"Thinker" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... He had been out with Hurree on the Road ere now. 'Let us finish the colouring,' said he. 'The boy is well protected if—if the Lords of the Air have ears to hear. I am a Sufi [free-thinker], but when one can get blind-sides of a woman, a stallion, or a devil, why go round to invite a kick? Set him upon the way, Babu, and see that old Red Hat does not lead him beyond our reach. I must ...
— Kim • Rudyard Kipling
... instance of a subtle, the other of an acute mind, than which no two things could be more distinct. The one was a shop-boy's quality, the other the characteristic of a philosopher. He considered Bishop Butler as a true philosopher, a profound and conscientious thinker, a genuine reader of nature and of his own mind. He did not speak of his Analogy, but of his Sermons at the Rolls' Chapel, of which I had never heard. Coleridge somehow always contrived to prefer the unknown to the known. In this ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... inasmuch as we employ induction alone in our search, without considering that in this way we can never understand wherefore precisely these conceptions, and none others, abide in the pure understanding. It was a design worthy of an acute thinker like Aristotle, to search for these fundamental conceptions. Destitute, however, of any guiding principle, he picked them up just as they occurred to him, and at first hunted out ten, which he called categories (predicaments). ...
— The Critique of Pure Reason • Immanuel Kant
... himself with their characteristics and their needs, and fits his ministrations to them. Especially does he carry comfort to the sick and soothe the suffering and the dying. No other can quite fill his place; no other so builds himself into the hearts of the people. He may not be a great thinker or preach polished sermons; his hands may be rough and his clothes ill-fitting; but if he is a loyal friend and ministers to real spiritual need, he is saint and prophet to those ...
— Society - Its Origin and Development • Henry Kalloch Rowe
... campaign in New York, when his adherents all over the country were carrying on a successful and effective propaganda. When Henry George himself came to Hull-House one Sunday afternoon, the gymnasium which was already crowded with men to hear Father Huntington's address on "Why should a free thinker believe in Christ," fairly rocked on its foundations under the enthusiastic and prolonged applause which greeted this great leader and constantly interrupted his stirring address, filled, as all of his speeches were, with high ...
— Twenty Years At Hull House • Jane Addams
... entertaining motives, which are not written in the four Gospels, is as unfair morally, as it is illogical critically. It creates a phantom, a fictitious character, and calls that Christ. It makes each writer, each thinker—or rather dreamer—however shallow his heart and stupid his brain—and all our hearts are but too shallow, and all our brains too stupid—the measure of a personage so vast and so unique, that all Christendom for eighteen hundred years has seen in Him, and ...
— All Saints' Day and Other Sermons • Charles Kingsley
... most favored classes of society; while among less enlightened and enslaved classes the wrongs which woman suffered were too terrible to mention. Carlyle has said, "Beware when the great God lets loose a thinker upon this earth." When Susan B. Anthony was born, a thinker was "let loose." Her voice and her pen have lighted a torch whose sacred fire, like that of some old Roman temples, dies not, but whose penetrating ray shall brighten the path of women down the long line of ages ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various
... fact, 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 of the speculative faculty, eternally spinning metaphysical ...
— Four Americans - Roosevelt, Hawthorne, Emerson, Whitman • Henry A. Beers
... social, religious, and civic life. King Saul (1839) embodies, for instance, the conflict between ecclesiastical and temporal authority—between the authority of the church and the claims of the thinker and the poet; Richard Savage (1839) that between the pride of noble birth and the promptings of the mother's heart; Werner (1840), A White Leaf (1842), and Ottfried (1848), variations of the conflict between a man's duty and his vacillating, ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... plays, most, because they helped to discipline him for his after-work; and I thank the theatre chiefly for ripening in its heat the philosophic humorist. That was the real character of the man. He tried many things, and he produced much; but the root of him was that he was a humorous thinker. He did not write first-rate plays, or first-rate novels, rich as he was in the elements of playwright and novelist. He was not an artist. But he had a rare and original eye and soul,—and in a peculiar way he could pour out himself. In short, to be an Essayist ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... need 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 ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. II • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... Mutianus Rufus, who kept his convictions to himself. There were no great theologians, but there was the greatest religious writer that ever lived, the author of the Imitation, and he was not a solitary thinker, but a member of a congregation which kept religion alive, especially in North Germany. The opposition which arose was stronger and more defined than anything in Italy, but it was against Catholicism, ...
— Lectures on Modern history • Baron John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton
... a tabernacle, the free, familiar Christ of the lake or the wayside was everybody's Christ; but the moment Christ is shut up in a church or a tabernacle He becomes the priest's Christ, the thinker's Christ, the devotee's Christ, but He ceases to be ...
— The World's Great Sermons, Volume 10 (of 10) • Various
... an Historical Study: Macmillan and Co., 1867. A masterly work, and one which every statesman, and every thinker would do well to peruse carefully. He says: "The question to be asked by every statesman, and by every citizen, with reference to a measure that is recommended to him as the enforcement of a public right, is whether the right is one which it is to ...
— An Illustrated History of Ireland from AD 400 to 1800 • Mary Frances Cusack
... characteristic than human beings. 'Look!' cried a friend of mine, whom lately I found studying a map of London, 'isn't it appalling? All these streets—thousands of them—in this tiny compass! Think of the miles and miles of drab monotony this map contains! I pointed out to him (it is a thinker's penalty to be always pointing things out to people) that his words were nonsense. I told him that the streets on this map were no more monotonous than the rivers on the map of England. Just as there were no two ...
