his own words, 'just as an old woman blows among the ashes to get a light for her lamp.' A student and a thinker, De Maistre was also a man of the world, and he may be added to the long list of writers who have shown that to take an active part in public affairs and mix in society give a peculiar life, reality, and force to both scholarship and speculation. It was computed ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3) - Essay 4: Joseph de Maistre • John Morley
... that it is the power of intellect. Stonewall Jackson has impressed the whole army down to the last and least little drummer with a sense of his mental force. I tell you, sir, that he is a thinker, and thinkers are rare, much more rare than people generally believe. There is only one man out of ten thousand who does not act wholly according to precedent and experience. Habit is so powerful that when we think we are thinking we are not thinking at all, we are merely recalling the experiences ...
— The Scouts of Stonewall • Joseph A. Altsheler
... 'O no!' cries man, 'the household and the child Must claim her energies; and all her training Must be to qualify the wife and mother: For one force loses when another gains, Since Nature is a very strict accountant; And what you give the thinker or the artist, You borrow from the mother and the wife.' With equal truth, why not object to man That what he gives the judge or politician He borrows from the husband and the father? The wife and mother best are qualified When you allow the woman breadth of culture, ...
— The Woman Who Dared • Epes Sargent
... the lungs; for we find that what we now call the pulmonary vein is connected with the lungs, and branches out in them (Fig. 1). Finding that the greater part of this system of vessels was filled with air after death, this ancient thinker very shrewdly concluded that its real business was to receive air from the lungs, and to distribute that air all through the body, so as to get rid of the grosser humours and purify the blood. That was a very natural and very obvious suggestion, and a highly ingenious ...
— William Harvey And The Discovery Of The Circulation Of The Blood • Thomas H. Huxley
... waves, the unstable foam-crests dashing hither and thither, the playful ripples of the surface, and, blind to the still and measureless waters beneath, calls woman capricious, uncertain,—varium et mutabile. But the thinker and seer, undeceived by such externals, knows that beneath this seeming change is stability unequaled in the stronger sex, a power of will to which man is a stranger, a devotion and purpose which strike him with ...
— The Physical Life of Woman: - Advice to the Maiden, Wife and Mother • Dr. George H Napheys
... boundaries of knowledge." We are under different conditions in this country, but the importance of the principle should not be overlooked. Every one has not the desire or ability to be a great scholar and thinker, but preparation for all the so-called practical careers of life should at least carry the student through the rigorous discipline of a college course up to the Junior year, when he may elect studies of a more technical nature looking ...
— Colleges in America • John Marshall Barker
... a grim kind of fate that had given to Le Beau a wife. Had she been a witch, an evil-doer and an evil-thinker like himself, the thing would not have been such an abortion of what should have been. But she was not that. Sweet-faced, with something of unusual beauty still in her pale cheeks and starving eyes—trembling at his approach and a slave ...
— Nomads of the North - A Story of Romance and Adventure under the Open Stars • James Oliver Curwood
... face of which he in time changes through 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 ask, that this god was fathered by the low ...
— Time and Change • John Burroughs
... in history. With what success his faulty and imperfect theories were engrafted upon the literature of his nation, the learned and sagacious Schlosser conclusively proves in his History of the Eighteenth Century. Says this ripe scholar and deep thinker, 'All that Bolingbroke ridicules as tedious and without talent, all that he laughs at as useless and without taste, all that which, urged by his labors and those of his like-minded associates, had ...
— Continental Monthly - Volume 1 - Issue 3 • Various
... either ill-paid, or not paid at all. I don't say it should be so, but it always is so. People, as a rule, only pay for being amused or being cheated, not for being served. Five thousand a year to your talker, and a shilling a day to your fighter, digger, and thinker, is the rule. None of the best head work in art, literature, or science, is ever paid for. How much do you think Homer got for his Iliad? or Dante for his Paradise? only bitter bread and salt, and going up and down other people's stairs. In science, ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... into smooth water, waiting, like a defeated political party, for a favorable change of the tide. When, therefore, Matthew Arnold came to America in the autumn of 1883 expressly to lecture on Emerson, as a writer and thinker, there was great expectation on both sides, and both were equally disappointed. His friends who knew that he liked Emerson, thought he had found too much fault with him, and the other party considered he had ...
— Sketches from Concord and Appledore • Frank Preston Stearns
... intellectual or as a moral movement. It is intellectual in that it presupposes a more or less general diffusion of intelligence, and moral in that its aim is justice. It could not have appeared or become a social force until man became a thinker and critic of existing social arrangements. It was first necessary that he should acquire a point of view and a habit of thought that give him a measure of intellectual independence and enable him to regard social institutions ...
