"Thinker" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... air of disparaging riches, of doing homage to private worth, of honoring patriotism, and so on, through all the commonplaces of creditable morality. But in the midst of this surface display, and in defiance of his ostentatious pretensions, Pope is not in any deep or sincere sense a moral thinker; and in his own heart there was a misgiving, not to be silenced, that he was not. Yet this is strange. Surely, Lord Carlisle, a man of ability and experience, might have credit given him for power to form a right judgment on such a question as that—power ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v2 • Thomas de Quincey
... remarkable oration delivered at his grave by Verner von Heidenstam, in which he was styled a martyr in the great cause of the emancipation of thought. Whatever may be thought of his moral character, Almquist was a great thinker and a wonderfully versatile writer. The last of the romantics, he has been called a realist, a psychologist, and a symbolist, and he was certainly something of all these, half a century before the terms became battle-cries in literature, and came to designate literary schools. One critic has made ...
— Norwegian Life • Ethlyn T. Clough
... sovereign reality of the national government. The effort to do this formed the silent inner experience behind the surging external events in the stormy months between April and July. It was governed by a firmness not paralleled in his outward course. As always, Lincoln the thinker asked no advice. It was Lincoln the administrator, painfully learning a new trade, who was timid, wavering, pliable in council. Behind the apprentice in statecraft, the lonely thinker stood apart, inflexible as ever, impervious to fear. The thinking which he formulated in the late spring ...
— Lincoln • Nathaniel Wright Stephenson
... to think, and I get stunned by thoughts that strike me as being dug right out of the centre. Sometimes I'd like to write them down; but I can't write; I can only talk as I'm talking to you. If you weren't so high up, and so much cleverer than I am, and such a thinker, I'd like you to be my safety-ring, if you would. I could tell the key-thoughts to you when they came to me, before I forgot them with all their bearings; and by-and-by they'd do me a lot of good when I got away from this influence, and back into the machinery of the Western world again. If ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... years ago, a profound but neglected thinker, George Drysdale, emphasized the necessity of a thorough understanding of man's sexual nature in approaching economic, political and social problems. "Before we can undertake the calm and impartial investigation of any social problem, ...
— The Pivot of Civilization • Margaret Sanger
... him or in advance of him. A hard case, to which nothing could reconcile a man, except that the faithful discharge of daily duties in his personal relations with his parishioners will make him useful enough in his way, though as a thinker he may cease to exist before he has ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 26, December, 1859 • Various
... 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 their faith? Do you think we don't want to ...
— The Ball and The Cross • G.K. Chesterton
... the Marquesas Islands, and when I left him he was in full tide of discourse on all things sacred and profane. But he seems to put away the objective side of his life, and to shut himself up in this cold north as a cloistered thinker.' ...
— Typee - A Romance of the South Sea • Herman Melville
... socialistic systems, who gave him the substance of the Hegelian ideas. During the winter of 1844-45, Charles Grun had some long conversations with Proudhon, which determined, very decisively, not the ideas, which belonged exclusively to the bisontin thinker, but the form of the important work on which he labored after 1843, and which was published in ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon
... I never smoke, either. I believe a man is a better thinker and cooler business man without it," said Uncle Ben. "But, tell me, what is the tremendous secret that made you lock the door and pull ...
— The Blue Birds' Winter Nest • Lillian Elizabeth Roy
... a moment, frowning. Then he said: "I must admit that I'm not a good intuitive thinker, Dr. Turnbull. I have not the capacity for it, I suppose. That's why I'm an engineer instead of a basic research man; that's why I'll never get a Scholar's degree." Again he paused before continuing. "For that reason, Scholar ...
— Dead Giveaway • Gordon Randall Garrett
... back from these far journeys to the point where we are, often to a place where we seem to stand marking time with no result. There are conditions of life and social complications in which the sage, the thinker, and the ignorant are alike unable to see clearly. The present age has often brought us face to face with such situations; I am sure that he who meets them with our method ...
— The Simple Life • Charles Wagner
... or had been permanently incapacitated, or had wasted long periods in endeavours to recover health. I do but echo the opinion of all the observant persons I have spoken to, that immense injury is being done by this high-pressure life—the physique is being undermined. That subtle thinker and poet whom you have lately had to mourn, Emerson, says, in his essay on the Gentleman, that the first requisite is that he shall be a good animal. The requisite is a general one—it extends to the man, to the father, to the citizen. We hear a great deal about "the vile body;" and many ...