— Yet Again • Max Beerbohm
... observation, at least, of singular opacity. Emotionally, the Japanese child appears incomparably closer to us than the Japanese mathematician, the peasant than the statesman. Between the most elevated class of thoroughly modernised Japanese and the Western thinker anything akin to intellectual sympathy is non-existent: it is replaced on the native side by a cold and faultless politeness. Those influences which in other lands appear most potent to develop the higher emotions seem here to have the extraordinary effect ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan • Lafcadio Hearn
... by different ages, nations, churches, 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, and all life and time, present and future, is both the truest cosmical devotee ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... not affirm that it is," returned the other, with the caution of no inexperienced thinker, "neither will I deny it. But if we suppose it so, I need not say that such accountability is neither to you, nor me, nor the Court of Common Pleas, ...
— The Confidence-Man • Herman Melville
... ground of those facts, and with the more earnestness the more reason they can give for receiving them as facts, that I refuse all their deductions with abhorrence. I mean that, if what they say is true, the thinker must reject with contempt the claim to anything ...
— The Portent & Other Stories • George MacDonald
... gradgrindism in education, library science, science in general, and life in general. It is full of humor, rich in style, and eccentric in form and all suffused with the perfervid genius of a man who is not merely a thinker but a force. Every sentence is tinglingly alive, and as if furnished with long antennae of suggestiveness. I do not know who Mr. Lee is, but I know this—that if he goes on as he has been, we need no longer whine that we have no ...
— The Education of the Child • Ellen Key
... concentrate, is the measure of mental efficiency; and this power may be developed by a training exactly analogous to that by which a muscle is developed, for mind and muscle are alike the instruments of the Silent Thinker who sits behind. The mind an instrument of something higher than the mind: here is a truth so fertile that in the language of Oriental imagery, "If you were to tell this to a dry stick, branches would grow, and ...
— Architecture and Democracy • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... 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
... rich, he would have been a very liberal patron. His conversation was like his writings, neat and elegant, but without strength. He grasped at more than his abilities could reach; tried to pass for a better talker, a better writer, and a better thinker than he was[655]. There was a quarrel between him and his father, in which his father was to blame; because it arose from the son's not allowing his wife to keep company with his father's mistress. The old lord shewed his resentment in ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 5 • Boswell
... shirt next his skin, and schooled himself by penances for the cell he desired among the Carthusians. It was characteristic of the man that among all the gay, profligate scholars of the Italian Renascence he chose as the object of his admiration the disciple of Savonarola, Pico di Mirandola. Free-thinker as the bigots who listened to his daring speculations termed him, his eye would brighten and his tongue falter as he spoke with friends of heaven and the after-life. When he took office, it was with ...
— History of the English People, Volume III (of 8) - The Parliament, 1399-1461; The Monarchy 1461-1540 • John Richard Green
... of his literary skill to expand commonplace sentiment; if he had talked that kind of gentle twaddle by which some recent essayists edify their readers, he might have succeeded in gaining a wide popularity. Or if he had been really, as some writers seem to fancy, a deep and systematic thinker as well as a most admirable artist, he might have extorted a hearing even while provoking dissent. But his boyish waywardness has disqualified him from reaching the deeper sympathies of either class. We feel that the most superhuman of schoolboys has really a rather shallow view of life. ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... girl may not be in reality better educated than her British sister, nor a more profound thinker; but her mind is indisputably more agile and elastic. In fact, a slow-going Britisher has to go through a regular course of training before he can follow the rapid transitions of her train of associations. She has the happiest faculty in getting at ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... 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 partly by mental irritation, confined him to his retreat, ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... an original thinker. Sir William Hamilton was a man of great learning. .'. Some men of great learning are ...
— Deductive Logic • St. George Stock
... 37: In 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
... Poet and Thinker. His early bent towards poetry and metaphysics, his prose style, his early poems, their merits and defects, his sonnets, Coleridge at his best, untimely decline of his poetic impulse, Wordsworth's great influence on him, Coleridge's ...
— English Men of Letters: Coleridge • H. D. Traill
... the researches of science afford us new proof that the savage, the barbarian, the idolater, the monk, each and all have arrived, by different paths, as near to some point of eternal truth as any thinker of the nineteenth century. We are now learning also, that the theories of the astrologers and of the alchemists were but partially, not totally, wrong. We have reason even to suppose that no dream of the ...
— The Wrack of the Storm • Maurice Maeterlinck
... and of thought, are visible characteristics of it. Thought, we said,—if thought it can be called: thought all hamstrung, shrivelled by inveterate rheumatism, on the part of the poor ill-thriven thinker; nay tied (so to speak, for he is of epigrammatic turn withal), as by cross ropes, right shoulder to left foot; and forced to advance, hobbling and jerking along, in that sad guise: not in the way of walk, but of saltation and dance; ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. III. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Hohenzollerns In Brandenburg—1412-1718 • Thomas Carlyle
... 'thinking things together.' Every man, says Hegel, is a philosopher, and in so far as it is the natural tendency of the human mind to connect and unify the manifold phenomena of life, the paradox of the German thinker is not without a measure of truth. But while this is only the occasional pastime of the ordinary individual, it is the conscious and habitual aim of the philosopher. In daily life people are wont to make assumptions which they do not verify, and employ ...
— Christianity and Ethics - A Handbook of Christian Ethics • Archibald B. C. Alexander
... pursuits that have hitherto constituted your utility and importance: and, ardently as I wish you success on the stage, I yet cannot frame myself to the thought that you should cease to appear as a bold moral thinker. I wish you to write a book on the power of words, and the processes by which human feelings form affinities with them—in short, I wish you to "philosophize" Horne Tooke's system, and to solve the great ...
— Biographia Epistolaris, Volume 1. • Coleridge, ed. Turnbull
... asylums; showing his lordship plainly that he could tell any insane person whatever from a sane one, and vice versa. This was the most remarkable part of the trial, to see this shrewd old judge extracting from a real observer and logical thinker those positive indicia of sanity and insanity, which exist, but which no lawyer has ever yet been able to extract from any psychological physician in the witness-box. At last, he was relieved, and sat sucking ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... inward Harmony; revealing this, by act or by word, through all his outward endeavours, be they high or low? Highest of all, when his outward and his inward endeavour are one; when we can name him Artist; not earthly Craftsman only, but inspired Thinker, who with heaven-made Implement conquers Heaven for us! If the poor and humble toil that we have Food, must not the high and glorious toil for him in return, that he have Light, have Guidance, Freedom, Immortality?—These two, in all their ...