— The Spirit of American Government - A Study Of The Constitution: Its Origin, Influence And - Relation To Democracy • J. Allen Smith
... an usual and a commendable practice to preface the discussion of the views of a philosophic thinker by some account of the man and of the circumstances which shaped his life and coloured his way of looking at things; but, though Zadig is cited in one of the most important chapters of Cuvier's greatest work, little is known about ...
— On the Method of Zadig - Essay #1 from "Science and Hebrew Tradition" • Thomas Henry Huxley
... endeavour to sink the individual in the universal; it is Browning's special distinction that when he is most universal he is most individual. As a thinker he conceives of humanity not as an aggregate, but as a collection of units. Most thinkers write and speak of man; Browning of men. With man as a species, with man as a society, he does not concern himself, but with individual man and man. Every man ...
— An Introduction to the Study of Browning • Arthur Symons
... time since that period, and shows that the human race must have attained a respectable age. Of course, it is all nonsense. But while I am indefatigably tramping the deck in a brown study, imagining myself no end of a great thinker, I suddenly discover that my thoughts are at home, where all is summer and loveliness, and those I have left are busy building castles in the air for the day when I shall return. Yes, yes. I spend rather too much time on this sort of ...
— Farthest North - Being the Record of a Voyage of Exploration of the Ship 'Fram' 1893-1896 • Fridtjof Nansen
... seriously, that obscurity is not always admirable, nor impetuosity always right; that disorder does not necessarily imply discretion, nor haste, security. It is sometimes difficult to understand the words of a deep thinker; but it is equally difficult to understand an idiot; and young students will find it, on the whole, the best thing they can do to strive to be clear;[31] not affectedly clear, but manfully and firmly. Mean something, ...
— Modern Painters, Volume IV (of V) • John Ruskin
... more or less. We use different terms, pursue different lines of thought, that is all. It is only the dullard, who mistakes the symbol for the idea, the letter for the spirit, the metaphor for the thought within, who is a bigot. The true thinker is an artist, the true artist is a thinker, for Art is the expression of thought in thing. The highest thought, as Connie rightly told us ...
— The Workingman's Paradise - An Australian Labour Novel • John Miller
... and a deep thinker. He liked to solve all questions for himself and did not accept readily other men's theories. He thought much on religious subjects and the future life, and liked to compare the Christian religion with the religions of Eastern countries, ...
— Vanished Arizona - Recollections of the Army Life by a New England Woman • Martha Summerhayes
... seemed as far from affecting my life as the source and flow of the sacred Ganges, and yet it was some trivial irritation of it that kept us from hearing his philosophy that night, and, more important to me, that sent another to expound ideas far different than could ever have come from the famous thinker. All the college, all in Harlansburg who were well-to-do and wise, watched for his coming expectantly; but when the door on the chapel platform opened and Judge Bundy stepped forth, he had on his arm, not the monumental ...
— David Malcolm • Nelson Lloyd
... free public libraries were clearly out of the question. Yet even here, and almost within the shadow of Bodley's great library, speaker after speaker assumed as axiomatic this curious fallacy—that a Poet is necessarily a thinker in advance of his age, and therefore peculiarly liable to persecution at the ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... ranks of life, with suitable bon-mots and embellishments;—then a little French sentiment, by way of moral, with some philosophical axioms, to show that, though he had led such a gay life, he had been a deep thinker, and that, though nobody could have thought that he had had time for reading, his genius had supplied him, he could not himself really tell how, with what other people with the study of years could not master:—all ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. V - Tales of a Fashionable Life • Maria Edgeworth
... was chosen after interminable discussion; his qualifications were thoroughly canvassed; very large powers and dignities were put into his hands. Well, what did we commonly find when we examined this gentleman? We found, not a profound thinker, not a leader of sound opinion, not a man of notable sense, but merely a wholesaler of notions so infantile that they must needs disgust a sentient suckling—in brief, a spouting geyser of fallacies and sentimentalities, a cataract of unsupported ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken
... Wherever Lucien saw him, at the library or at Flicoteaux's, there was a dignity in his manner, springing doubtless from the consciousness of a purpose that filled his life, a dignity which made him unapproachable. He had the expression of a thinker, meditation dwelt on the fine nobly carved brow. You could tell from the dark bright eyes, so clear-sighted and quick to observe, that their owner was wont to probe to the bottom of things. He gesticulated very little, his demeanor was grave. Lucien ...
— A Distinguished Provincial at Paris • Honore de Balzac
... science defines in such cases "an image of memory which differs in intensity from the normal"—that is to say, a fixed idea so persistent and growing that to the thinker ...