— The Contemporary Review, January 1883 - Vol 43, No. 1 • Various
... affected in private life, and a dignity not unbecoming the grandson of Confucius. But we miss the reach of thought and capacity for administration which belonged to the Sage. It is with him, how- 1 This conversation is given in the Li Chi, II. Sect. II. Pt. ii, 1. ever, as a thinker and writer that we have to do, and his rank in that capacity will appear from the examination of the Chung Yung in the section iv below. His place in the temples of the Sage has been that of one of his four assessors, since the ...
— THE CHINESE CLASSICS (PROLEGOMENA) Unicode Version • James Legge
... students the value of power and promptitude in combination, for their professional purposes; the uses to them of nearness of the {Nous}, and of happy guessing; and how you may see the sense, and neatness, and pith of that excellent thinker, as well as best of all story-tellers, Miss Austen, when she says in Emma, "Depend upon it, a lucky guess is never merely luck, there is always some talent in it." Talent here denoting intelligence and will in action. In all ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... 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.' ...
— Cleo The Magnificent - The Muse of the Real • Louis Zangwill
... have been presented. I feel something like the man who says, "There are good things to be said in praise of Socialism or Nationalism, as compared with the crushing and wearing methods of competition; but what the world is waiting for is the thinker who shall either show us how to reconcile the new system with human liberty, or else convince us that we can do without liberty." In the mean-time I believe in God, in His wise purpose in the creation of the world, in His providential ...
— White Slaves • Louis A Banks
... be no diversity. Now, truth and right is one; and yet we judge not one thing, we think not aright. Yet is the original impulse true to its purpose, but, in its passage through the many channels of the mind, is strangely perverted. It is eloquently said by a modern writer, a deep thinker, "Thus does the conscience of man project itself athwart whatsoever of knowledge, or surmise, or imagination, understanding, faculty, acquirement, or natural disposition he has in him; and, like light through coloured glass, paint strange pictures on the rim of the horizon ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 348 • Various
... point; I'm not Disposed to grapple with so great a matter. 'T would tie my thinker in a double knot And drive me staring mad as any hatter— Though I submit that hatters are, in fact, Sane, and all other human ...
— Shapes of Clay • Ambrose Bierce
... the foremost living thinker in the psychological and sociological fields, and this volume is an important contribution to the science of which it treats.... It will prove more popular than any of its author's other creations, for it is more plainly addressed to the people and has a more practical and less speculative cast. ...
— Fungi: Their Nature and Uses • Mordecai Cubitt Cooke
... inclination, very little of a worker. He is, first, a wanter—a bundle of instincts; second, a feeler—a bundle of emotions; last and least, he is a thinker. What real work he does is done not because he likes it but because it serves one of these first ...
— How to Analyze People on Sight - Through the Science of Human Analysis: The Five Human Types • Elsie Lincoln Benedict and Ralph Paine Benedict
... ballads 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
... incalculable," declared Walter Bagehot in his famous essay on The English Constitution. He continues: "Without her in England, the present English Government would fail and pass away." It is interesting to read the reasons which such a clear and distinguished thinker gives to explain the hold which the Monarchy retains upon the English nation ...
— Queen Victoria • E. Gordon Browne
... Carlyle.[678] He prefixed, from his own pen, a thoughtful and ingenious essay on Proportion, as good a substitute for the fifth Book of Euclid as could have been given in the space; and quite enough to show that he would have been a distinguished teacher and thinker on first principles. But he left ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume II (of II) • Augustus de Morgan
... that he was the Ulysses of the five, and as such his fame had spread along the whole border, and among the Indian tribes. Hidden perhaps by his lazy manner, but underneath that yellow thatch of his the shiftless one was a thinker, a deep thinker, and a nobler thinker than the one who sat before Troy town, because his thoughts were ...
— The Keepers of the Trail - A Story of the Great Woods • Joseph A. Altsheler
... upon one side, and the Protestants on the other, but both religions were necessary to Henry the Huguenot: The bold free-thinker adroitly balanced himself upon each creed. In making use of a stern and conscientious Calvinist, like Maximilian de Bethune, in his first assault upon the theological professor who now stood in Elizabeth's place, he showed the exquisite tact ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... Palace of Fine Arts at Night—Paul Elder Co. Tympanum, Palace of Varied Industries Tympanum, Palace of Education "The Genius of Creation" Pavilions of Australia and Canada (2),—H. W. Mossby, J. L. Padilla Pavilions of France and the Netherlands (2) Rodin's "The Thinker"—Friedrich Woiter A Court in the Italian Pavilion The Pavilion of Sweden Pavilions of Argentina and Japan (2) The New York State Building—Pacific Photo and Art Co. California Building Illinois and Missouri (2) Massachusetts and Pennsylvania (2) Inside ...