— The Ontario Readers: Fourth Book • Various
... 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 man ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... robust life; I might have had companions, and I chose solitude. Each of the teachers in turn made me overtures of special intimacy; I tried them all. One I found to be an honest woman, but a narrow thinker, a coarse feeler, and an egotist. The second was a Parisienne, externally refined—at heart, corrupt—without a creed, without a principle, without an affection: having penetrated the outward crust of decorum in this character, ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... outline or form from the substance of truth; and both of them had to be content with an abstraction of science which was not yet realized. He was the greatest metaphysical genius whom the world has seen; and in him, more than in any other ancient thinker, the germs of future knowledge are contained. The sciences of logic and psychology, which have supplied so many instruments of thought to after-ages, are based upon the analyses of Socrates and Plato. The principles of definition, the law of ...
— The Republic • Plato
... was published in Cartagena, on December 15, 1812, and presents Bolivar as he was in the maturity of his life, as a thinker, apostle, general, and practical statesman; it shows him as the man destined to give liberty to five countries. This proclamation is the first ...
— Simon Bolivar, the Liberator • Guillermo A. Sherwell
... cares as a teacher, the Prior of Bec found time for philosophical speculations to which we owe the scientific inquiries which built up the theology of the Middle Ages. His famous works were the first attempts of any Christian thinker to elicit the idea of God from the very nature of the human reason. His passion for abstruse thought robbed him of food and sleep. Sometimes he could hardly pray. Often the night was a long watch till ...
— History of the English People, Volume I (of 8) - Early England, 449-1071; Foreign Kings, 1071-1204; The Charter, 1204-1216 • John Richard Green
... suthin' in the trail over by the drownded lands that looked kind o' neevarious. It were like the end o' a wooden leg with an iron ring at the bottom an' consid'able weight on it. An Injun wouldn't have a wooden leg, least ways not one with an iron ring at the butt. My ol' thinker had been chawin' that cud all day an' o' a sudden it come to me that a white man were runnin' the hull crew. That's how I had gained ground with the red scout I took him out in the aidge o' the bush an' ...
— In the Days of Poor Richard • Irving Bacheller
... all the moral evils that infest the world. In particular, it leads to the predatory use of force. Material possessions can be taken by force and enjoyed by the robber. Spiritual possessions cannot be taken in this way. You may kill an artist or a thinker, but you cannot acquire his art or his thought. You may put a man to death because he loves his fellow-men, but you will not by so doing acquire the love which made his happiness. Force is impotent in such matters; it is only as regards material goods that it is effective. For this ...
— Political Ideals • Bertrand Russell
... premise, and try to make out what the missing premise can be. Sometimes this is easy, as when one says, "I like him because he is always cheerful", from which you see that the person speaking must like cheerful persons. But if you hear it said that such a one "cannot be a real thinker, he is so positive in his opinions" or that another "is unfeeling and unsympathetic from lack of a touch of cruelty in his nature", you may have to explore about considerably before finding acceptable major premises from which such ...
— Psychology - A Study Of Mental Life • Robert S. Woodworth
... Epictetus led as virtuous a life as if heaven had been open to his faith and hope.—Paley's system may be described in detail as Shaftesbury's, with an external washing of Christianity; Shaftesbury having been what was called a free-thinker, while Paley was a sincere believer in the Christian revelation, and contributed largely and efficiently to the defence of Christianity and the illustration of its records. The chief merit of Paley's treatise on ...
— A Manual of Moral Philosophy • Andrew Preston Peabody
... that they should not be injured or badly nourished while they are growing. So that alcohol in all its forms is particularly injurious to young persons, as it retards their growth, and stunts both body and mind. This is the theory of Dr. Lionel S. Beale, a celebrated microscopist and thinker, and is quite generally accepted."—Dr. Roger S. Tracy, of the New York Board ...
— A Practical Physiology • Albert F. Blaisdell
... have made a better reparation for the folly or injustice with which he might be charged, by writing another poem, called "The Progress of a Free-thinker," whom he intended to lead through all the stages of vice and folly, to convert him from virtue to wickedness, and from religion to infidelity, by all the modish sophistry used for that purpose; ...
— Lives of the Poets: Addison, Savage, and Swift • Samuel Johnson
... Mr Sogen mentions the name of another Buddhist Hinayana thinker (about 250 A.D.), Harivarman, who founded a school known as Satyasiddhi school, which propounded the same sort of doctrines as those preached by Nagarjuna. None of his works are available in Sanskrit and I have never come across any allusion ...
— A History of Indian Philosophy, Vol. 1 • Surendranath Dasgupta
... the little soliloquizing Creature, "and what It fills, It is. What It thinks, that It utters; and what It utters, that It hears; and It itself is Thinker, Utterer, Hearer, Thought, Word, Audition; it is the One, and yet the All in All. Ah, the happiness ah, ...
— Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions (Illustrated) • Edwin A. Abbott
... Mill's general reputation rests on grounds quite distinct from his performances in metaphysics; and though we could hardly name one of his writings from whose main principles we do not dissent, there is hardly one which is not better fitted to sustain his character as a thinker than this last, in which the fatal charms of the goddess Necessity seem to have betrayed her champion into an unusual excess of polemical zeal, coupled, it must be added, with an unusual ...
— The Philosophy of the Conditioned • H. L. Mansel
... right to blame a man for being different from me than a driving-wheel has a right to blame the iron shaft that holds it to the centre. John Wesley balances Calvin's Institutes. A cold thinker gives to Scotland the strong bones of theology; Dr. Guthrie clothes them with a throbbing heart and warm flesh. The difficulty is that we are not satisfied with just the work that God has given us to ...