— Library of the World's Best Mystery and Detective Stories • Edited by Julian Hawthorne
... want to fight? Do I want to fight?" cried the furious Free-thinker. "Why, you moonstruck scarecrow of superstition, do you think your dirty saints are the only people who can die? Haven't you hung atheists, and burned them, and boiled them, and did they ever deny ...
— The Ball and The Cross • G.K. Chesterton
... imagine the mind of Charles Lamb, even in early boyhood, to have been weak or childish. In his first letters you see that he was a thinker. He is for a time made sombre by unhappy reflections. He is a reader of thoughtful books. The witticisms which he coined for sixpence each (for the Morning Chronicle) had, no doubt, less of metallic lustre than those which he ...
— Charles Lamb • Barry Cornwall
... unusually modern thinker demonstrates his noble, righteous utilitarian personal philosophy, and meticulously records his personal and travel expenses, while journeying throughout Venice and various other European cities and divided German states. Numerous kings and laypeople sought to meet and host him, since he ...
— Memoirs of Journeys to Venice and the Low Countries - [This is our volunteer's translation of the title] • Albrecht Durer
... window-seat, came to a conclusion to which others have been led before him—that life is a small thing. Oddly enough, this discovery, though it belittled his fellowmen considerably, did not belittle the thinker at all, or rather affected him ...
— The Astonishing History of Troy Town • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... St. Simon, and on that of Karl Marx, the founder of the new socialism, 'which has gained favor with the working classes in all civilized countries,' which agrees with Rousseau's plan in being democratic, and with St. Simon's in aiming at collective ownership.... The professor is an independent thinker, whose endeavor to be clear has resulted in the statement of definite conclusions. The book is a remarkably fair digest of the subject ...
— The Story of the Living Machine • H. W. Conn
... opinion. Although young, he was already deaf and gouty. This rendered his motions deliberate and very grave, and although he was fond of disputing, he in general spoke but little because his hearing was bad. I was struck with his exterior, and said to myself, this is a thinker, a man of wisdom, such a one as anybody would be happy to have for a friend. He frequently addressed himself to me without paying the least compliment, and this strengthened the favorable opinion I had already formed of him. He said but little to me of myself or my books, ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... know nothing about manufacturing; the manufacturer may know nothing about farming; the artist, the explorer, the thinker, the inventor and the scientist may know nothing about any field of endeavor other than his own, ...
— Tyranny of God • Joseph Lewis
... be a superb fit. As the coat was the personal theatricals-equipment of Mr. Harris Hartwig, who was shaped like the dome of the county court-house, Lulu looked suspicious, but Harry was discovered making bread pills, and she was so engaged in telling him what she thought—Lord, what a thinker the little woman was!—that she ...
— The Innocents - A Story for Lovers • Sinclair Lewis
... reflections of a sage. Most of the extracts are from Latin and Greek authors, but not a few are from the Books of Ecclesiastes and Ecclesiasticus and the Epistles of St. Paul. Here one sees written by the hand of the sixteenth century thinker ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... been mischievous; and higher, whether praise or blame, I know not how to give. Nevertheless I would in the outset, and with the utmost sincerity, admit concerning Messrs. Wallace and Darwin that neither can be held as the more profound and conscientious thinker; neither can be put forward as the more ready to acknowledge obligation to the great writers on evolution who had preceded him, or to place his own developments in closer and more conspicuous historical connection with earlier thought upon the subject; ...
— Essays on Life, Art and Science • Samuel Butler
... to tea.' Once, on occasion of discussing an important problem of physical geography, Ritter quoted him, and every body looked up at him. Humboldt bowed to us, with his usual good nature, which put the youngsters into the happiest humor. We felt ourselves elevated by the presence of this great thinker and most laborious student. We seemed to be joined with him in the pursuit of great ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... pleasure in giving generously, but always judiciously and without ostentation. On one occasion he, with a few of his friends, paid off the debt from the house of an eminent scholar; on another, he helped to rebuild for a great thinker the home which had been burned. At Harvard, more than fifty years after his graduation, he founded a traveling scholarship and named it in honor of the president of ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... interference of any insolent member of the insolent whole. It was this mixture of deep love and profound respect for the eternal PEOPLE, and of calm, passionless disdain for that capricious charlatan, the momentary PUBLIC, which made Ernest Maltravers an original and solitary thinker; and an actor, in reality modest and benevolent, in appearance arrogant and unsocial. "Pauperism, in contradistinction to poverty," he was wont to say, "is the dependence upon other people for existence, not on our own exertions; there is a moral pauperism in the man who ...