— The Jewel City • Ben Macomber
... North Pole, God's truth it is!" said the master, who was inclined to be a free-thinker; "God's truth, I tell you! The other's ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... painter, architect, military engineer; praised as a poet; befriended with the best and greatest of his contemporaries; recognised as unique, not only in the art of sculpture. If he felt some pride of race, we cannot blame the plain-liver and high-thinker, who, robbing himself of luxuries and necessaries even, enabled his kinsmen to maintain their rank among folk gently ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... design, I do hereby invite all persons who are willing to encourage so public-spirited a project to bring in their contributions as soon as possible; and to apprehend forthwith any politician whom they shall catch raving in a coffee-house, or any free-thinker whom they shall find publishing his deliriums, or any other person who shall give the like manifest signs of a crazed imagination. And I do at the same time give this public notice to all the madmen about this great city, that they may return to their senses with all ...
— English Satires • Various
... your writings, I should dismiss this latter statement of yours by calling on the proper authorities to take cognizance of you as a most dangerous lunatic, but as your business career and your writings show you to be an able financier, a successful business man, an advanced thinker and brilliant writer, I feel that mental derangement cannot be the cause ...
— Frenzied Finance - Vol. 1: The Crime of Amalgamated • Thomas W. Lawson
... intellect—but deeply sad too, in more ways than one. I live in dread of the possible effect on you and Kate of the account of his education by his father—the principles right, the application so wofully wrong. Mill was a learned scholar, a great thinker, a good man, partly in consequence, partly in spite of it.... Happily you have more Popes than one, as good for you as it was for the world in days of old. Happily, too, there's such a thing as love, innate, intuitive, instinctive (oh, horrible!), which is wise ...
— Lady John Russell • Desmond MacCarthy and Agatha Russell
... A profound thinker has said, "No married woman can represent the female world, for she belongs to her husband. The idea of Woman must be represented by ...
— Woman in the Ninteenth Century - and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition - and Duties, of Woman. • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... be held in forms in which this uncanny doctrine of absolute identity was avoided; but at the best it meant an endless monotonous iteration, which was singularly unlikely to stimulate speculative interest in the future. It must be remembered that no thinker had any means of knowing how near to the end of his cycle the present hour might be. The most influential school of the later Greek age, the Stoics, adopted the theory of cycles, and the natural psychological effect of the theory ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury
... book of extraordinary merit in matter and style, and does you great credit as a thinker and writer.—Hon. CALVIN E. PRATT, of ...
— Harper's Young People, February 3, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... less deep thinker than Botticelli would have made her parched with thirst, and burnt with heat. But the voice of God, through nature, to the Arab or the Moor, is not in the thirst, but in the fountain—not in the desert, but in the grass of it. And this Libyan Sibyl ...
— Ariadne Florentina - Six Lectures on Wood and Metal Engraving • John Ruskin
... vivacity. His large cheek-bones were much too prominent; the lower part of his face was small, ugly and, as it were, compressed, while his high broad forehead crowned the whole and stamped it as that of a thinker, as a fine cupola may crown an insignificant ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... of empty terms that has been and is conspicuously dangerous to the thinker, the class of negative terms. The negative term is in plain fact just nothing; "Not-A" is the absence of any trace of the quality that constitutes A, it is the rest of everything for ever. But there seems to be a real bias in the mind towards regarding "Not-A" as a thing mysteriously ...
— First and Last Things • H. G. Wells
... 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 ...
— Ernest Maltravers, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... or the other. We regard it (in other words) as a positive objection to a reasoner that he has contrived to reach the object of his reasoning. We call a man a bigot or a slave of dogma because he is a thinker who has thought thoroughly and to a definite end. We say that the juryman is not a juryman because he has brought in a verdict. We say that the judge is not a judge because he gives judgment. We say that the sincere believer has no right to vote, ...
— All Things Considered • G. K. Chesterton
... of man is always a thinker, usually a professional man, and almost invariably a man of able brain. He is nearly always well-formed, physically, and of good ...