— The Wedding Ring - A Series of Discourses for Husbands and Wives and Those - Contemplating Matrimony • T. De Witt Talmage
... 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 ...
— Timaeus • Plato
... 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 with Him than was ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: St. John Chaps. XV to XXI • Alexander Maclaren
... healing forest, with its whispering wind and imperious solitude, had come between Ellen and the meaning of the squalid sheep ranch, with its travesty of home, its tragic owner. And it was coming between her two selves, the one that she had been forced to be and the other that she did not know—the thinker, the dreamer, the romancer, the one who lived in fancy the ...
— To the Last Man • Zane Grey
... Ruedesheim were clothed in white. As the imperial ruler was looking thoughtfully over the landscape, he noticed that the snow on one side of Johannisberg melted quicker in the sun's rays than on any other part. Charles, who was a great and deep thinker, began to reflect that on a spot where the rays of the sun shone so genially, something better ...
— Legends of the Rhine • Wilhelm Ruland
... infidelity. The following incident shows the impious end for which these schools have been founded: One of the principal teachers died, and over her grave her husband pronounced these words,—"I will tell you, for it is my duty to tell you, that if this funeral is that of a free-thinker" [unaccompanied by any religious ceremony], "it is so not only by my wish, but also and chiefly because such was the desire of my dear wife." He adds that she had devoted herself to "the great work of spreading education and morality without religion, because ...
— Public School Education • Michael Mueller
... Negro people—the Negro as a citizen—his status, his future, the sort of education best adapted to his needs as a man and a citizen, and kindred subjects. In fact no phase of the Negro's life fails of discussion at the hands of the most flippant penny-a-liner as well as the gravest thinker. All have theories of some sort and they do not hesitate to express them—whether they are ...
— Twentieth Century Negro Literature - Or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating - to the American Negro • Various
... for Nature in many similes and descriptions[4]— in fact, much of his pithy drastic writing sounds pantheistic. But he was very far from the standpoint of the great Italian philosophers, Giordano Bruno and Campanella. Bruno, a poet as well as thinker, distinguished Nature in her self-development—matter, soul, and mind—as being stages and phases of ...
— The Development of the Feeling for Nature in the Middle Ages and - Modern Times • Alfred Biese
... Jeremiah," as the old Greek Professor was said to call it) was announced to be brought on the stage with the whole force of the Faculty, read by our Frederick, (no such person, of course,) than say the best things I might by any chance find myself capable of saying. Of course, if I come across a real thinker, a suggestive, acute, illuminating, informing talker, I enjoy the luxury of sitting still for a ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 15, January, 1859 • Various
... Dr. 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
... came an attack in France, and though its results were less immediate at home, they were much more effective abroad. In 1748 appeared Montesquieu's Spirit of the Laws. In this famous book were concentrated twenty years of study and thought by a great thinker on the interests of the world about him. In eighteen months it went through twenty-two editions; it was translated into every civilized language; and among the things on which Montesquieu brought his wit and wisdom to bear with especial force was ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... by any means for the first time—felt regret that Canon Wrottesley's influence upon his wife had not made her a more orthodox thinker. A woman who criticized the Prayer Book was surely not fitted to be the wife of a clergyman. Miss Abingdon liked to lean on a spiritual guide, and she thought that this was the graceful and becoming attitude ...
— Peter and Jane - or The Missing Heir • S. (Sarah) Macnaughtan
... the heads of the church. Through him was prepared in the Middle Age the ascendancy of the philosophical authority of Aristotle, which became firmly established in the half-century after his death, when first the completed Organon, and gradually ail the other works of the Greek thinker, came to be known in the schools: before his time it was rather upon the authority of Plato that the prevailing Realism sought to lean. As regards his so-called Conceptualism and his attitude to the question of Universals, see SCHOLASTICISM. Outside of his dialectic, ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... was, indeed, the most important thing in the world, but to whom nothing in the world was indifferent. The bust which gives us the most lively notion of him shows us a great, vivid, intellectual face, full of fiery energy and calm resource, the face of a thinker and a fighter in one. A scholar, an adventurer, perhaps a Cabalist, a busy stirrer in politics, a gamester, one 'born for the fairer sex,' as he tells us, and born also to be a vagabond; this man, who is remembered now for his written account of his own life, was that rarest ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... loss of moral dignity. Altogether, this humiliating affair showed me what a trap for the conscience these subscriptions are: how comfortably they are passed while the intellect is torpid or immature, or where the conscience is callous, but how they undermine truthfulness in the active thinker, and torture the sensitiveness of the tenderminded. As long as they are maintained, in Church or University, these institutions exert a positive influence to deprave or eject those who ought to be their most ...
— Phases of Faith - Passages from the History of My Creed • Francis William Newman
... affects the development of the law has, in modern England at least, often originated with some single thinker or school of thinkers. No doubt it is at times allowable to talk of a prevalent belief or opinion as "being in the air," by which expression is meant that a particular way of looking at things has become the common possession of all the world. But though ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... the speculative movement affects the social and political—I think that less attention has been given to the reciprocal influence. The philosophy of a period is often treated as though it were the product of impartial and abstract investigation—something worked out by the great thinker in his study and developed by simple logical deductions from the positions established by his predecessors. To my mind, though I cannot now dwell upon the point, the philosophy of an age is in itself determined to a very great extent by the social position. It gives the solutions of the problems ...
— English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century • Leslie Stephen
... 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 ...
— A Dash from Diamond City • George Manville Fenn
... presumptuous youth, but the general tendency of which railways may be considered as the outward expression and symbol. We hurry and push and hustle, for the good of humanity! 'The world is becoming too noisy, too commercial!' groans some solitary thinker. 'Undoubtedly it is, but the noise of waggons bearing bread to starving humanity is of more value than tranquillity of soul,' replies another triumphantly, and passes on with an air of pride. As for me, I don't believe in these waggons bringing bread to humanity. ...