— Ernest Maltravers, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... uplifting, have waked but poor ideas in poor minds; for words, if they seem to mean anything, must always seem to mean something within the scope of the mind hearing them. Words cannot convey the thought of a thinker to a no-thinker; of a largely aspiring and self-discontented soul, to a creature satisfied with his poverty, and counting his meagre faculty the human standard. Neither will they readily reveal the mind of one old in thought, to one who has but lately begun to think. The ...
— Hope of the Gospel • George MacDonald
... together in a definite organism; it is the life-breath within the organism, the portion of the universal Life-Breath, appropriated by the organism during the span of existence that we speak of as "a life". Kama is the aggregate of appetites, passions, and emotions, common to man and brute. Manas is the Thinker in us, the Intelligence. Buddhi is the vehicle wherein Atma, the Spirit, dwells, and in which alone it ...
— Death—and After? • Annie Besant
... some book afterwards, for he distinctly stated that he fell into a kind of doze, as he sat on the old axle-tree looking at the decayed mail coaches, and that he was suddenly awakened by some deep church bell striking two. Now, my uncle was never a fast thinker, and if he had thought all these things, I am quite certain it would have taken him till full half-past two o'clock at the very least. I am, therefore, decidedly of opinion, gentlemen, that my uncle fell into a kind of doze, without having ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens
... 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 ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... been the motives consciously or unconsciously affecting Mr. Gladstone's course of action—these and a hundred other enquiries of the like sort, which engage the attention and distract the judgment of the public, possess, in the eyes of any serious thinker occupied in estimating the strength of the arguments for and against Home Rule, no material importance whatever. His concern is the merit or demerit of a legislative enactment. He is not concerned at all with the conduct or the character of legislators. Mr. Gladstone's motives may be ...
— England's Case Against Home Rule • Albert Venn Dicey
... make-up, giving them a queer, sinister expression. Yank has not washed either face or body. He stands out in contrast to them, a blackened, brooding figure. He is seated forward on a bench in the exact attitude of Rodin's "The Thinker." The others, most of them smoking pipes, are staring at Yank half-apprehensively, as if fearing an outburst; half-amusedly, as if they saw a joke somewhere ...
— The Hairy Ape • Eugene O'Neill
... Eusebius "Nature's private secretary," and by Dante "the master of those that know,"—the greatest thinker of the ancient world, and the most influential of all time,—was born of Greek parents at Stagira, in the mountains of Macedonia, in B.C. 384. Of his mother, Phaestis, almost nothing is known. His father, Nicomachus, belonged to a medical family, and acted as private physician to Amyntas, ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... only mention to recall a great thinker to the mind of every well-informed man,—Shaftesbury lived at a time when much disturbance reigned in the religion of his native land, when the dominant church sought by force to subdue men of other modes of thought. State and morals were also ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. II • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... system of decoration by mosaics well advanced. The absolute necessity of using the dome was emphasised, not only by the Sunday evening services, but by the appointment of HENRY PARRY LIDDON to a resident's stall. Competent judges have asserted that Henry Melvill, though not the greater thinker, was the greater preacher of the two; but Melvill was almost past his best on his appointment in 1856, and he is rather associated with the choir than the dome. Be this as it may, Wren would have been gratified indeed to have seen the favourite offspring of ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of St. Paul - An Account of the Old and New Buildings with a Short Historical Sketch • Arthur Dimock
... and without explaining his pleasure to himself, the slender lines on the petals of dark flowers, the delicacy of their rich tunics of gold or purple, green or azure, the fringes, so profusely beautiful, of their calyxes or leaves, their ivory or velvet textures. Later, a thinker as well as a poet, he would detect the reason of these innumerable differences in a single nature, by discovering the indication of unknown faculties; for from day to day he made progress in the interpretation of the Divine ...
— The Hated Son • Honore de Balzac
... it will not cause any one a shock to be told that "the greatest thinker of all time" was not exactly a ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 12 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Scientists • Elbert Hubbard
... and unhealthy to go without these bandages. Their satisfied smiles gave no indication of the discomfort they might be feeling. But Nature always took her revenge. Every now and then there would arise some individual in revolt, some vigorous artist or unbridled thinker who would brutally break his bonds and set the city fathers by the ears. They were so clever that, if the rebel had not been stifled in the embryo, and became the stronger, they never troubled to fight him—(a fight might have produced all sorts of scandalous outbreaks):—they bought him up. If he ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland
... much attention to 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 ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 21, August, 1891 • Various
... knew a man who made me a map of the opposite hemisphere of the moon. He was crazy. I knew another who taught me what country lay upon the other side of the grave. He was a most acute thinker-as he ...
— The Fiend's Delight • Dod Grile |