— Raspberry Jam • Carolyn Wells
... stick in for a handle" was dubbed "the spoon-maker." At that time we were earning names for ourselves by suggestions; we started with Fair Hair, Curly Hair, Big Teeth, Long Legs, and arrived at Quick Runner, Climber, and even Thinker. ...
— The Child Under Eight • E.R. Murray and Henrietta Brown Smith
... their purpose and animates their feeling, is cast in the mould of highly abstract ideas. They express themselves in phrases which to most people seem cold or meaningless,—an empty substitute for the warmth of religious life. But to the thinker himself these phrases stand for profound realities. It may be that words which have to other ears the dryness of a mathematical formula are to him the expression of moral purpose and sacred trust. Such an one may say: "I do not recognize a personal God, ...
— The Chief End of Man • George S. Merriam
... chance, all right, never you fear. I'm the only one who will, for after you're disposed of, and Jack has gone moony, this expedition will need a clear thinker. There's where your uncle Tom ...
— Wings of the Wind • Credo Harris
... reality, however, this beautiful little treatise belongs to a period when that movement had nearly spent itself. Thomas a Kempis, as Dr. Bigg has said,[1] was only a semi-mystic. He tones down the most characteristic doctrines of Eckhart, who is the great original thinker of the German mystical school, and seems in some ways to revert to an earlier type of devotional literature. The "Imitation" may perhaps be described as an idealised picture of monastic piety, drawn at a time ...
— Light, Life, and Love • W. R. Inge
... an unexpected charm to the almost severe features of the host. His usual expression was rather sad, and a trifle haughty. His forehead was broad and high, the forehead of a thinker and a student rather than that of a soldier; his eyes were of a deep, clear blue, looking directly at everything; his nose was straight and regular, and his beard and moustache were blond, slightly gray at the corners of the mouth and the chin. His whole ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... the year 1730-1, there was sold by auction, at St. Paul's Coffee-house, in St. Paul's Church-yard (beginning every evening at five o'clock), the library of the celebrated Free-Thinker, ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... while its promoters admit as an axiom the superiority of moral and religious attainments, they are found in practice to bestow their chief attention, and to lavish most of their approbation on physical investigations and on intellectual pursuits. Every sound thinker must see, that by doing so, the first principles of philosophy are violated; and many well meaning persons are, by this inverted state of public opinion, insensibly drawn away from the more valuable food provided ...
— A Practical Enquiry into the Philosophy of Education • James Gall
... each day or lesson, but of one day on another, and of each term on the preceding, are things quite overlooked, and undreamed of, or, at the best, imperfectly and fragmentarily attempted. But these, in so far as, he can secure their benefits, are just the elements that make the thinker, the scholar, the man of real learning or intellectual power in any ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. VI, June, 1862 - Devoted To Literature and National Policy • Various
... 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 ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 7: A Sketch • John Morley
... in the portrait is that of a thinker, a poet, and an artist. It is the face of one who held intimate converse with the great poets of the ages, of one whose favorite books were the Bible, Virgil, Theocritus and Shakespeare. Though Millet had many genial traits in his nature, his expression here is profoundly serious. Such an ...
— Jean Francois Millet • Estelle M. Hurll
... all wrong' are they?" And he gave a glance back at the beautiful little church in its exquisite design and completed perfection."'Out of keeping with early Norman walls!' Wise Leveson! He ignores all periods of transition as if they had never existed—as if they had no meaning for the thinker as well as the architect—as if the movement upward from the Norman, to the Early Pointed style showed no indication of progress! And whereas a church should always be a veritable 'sermon in stone' expressive of the various generations that have wrought their best on it, he limits himself ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... is a larger and more elaborate task, but it is none the less cardinal and essential. Indeed it is more cardinal and essential. The true knight has to be not only no coward, no self-pamperer, no egotist. He has to be a philosopher. He has to be no hasty or foolish thinker. His judgment no more than his courage is ...
— The Research Magnificent • H. G. Wells
... a Jacobin and a free-thinker, who could only be got to attend church by the positive orders of the Governor-General, cried over the last volume until he was too ill to appear at dinner. [Degenerate readers of our own day have actually been provided with an abridgment of Clarissa, itself ...
— Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay • George Otto Trevelyan
... statesman was once asked, "Can you comprehend how Jesus Christ could be both God and Man?" The great thinker replied, "No, sir; I cannot. And I would be ashamed to acknowledge Him as my Saviour if I could, for then He would not be ...