— The Idiot • (AKA Feodor Dostoevsky) Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... asked Bunny. Though he was a little older than Sue he knew that she often thought more then he did about what they were going to do or play. Sue was a good thinker. She usually thought first and did things afterward, while Bunny was just the other way. He did something first and then thought about it afterward, and sometimes he was sorry for what he had done. But this time he wanted to know what Sue was going ...
— Bunny Brown and His Sister Sue in the Big Woods • Laura Lee Hope
... the poet into his ideal worlds, were dispositions wholly foreign from the worldly sagacity and stern shrewdness of Johnson. As in his judgment of life and character, so in his criticism on poetry, he was a sort of Free-thinker. He suspected the refined of affectation, he rejected the enthusiastic as absurd, and he took it for granted that the mysterious was unintelligible. He came into the world when the school of Dryden and Pope gave the law to English poetry. In that school he had himself learned to be a ...
— Select Poems of Thomas Gray • Thomas Gray
... very first who made this discovery was one Friedrich Nietzsche, an idealist, a dreamer, a thinker, and a revolutionary. Nietzsche was an honest man of marked intellect, whose nerves were worn to the quick by the pretense of the times—the mad race for place and power—the hypocrisy and phariseeism that ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Musicians • Elbert Hubbard
... that Sir Henry Delme was disposed to consider Dr. Pormont, with his pomposity, and wordy arguments, as a mere superficial thinker; and he half laughed at himself, for having ever thought it necessary to consult him. This class of men influence less than they ought. Sensible persons are apt to set them down, as either fools or pedants. Their very magniloquence condemns them; ...
— A Love Story • A Bushman
... The crudest thinker, at the first attempt to increase his knowledge of the general nature of trusts, discovers that the problem has a close connection with others which have long puzzled workers for the public good. Trusts ally ...
— Monopolies and the People • Charles Whiting Baker
... 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 was not his ...
— Immortal Memories • Clement Shorter
... civilization, and it is interesting to study the myths as to the origin of fire, and possibly even more interesting to compare the Greek and Japanese stories. As we know, old-time popular etymology makes Prometheus the fore-thinker and brother of Epimetheus the after-thinker. He is the stealer of the fire from heaven, in order to make men share the secret of the gods. Comparative philology tells us, however, that the Sanskrit Pramantha is a stick that produces fire. The ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis
... experience fer you, Kiddie," said Gid. "You was allus' a deep thinker. Guess it's the Injun blood in you assertin' itself. An' what's the matter wi' the cabin ter make you meditate ...
— Kiddie the Scout • Robert Leighton
... 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 for eighty years disappeared from ancient history, is again brought back ...
— Continental Monthly - Volume 1 - Issue 3 • Various
... California forests black-and-silver compositions of filmy fluttering light and solid bedded shade. I am thinking also of that patch of pre-historic cypresses in Monterey. These differ from the straight, symmetrical classic redwoods as Rodin's "Thinker" differs from the Apollo. Monstrous, contorted shapes—those Monterey cypresses look like creatures born underground, who, at the price of almost unbearable torture, have torn through the earth's crust, thrusting and twisting themselves airward. ...
— The Native Son • Inez Haynes Irwin
... ashamed of his new client's friendship; it had taken many invitations to get him to Winchester and Wickham Manor; but he had gone at last, and was now returning. It has been remarked by some judicious thinker (possibly J.F. Smith) that Providence despises to employ no instrument, however humble; and it is now plain to the dullest that both Mr. Wickham and the Wallachian Hospodar were liquid lead and wedges in the hand ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 7 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... properly, one who believes in two gods (the old Persian dualism); in books an atheist, i.e. one who does not believe in a god or gods; and, popularly, a free-thinker who denies the existence of a Supreme Being, rejects revelation for the laws of Nature imprinted on the heart of man and for humanity in its widest sense. Hence he is accused of permitting incestuous marriages and other abominations. We should ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton
... ever more profound, conscientious, and careful; and all modern investigations confirm his sagacity and impartiality. He was one of the most accomplished men of antiquity, or of any age,—an enlightened and curious traveler, a profound thinker, a man of universal knowledge, familiar with the whole range of literature, art, and science in his day, acquainted with all the great men of Greece and at the courts of Asiatic princes, the friend of Sophocles, of Pericles, ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... among others, Berruguete, Becerra, and the marvellous deaf-mute Navarrete. The luxurious city of Valentia sent Juan de Juanes and Ribalta. Luis de Vargas went out from Seville, and from Cordova the scholar, artist, and thinker, Paul of Cespedes. The schools of Rome and Venice and Florence were thronged with eager pilgrims, speaking an alien Latin and filled with a ...
— Castilian Days • John Hay
... denounced him. His fellow-disputants have their places in the history of philosophy; the story of Abelard's love for Heloise has set him apart, so that he has lived for eight centuries less as a fearless thinker and masterly logician than as one of the glowingly romantic figures of ...
— Historia Calamitatum • Peter Abelard
... humorous story. The hero, an independent and vigorous thinker, sees life, and tells about it in a ...
— The Wall Street Girl • Frederick Orin Bartlett
... bought in 1711 for L28 by Mr. Walter Clavel at the sale of the library of Mr. Charles Barnard. It had been bought in 1706 at the sale of Mr. Bigot's library with five others for two shillings and a penny. Although Giordano Bruno was burnt as a heretic, he was a noble thinker, no professed atheist, but a man of the reformed faith, who was in advance of Calvin, a friend of Sir Philip Sydney, and as good a man as ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... sport your cockade openly." "But," I replied, "this is a villainous character." "Ah, I do not pretend to introduce to you an Aristides or an Epaminondas, or any other soul of similar stamp. He is a man of letters, full of wit, a deep thinker, a superior genius, and our reputations are in his hands. If he flatters us, posterity will know it; if he laugh at us, it will know it also. I counsel you therefore to use him well, if you would have him behave so towards you." "I will act conformably to your advice," said I to the ...