— The Work Of Christ - Past, Present and Future • A. C. Gaebelein
... should have gone crazy over a man if I'd remained unmarried forty thousand years," she retorted, severely. "I married Socrates because I loved him and admired his sculpture; but when he gave up sculpture and became a thinker he simply tried me beyond all endurance, he was so thoughtless, with the result that, having ventured once or twice to show my natural resentment, I have been handed down to posterity as a shrew. I've never complained, ...
— A House-Boat on the Styx • John Kendrick Bangs
... so many "buts" rising up in the way. The slightest hitch would spoil all, and they would be detected and subjected to the roughest of usage, even if they were not shot. But it was worth the risk, and the thinker's heart began to beat faster, and his hand stole to the part of his jacket where he had hidden the despatch, and as he did so he mentally saw himself and his companion riding through the darkness with the Boers, and waiting ...
— A Dash from Diamond City • George Manville Fenn
... Platonist.[1] Nominalists and realists, intuitionists and empiricists, idealists and materialists, represent different forms of a fundamental antithesis which appears to run through all philosophy. Each thinker is apt to take the postulates congenial to his own mind as the plain dictates of reason. Controversies between such opposites appear to be hopeless. They have been aptly compared by Dr. Venn to the erection of a snow-bank to dam a river. The snow melts and swells the torrent which it was ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume I. • Leslie Stephen
... as isolated in their little corner as if in a nook of the woods. The crowds surged to and fro, and its units were "but as trees walking" to their oblivious eyes. Joyce was discovering new depths in George Dalton's nature. He was a thinker, and as his thinking had grown out of contact with men, rather than from grubbing in books, it was often of ...
— Joyce's Investments - A Story for Girls • Fannie E. Newberry
... sanctifying the heart of man. Mountains seem to have been built for the human race, as at once their schools and cathedrals, full of treasures of illuminated manuscript for the scholar, kindly in simple lessons to the worker, quiet in pale cloisters for the thinker, glowing ...
— The Road and the Roadside • Burton Willis Potter
... great leap. Here was hope! But no; he fixed me with a cold and glittering eye, searching with the chill of space till my financial status stood before him shivering and ashamed. I communed with myself: By his brow he is a thinker, but his intellect has been prostituted to a mercenary exaction of toll from misery. His nerve centres of judgment and will have not been employed in solving the problems of life, but in maintaining his own solvency by the insolvency of others. He trades upon sorrow and ...
— Revolution and Other Essays • Jack London
... had no use for philosophy or speculative thought which could not be reduced to useful action. He was an eminently practical thinker. His mind was without subtlety, and he had little imagination. A life of thought for its own sake; the life of a dreamer or idealist; a life like that of Coleridge, with his paralysis of will and abnormal activity ...
— Four Americans - Roosevelt, Hawthorne, Emerson, Whitman • Henry A. Beers
... his arm round her shoulders. "Well, it is not too late," he said, bending over her. But the girl shrank from his arm, and he realised it instantly. He was aware directly that there was some feeling in her not quite fathomed nor understood. It puzzled him. He was far too deep a thinker, far too refined a nature to treat his women as inanimate toys to be used for his amusement, either with or without their consent, as the chance might be. He knew them to be, and treated them as, individual ...
— Six Women • Victoria Cross
... plans of study. Such a criticism might have had weight in the days when the mind was supposed to inhabit the body as a tenant a house, and have no relation to it other than that of a casual occupant. But that opinion is antiquated. More than three-fourths of a century ago the far-seeing thinker, Wilhelm von Humboldt, laid down the maxim that the phenomena of mind and matter obey laws identical in kind;[6-1] and a recent historian of science sums up the result of the latest research in ...
— The Religious Sentiment - Its Source and Aim: A Contribution to the Science and - Philosophy of Religion • Daniel G. Brinton
... buttons—it is expected of him—but in his more vital privacies, in the matter of braces for example, he still turns to string. He conducts his house without enterprise, but with eminent decorum. His movements are slow, and he is a great thinker. But he has a reputation for wisdom and for a respectable parsimony in the village, and his knowledge of the roads of the South ...
— The Invisible Man • H. G. Wells
... hour, then 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 ...
— The House of Walderne - A Tale of the Cloister and the Forest in the Days of the Barons' Wars • A. D. Crake
... inaugural discourse upon the study of universal history. The address, which was subsequently published in the Merkur, begins with a vigorous elucidation of the difference between the bread-and-butter scholar and the philosophic thinker. The former is depicted in caustic terms as a narrow, selfish, timorous time-server. He is the enemy of reform and discovery, because he is forever dreading that the enlargement of the human outlook may disturb his little private routine. He cares for truth only so far as it can be turned to his ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... to the surface some yards from the overturned boat, and, looking round for Mr Mifflin, discovered that great thinker treading ...