— "Written by Herself" • Baron Etienne Leon Lamothe-Langon
... in holding Paley for an honest man, in spite of his defence of lying, why do you scruple at St. Alfonso? I am perfectly sure that you would not scruple at Paley personally; you might not agree with him, but you would call him a bold thinker: then why should St. Alfonso's person be odious to you, as ...
— Apologia pro Vita Sua • John Henry Newman
... It is an internal form and rule, a discipline of the entire person: it penetrates the will as well as the intelligence. Its principle, a central inspiration of the living human personality in the civil community, descends into the depths and settles in the heart of the man of action as well as the thinker, of the artist as well as of the scientist; ...
— Readings on Fascism and National Socialism • Various
... has been 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
... mid-Atlantic, to do something to prevent my colliding with a derelict, as the Van-dam has done during the last few days? Do you think there was no one on that ship that prayed? What is the difficulty in the mind of the intelligent, modern thinker when he faces this conception ...
— Our Unitarian Gospel • Minot Savage
... the success of the essayist. Montaigne said the most familiar things in the finest way. Goldsmith could not be termed a thinker; but everything he touched he brightened, as after a month of dry weather, the shower brightens the dusty shrubbery of a suburban villa. The world is not so much in need of new thoughts as that when thought grows ...
— Dreamthorp - A Book of Essays Written in the Country • Alexander Smith
... 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 year 1267. He ranks with Yen Hui, Tsang Shan, ...
— THE CHINESE CLASSICS (PROLEGOMENA) Unicode Version • James Legge
... "materialism" as his antagonist. Those who distinguish man into two parts, and give the higher qualities to the soul and the sensual to the body, assume that all who reject their distinction abolish the soul, and with it abolish all that is not sensual. Yet every genuine scientific thinker believes in the existence of love and reverence as he believes in any other facts, and is likely to set just as high a value upon them as his opponent. He believes equally with his opponent, that to cultivate the higher emotions, man must habitually attach himself to objects outside ...
— Prose Masterpieces from Modern Essayists • James Anthony Froude, Edward A. Freeman, William Ewart Gladstone, John Henry Newman and Leslie Steph
... thing to do, Dave," was Ben's comment. "But I don't know that I would have thought of it. You are a quick thinker, and I guess we have you to thank for ...
— Dave Porter and His Double - The Disapperarance of the Basswood Fortune • Edward Stratemeyer
... himself against nature, as if he had been a decree of God over-riding all these other insuperable obstacles. That was his function. Mr. Phillips was not called to be a universal orator any more than he was a universal thinker. In literature and in history widely read, in person magnificent, in manners most accomplished, gentle as a babe, sweet as a new-blown rose, in voice clear and silvery, yet he was not a man of tempests, he was not an orchestra of a hundred instruments, he was not an organ, mighty and ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller
... contrary to all the usages and rules of civilized literature. Hence the secret of its popularity, that it is the organ of average as distinguished from highest thought. Science and art are the goals of destiny, but rarely is there a thinker or writer who has an eye single to them. It is an heroic, self-sacrificing, and small platoon which in every age brunts Fate, and, fighting on the shadowy frontier, makes conquests from the realm of darkness. Their ideas are passed back from hand to hand, and become known in fragments ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 34, August, 1860 • Various
... daily work of society, which must be done. But this, we think, may also be accomplished. We can elevate the condition of labour by allying it to noble thoughts, which confer a grace upon the lowliest as well as the highest rank. For no matter how poor or humble a man may be, the great thinker of this and other days may come in and sit down with him, and be his companion for the time, though his dwelling be the meanest hut. It is thus that the habit of well- directed reading may become a source of the greatest pleasure and self-improvement, and exercise a gentle coercion, ...
— Self Help • Samuel Smiles
... his own. More admired, of course, not the quackery, but the adventurous boldness of Helment's genius, and his devotion to chemistry; which is certainly the most spiritual of all the sciences, and must, especially in its transcendental forms, have had a great charm for a Platonic thinker. Our author was entirely devoted to study, and resisted every inducement to leave what he called his 'Paradise' at Cambridge. His friends once tried to decoy him into a bishopric, and got him the length of Whitehall to kiss the king's hand on the occasion; but when he understood their ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... Mr. Crawford had committed suicide, the pistol would have been there," said Mr. Porter; who seemed to be a more acute thinker than the ...
— The Gold Bag • Carolyn Wells
... 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 farmers about his crops and cattle. She felt disappointed ...
— Cobwebs and Cables • Hesba Stretton
... you're a theoretical physicist. A really original-type thinker. You come up with a mathematical system that explains all known phenomena at that time, and predicts others that are, as yet, unknown. You check your math over and over again; there's no error in your logic, since it all follows, step ...
— Psichopath • Gordon Randall Garrett
... no embarrassment for material, as the Appendix to this book—limited though it wisely is—will show. Mr. Gunn, undaunted by all this, makes a further, useful contribution in his unassuming but workmanlike and well-documented account of the ideas of the distinguished French thinker. It is designed to serve as an introduction to Bergson's philosophy for those who are making their first approach to it, and as ...
— Bergson and His Philosophy • J. Alexander Gunn
... little more to say, except, that what is generally the experience of your countrymen will probably be yours in Merleville. You have some disappointing discoveries to make among us, you who are an earnest man and a thinker." ...
— Janet's Love and Service • Margaret M Robertson
... 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
... and Cicero, not as food for schoolboys, but as food for men, and men engaged in the current of contemporary life and action, so in his remarks and essays on Marcus Aurelius he treats this truly modern striver and thinker not as a Classical Dictionary hero, but as a present source from which to draw "example of life, and instruction of manners." Why may not a son of Dr. Arnold[200] say, what might naturally here be said by any other ...