— The Man Upstairs and Other Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... blood, with the ranging of his theme. The subject became clearer to her subjugated wits, until the mental vivacity he roused on certain impetuous phrases of assertion caused her pride to waken up and rebel as she took a glance at herself, remembering that she likewise was a thinker, deemed in her society an original thinker, an intrepid thinker and talker, not so very much beneath this man in audacity of brain, it might be. He kindled her thus, and the close-shut but expanded and knew the fretting desire ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... superficial thinker, who imagines that all instances of mutual deference are to be understood in earnest, and that a man would be more esteemable for being ignorant of his own merits and accomplishments. A small bias towards modesty, even in the internal sentiment, is ...
— An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals • David Hume
... never expected that particular pleasure in this life, and he will never have it again; but for this once he has it to the full. Mr. James Gilmour, though a man of whom any country may be proud, is not a deep thinker, and not a bright writer, and not a man with the gift of topographical, or, indeed, any other kind of description. He thinks nothing extraordinary, and has nothing to say quotable. There is a faint, far-off humour in him, humour sternly repressed; but that, so far as we know, is the only ...
— James Gilmour of Mongolia - His diaries, letters, and reports • James Gilmour
... north. It is easy to suppose that Bodhidharma being the head of some heretical sect had to fly and followed the example of many monks in going to China. But if so, no record of his school is forthcoming from his native land, though the possibility that he was more than an individual thinker and represented some movement unknown to us cannot be denied. We might suppose too that since Nagarjuna and Aryadeva were southerners, their peculiar doctrines were coloured by Dravidian ideas. But our available documents indicate that the ...
— Hinduism And Buddhism, Volume II. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... my counsels, perhaps the notion of anything like guidance offended him; perhaps it was the phrase, "bear-leadership," and the half-threat of betraying him, has done the mischief.' Now the gallant soldier was a slow thinker; it took him a deal of time to arrange the details of any matter in his mind, and when he tried to muster his ideas there were many which would not answer the call, and of those which came, there were not a few which seemed to present themselves in a refractory and unwilling ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever
... made aware how very great the advancement, during that period, of the intellectual condition of the people of Athens. He has been in Athens all the time, but how very different have the Athenians become! And unless he were under the guidance of some more powerful thinker than ordinarily wields the pen of history, he might be little aware of the change. Mr Grote points ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, No. 382, October 1847 • Various
... writers 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 ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... 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 ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... the life of the woman within it. She was set apart with the thing that had been man stretched out above in stupor, or restlessly babbling over his dirty tale. God knew why! Yet, physician and unsentimental thinker that he was, he felt to a certain degree the inevitableness of her fate. The common thing would be to shake the dirt from one's shoes, to turn one's back on the diseased and mistaken being, "to put it away where it would not trouble,"—but she did ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... as an introduction to certain remarks advocating a more definite use of terms relating to tone production by the human voice:—"The correct use of words is the most potent factor in the development of the thinker." If this statement has any basis of fact whatsoever to support it then it must be evident to the merest novice in musical work that the popular use of many common terms by musicians is keeping a good ...
— Music Notation and Terminology • Karl W. Gehrkens
... for him a scandal to pure reason: for it was not organized by a legislative philosopher in accordance with a sound principle, but is the work of one generation after another, according to manifold and changing necessities. It is not a product of logic, but of history, and the new-fledged thinker shrugs his shoulders as he looks up and sees what the ancient tenement is, the foundations of which are arbitrary, its architecture confused, and its many repairs plainly visible.—In the second place, whatever degree of perfection preceding institutions, laws, and customs have reached, these ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 3 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 2 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... we need scarcely say, could only have been given by a thinker who had grown up in the intellectual atmosphere of Deism; the Deity which he contemplates is One who works upon the world purely ab extra, who cannot be spoken of as the Creator, except by courtesy; ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... to give the order, and Innocent, left to herself for a moment, moved softly up to her father's picture and gazed upon it with all her soul in her eyes. It was a wonderful face—a face expressive of the highest thought and intelligence—the face of a thinker or a poet, though the finely moulded mouth and chin had nothing of the weakness which sometimes marks a mere dreamer of dreams. Timidly glancing about her to make sure she was not observed, she kissed the portrait, the cold glass which ...
— Innocent - Her Fancy and His Fact • Marie Corelli
... also those of political and even of military foresight, and either inspire the besieged to a victorious resistance, or compel himself, alone in a cityful of fanatics, to counsel surrender. A siege can turn a prophet or quiet thinker into a hero. ...
— Jeremiah • George Adam Smith
... 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 ...
— The Common Sense of Socialism - A Series of Letters Addressed to Jonathan Edwards, of Pittsburg • John Spargo
... Burchill. "Because Barthorpe immediately sprang upon me the matter of the will. And I just as immediately recognized—I think I may count myself as a quick thinker—that the really important matter just then was not the murder of Jacob Herapath, but the ultimate disposal of Jacob ...
— The Herapath Property • J. S. Fletcher
... 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 manufacturer in his native town. Apart from the avocations of business, much ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume IV. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... the most intimate and affecting of all the arts, has done much to create as well as to express the religious emotions, thus modifying more or less deeply the fabric of belief to which at first sight it seems only to minister. The musician has done his part as well as the prophet and the thinker in the making of religion. Every faith has its appropriate music, and the difference between the creeds might almost be expressed in musical notation. The interval, for example, which divides the wild revels of Cybele from the stately ritual of ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... dreaming!" laughed Shirley, the quiet, sensible girl. Never in the world would Shirley have dreamed or let her imagination run wild. She was a practical, well-balanced girl, a clear thinker and not given to romantic flights ...
— The Merriweather Girls in Quest of Treasure • Lizette M. Edholm
... poetry. But that Mr. Davidson (who can write excellent poetry) should write instead laborious metaphysics in defence of this doctrine of will, does show that the doctrine of will has taken hold of men. Even Mr. H.G.Wells has half spoken in its language; saying that one should test acts not like a thinker, but like an artist, saying, "I FEEL this curve is right," or "that line SHALL go thus." They are all excited; and well they may be. For by this doctrine of the divine authority of will, they think they can break out of the doomed fortress ...
— Orthodoxy • G. K. Chesterton
... double-entente, which its parent will not willingly forego. The smallest jokelet is a marketable commodity. The dinner-table is sacrificed to Punch. There is too much competition in these days, too many hungry candidates for the crumbs that fall from the thinker's table, not to make him chary of his offerings. In these days, every scrap of knowledge—every happy thought—every felicitous turn of expression, is of some value to a literary man; the forms of periodical literature are so many and so ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850 • Various
... 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 ...
— Insights and Heresies Pertaining to the Evolution of the Soul • Anna Bishop Scofield
... 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
... story. The hero, an independent and vigorous thinker, sees life, and tells about it in ...
— The Wall Street Girl • Frederick Orin Bartlett
... Review, in 1876, and are now republished, with some other materials for the author's proposed work, under the title of The Postulates of English Political Economy.[10] These essays, which emanated from a well-trained, scientific mind, an independent thinker, and one who was perfectly free in his criticisms, deal almost exclusively with one side of what the author wished and intended to say; but as they stand, they prove that had he lived he would have shed much light on the problem, ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 6 • Various
... Fannikin, and she in return called him her dear Daddy. In truth, he seems to have done much more than her real father 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 Dr. Burney's concerts. They had, indeed, been commenced at his suggestion, and when he visited London he constantly attended them. But when he grew old, and when gout, brought on ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... propounded by Mr. Darwin. For Lamarck, sagacious as many of his views were, mingled them with so much that was crude and even absurd, as to neutralize the benefit which his originality might have effected, had he been a more sober and cautious thinker; and though I have heard of the announcement of a formula touching "the ordained continuous becoming of organic forms," it is obvious that it is the first duty of a hypothesis to be intelligible, and that a ...
— On the Relations of Man to the Lower Animals • Thomas H. Huxley
... the 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, ...
— Crowded Out! and Other Sketches • Susie F. Harrison
... been studying somewhat and pondering more the secret of his success, and I have sat down this evening to try and clear up my own shadowy thoughts by reducing them to form. I often take my pen for such a purpose. Is it not Bacon who says the pen makes an accurate thinker? ...
— Laicus - The experiences of a Layman in a Country Parish • Lyman Abbott
... and perception ends in reason. These are the two sides of man's nature, and the individual is determined and ruled by whichever side in him happens to be temperamentally dominant. I have already classed you as a feeler, myself as a thinker. This is, I think true. You, I am confident, feel it to be true. I reason why it is true. You accept it on faith as true, lose sight of the argument forthwith, and proceed to express it in emotional terms—which is to say that ...