— Selections from the Prose Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... recently to make clear. Nothing is more contrary to fact than to suppose that any considerable movement of opinion in Europe can be limited to the frontiers of one nation. Even at a time when it took half a generation for a thought to travel from one capital to another, a student or thinker in some obscure Italian, Swiss or German village was able to modify policy, to change the face of Europe and of mankind. Coming nearer to our time, it was the work of the encyclopaedists and earlier political questioners which made the French Revolution; and the effect of that Revolution ...
— Peace Theories and the Balkan War • Norman Angell
... we call death transform a human being? It is merely the loss of one part of the mechanism of consciousness. The soul, the thinker, has lost connection with the physical world because the physical body has ceased to exist. The mental body and the astral body remain and they enable him to think and feel. But he can not think more than ...
— Elementary Theosophy • L. W. Rogers
... year, Washington was an unusually presentable young man, more than six feet tall, broad-shouldered, very strong, slender and athletic, carefully polite in his manners, a boon companion, though he talked little, a sound and deliberate thinker; moreover, the part he had taken in the war with the Indians and the French made him almost a popular hero, and gave him a preeminent place among the Virginians, both the young and the old, of that time. The possession of the estate ...
— George Washington • William Roscoe Thayer
... almost any age,—in reality about thirty five. His head is that of the thinker, high above the eyes. His face bears evidence in its lines of years of labour and service, as well as of a triumphant struggle against ill health. In his eyes is a thoughtful yet illuminating smile, now directed toward GEORGE who, when he ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... slander. In New England, the stronghold of Federalism, nearly every Sunday's sermon was an arraignment of the French, and impliedly of their allies, the Republicans. [Footnote: 2 McMaster, 383] From Jefferson's election—he was a conservative free-thinker—they seemed to anticipate the utter extermination of Christianity, though the man paid in charities, mostly religious, as for Bibles, missionaries, chapels, meeting-houses, etc., one year of his presidency, $978.20; another year, $1,585.60. One preacher likened the tribute which Talleyrand demanded ...
— History of the United States, Volume 2 (of 6) • E. Benjamin Andrews
... actually made up my mind," went on Blake, who was, perhaps, a little more serious, and probably a deeper thinker than his chum. "But I went over it in my mind last night, and I didn't just see how we could refuse Mr. ...
— The Moving Picture Boys at Panama - Stirring Adventures Along the Great Canal • Victor Appleton
... beautiful panegyric on the divinity of Christ has never been pronounced. The thrilling and convincing conclusions evolved from the mind of a great reader, a great thinker—a man, in fact, who had studied and knew the human side of life, and could describe it with flawless accuracy—are a complete refutation of the opinions expressed either from prejudice or personal and political motives. Napoleon conversed about religion with other men in a critical way, not ...
— The Tragedy of St. Helena • Walter Runciman
... thinker and a crank," said Ellis. "If he had a little more balance he'd make his mark. But he's a sort of melancholiac. Ill-health, nerves, and a fixed belief in ...
— The Clarion • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... do yield to the force of evidence and accept extraordinary new discoveries, they either do it in a blundering and perverted manner, or they try to appropriate it as their own and continue to rob the pioneer thinker. ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, November 1887 - Volume 1, Number 10 • Various
... if impelled to speak against his will). Yes, one thing—only I'm afraid you wouldn't see it in the same light. And yet I must mention it. It is like this. I want to recover faith in my mission, in my power to ennoble human souls. And, as a logical thinker, this I cannot do now, unless—well, unless you jump into the mill-race, too, ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100, March 28, 1891 • Various
... subsequently combined in order to form "our noble national theory," and what were the advantages, the limitations, and the effects of this combination. I shall not disguise the fact that, on the whole, my own preferences are on the side of Hamilton rather than of Jefferson. He was the sound thinker, the constructive statesman, the candid and honorable, if erring, gentleman; while Jefferson was the amiable enthusiast, who understood his fellow-countrymen better and trusted them more than his rival, but who ...
— The Promise Of American Life • Herbert David Croly
... light, pursuing its way under all kinds of difficulties, growing broader and broader as it goes, till a wide, sunlit river, it flows onward and onward, finally reaching the sea, reminded me, as I gazed, of a lovely thought emerging from the thinker's brain, which, after obstacles and hindrances innumerable, at last, refreshing all as it goes, reaches the open light ...
— Holidays in Eastern France • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... the sixteenth century were some whose opinions were unsound on the Trinity; possibly they affected English opinion in some small degree. Loelius Socinus (1525-62), uncle of Faustus (1539-1604), was for a short time in London, but interesting thinker as he was, his nephew who never set foot in England really exerted much more influence ...
— Unitarianism • W.G. Tarrant
... demands earnest commendation. It is a powerful production—perhaps the highest effort of the brilliant and successful author. A thorough historian and a careful thinker, he is well qualified to write learnedly of any period of the world's history. The book is published in tasteful style, and will adorn ...
— The Humors of Falconbridge - A Collection of Humorous and Every Day Scenes • Jonathan F. Kelley
... intellectual pursuits,—a man of fine powers of mind, but not fully progressed in thought. As far as he knew, at the time of this writing, he was appreciative of your suggestions, and of scientific progress. He was a cool-headed man,—not a light or superficial thinker, but thought on deep subjects. He was a brain worker; it makes my brain tired. I think he published books—poems. I think he was more a poet than a prose writer. He was not like Tom Moore—there was nothing light or superficial—his poetry was grand, solid, deep, stirring. He could write upon ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, August 1887 - Volume 1, Number 7 • Various
... 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
... music had been sufficiently exploited by Mozart and Haydn. Beethoven demonstrated that music has a higher function than that of mere beauty, or the simple act of giving pleasure. The beautiful in literature is not its best part. To the earnest thinker, the seeker after truth, the student who looks for illumination on life's problem, beauty in itself is insufficient. It is the best office of art, of Beethoven's art in particular, that it leads ever onward and upward; that it acts not ...