— The Kempton-Wace Letters • Jack London
... not quite so squeamish to-day; and a thinker of our own time would scarcely deny that English society is very largely governed at this moment by the same kind of rules that Sir Walter Scott thought to be so bad. But here we need not condemn English society in particular. All European ...
— Books and Habits from the Lectures of Lafcadio Hearn • Lafcadio Hearn
... 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 ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... don't quite understand," said Peter, and looked as bewildered as he felt. He wasn't a quick thinker. "What is it you wish ...
— The Purple Heights • Marie Conway Oemler
... he got to be credited, in the long run, with the belief that the devil's tail was not as long as it is represented in the old Bible pictures. When the Boers were defeated by Sekukuni, they looked upon it as a punishment from God for having a "free thinker" for President. The commandos disbanded themselves. At the same time Cetewayo, the Zulu Chief, was threatening the Boers in the south. Caught between two fires, without resources or organisation, annihilation was before ...
— Boer Politics • Yves Guyot
... seeks to delve either into the history or the constructive coaching of the game at the Academy, the younger men, as well as the older, will always answer your questions by saying "Go ask Koehler." Always a hard worker and serious thinker, he is apt to give an almost nightly demonstration during the season of the foundation ...
— Football Days - Memories of the Game and of the Men behind the Ball • William H. Edwards
... prevailed amongst the "Intelligentia" that the function of writers, thinkers, and poets was to teach; they were to teach not because they knew or understood, but unconsciously and intuitively. Acting on this philosophy, I, as a thinker and poet, wrote and taught I knew not what, received large remuneration for my efforts with the pen, and lived loosely, gaily, ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol X • Various
... as well as vivacious writer of the French Revolution and of the first Empire. For Montaigne Toepffer cherished the highest admiration. In his "Reflections and Short Disquisitions upon Art," (Reflexions et Menus Propos,) he thus tersely sums up the excellency of the French philosopher:—"Thinker full of probity and grace; philosopher so much the greater by that which he said he did not know than by that which he thought he knew." In our own language, Shakspeare was his favorite author. M. de Sainte-Beuve ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 97, November, 1865 • Various
... thinker should have begun by striking at what seemed to him the root of obstructive fallacies was natural enough. He supposed that a logical demonstration would clear the ground for his plans of reform; whereas, on the contrary, it entangled him in preliminary disputations, and his inflexible ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... evening-party where Ethelberta had been a star. Instead of engaging his energies to clear encumbrances from the tangled way of his life, he now set about reading the popular 'Metres by E.' with more interest and assiduity than ever; for though Julian was a thinker by instinct, he was a worker by effort only; and the higher of these kinds being dependent upon the lower for its exhibition, there was often a lamentable lack of evidence of his power in either. It is a ...
— The Hand of Ethelberta • Thomas Hardy
... what I said above, I believe, too, that it is very bad for any man not to have a fixed occupation; however great his natural energy may be, it either relaxes with time, or expends itself uselessly. The mere thinker often ends by hovering ...
— The Wings of Icarus - Being the Life of one Emilia Fletcher • Laurence Alma Tadema
... man who has been chosen to lead the Russian armies to victory does not encourage familiarity. Next to him I notice Janushkewitch, the Chief of the Great General Staff, with the gentle, almost youthful face of a thinker. But everything is ruled by the personality of the Grand Duke, which, with its mixture of will power and of gracious majesty, ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume II (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various
... Lee, in Kent, England, Nov. 24, 1821. Delicate health prevented him from following the ordinary school course. His father's death in 1840 left him independent, and the boy who was brought up in Toryism and Calvinism, became a philosophic radical and free-thinker. He travelled, he read, he acquired facility in nineteen languages and fluency in seven. Gradually he conceived the idea of a great work which should place history on an entirely new footing; it should concern itself not with the unimportant and ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XII. - Modern History • Arthur Mee
... Bushnell's house. The Doctor is a very unassuming man, and a very original but somewhat eccentric thinker. He had lately published a sermon on Roads, a sermon on the Moral Uses of the Sea, a sermon on Stormy Sabbaths, and a sermon on Unconscious Influence,—all treated in a very striking manner. He had recently visited England and the continent ...
— American Scenes, and Christian Slavery - A Recent Tour of Four Thousand Miles in the United States • Ebenezer Davies |