— Beethoven • George Alexander Fischer
... these words of that many-sided thinker, Steffen:—"He who has no employment to which he gives himself with true earnestness, which he does not love as much as himself and all men, has not discovered the true ground on which Christianity even here brings forth fruit. Such an occupation becomes ...
— The Home • Fredrika Bremer
... king and his people, all of their blood, had given to the German national idea a golden setting, and to the history of civilization a new meaning. Now they were experiencing the struggles, ventures, and victories of a great man. Work on in your study, peaceful thinker, fantastic dreamer! You have learned over-night to look down with a smile upon foreign ways and to expect great things of your own talent. Try to realize, now, what flows from ...
— The German Classics Of The Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries, Volume 12 • Various
... A distinguished thinker, Stephen Pearl Andrews, from whose writings some of these suggestions concerning Methods have been borrowed, points out three sources of confusion in the minds even of the learned themselves, in connection with this subject. First, ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol IV, Issue VI, December 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... say the Upanishads, and the Vedantists add: "Not a part, not a mode of That, but identically That, that absolute Spirit of the World." "As pure water poured into pure water remains the same, thus, O Gautama, is the Self of a thinker who knows. Water in water, fire in fire, ether in ether, no one can distinguish them: likewise a man whose mind has entered into the Self."[272] "'Every man,' says the Sufi Gulshan-Raz, whose heart is no longer shaken by any doubt, knows with certainty that there is no being save ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... narrow-minded man, painfully conscientious in his statements lest he should be unjust to somebody; a slow thinker, unable to let a subject drop when once he had started upon it. He had no sooner uttered his remark about hard times than he was moved to ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris
... more, he achieves beauty, or nobility, or fitness of phrase such as only a poet is capable of. It is in these last pieces and their like that his fame lies for the future. It was his lot to be strong as the thinker, the moralist, with "the accomplishment of verse," the scholar interested to rebuild the past of experience, the teacher with an explicit dogma in an intellectual form with examples from life, the anatomist of human passions, instincts, and impulses in all their ...
— Browning's Shorter Poems • Robert Browning
... shore for those who are disposed to separate themselves from the established church, without the aid of a floating chapel, furnished by the government agent to subvert the present order of things. On this point, you know, I was always a liberal thinker, but a firm friend to the church, as being essential to the best interests of the state. An old college chum of ours, who has been unusually fortunate in obtaining ecclesiastical preferment, thought ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... faith, and little disposed to covenant with slavery. There we begin to see that race of Puritan farmers, but lately represented by John Brown. Has not the attempt been made to transform him also into a free thinker, a philosophic enemy of the Bible, and, from this very cause, an enemy to slavery? We need nothing more than his last letter to his wife, to show from what source he had drawn that courage, so misdirected ...
— The Uprising of a Great People • Count Agenor de Gasparin
... the channels for knowledge of that sort to be poured out amongst them. There is one line of work you might well take up, and the country Lodges might do the same, winning down from London now and again some thinker who would come and give the benefit of his study; and if you were known all over England as the places where such knowledge might be gained, and the bringers of such within the reach of your fellow-townsmen, ...
— London Lectures of 1907 • Annie Besant
... our inquiry. The passage in Lucretius at the end of his fifth book on the Nature of Things is so true and brilliant and anticipates so many points in later thought that it is worth quoting at some length, and the poet's close relation with Cicero, the typical Greco-Roman thinker, gives his ideas the more weight ...
— Progress and History • Various
... a thinker and man of letters, the other is only a literary man. Erasmus was a man of letters, Gigadibs a literary man. A.B. is the incarnation of Gigadibs. I should ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 3 • Leonard Huxley
... I was trained for the work by a medical man—my friend Mr. James Hinton—first in his own branch of the London profession, and a most original thinker. To him the degradation of women, which most men accept with such blank indifference, was a source of unspeakable distress. He used to wander about the Haymarket and Piccadilly in London at night, and break his heart ...
— The Power of Womanhood, or Mothers and Sons - A Book For Parents, And Those In Loco Parentis • Ellice Hopkins
... metaphysical reality, a son of Venus. Having satisfied the rural mind, which thus, unconsciously, accepts an absolute truth under a physical disguise, the metaphysical thinker, the philosopher, also accepts the same fable, knowing and realizing its ...
— The Light of Egypt, Volume II • Henry O. Wagner/Belle M. Wagner/Thomas H. Burgoyne
... modern Plato, the leader at Concord. The Herald has informed us that on another day "the school listened with great satisfaction to Prof. Harris, who is constantly adding to the deep impression he has already made, and to the high opinion in which he is held as the most acute and profound thinker of ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, September 1887 - Volume 1, Number 8 • Various
... (1516) expresses the ideas of an advanced political thinker, and incidentally, directly or by implication, conveys much information as to prevalent social ...
— England Under the Tudors • Arthur D. Innes
... length of Hamlet's speeches," says Dryasdust, "far exceeds that of those allotted by Shakespeare to any other of his characters." The important point, however, is that Romeo has a more than family likeness to Hamlet. Even in the heat and heyday of his passion Romeo plays thinker; Juliet says, "Good-night" and disappears, but he finds time to give ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris
... talking in that curious fashion of his," said Carey, as they began to pace the walks. "I am afraid his thinker is too big-as the child says in Miss Tytler's book. This morning over his parsing he asked me-'Mother, which is realest, what we touch or what we feel?' knitting his brows fearfully when I did not catch his meaning, and going on-'I mean is that fly as real as King David?' and then as ...
— Magnum Bonum • Charlotte M. Yonge
... born a thinker. His physical organization was delicate, but he had an energy of spirit which led him often to overtask his bodily forces in long-continued mental exertions. Without brilliancy of imagination and with little liveliness of fancy, he possessed the faculty of acute and discriminating ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 49, November, 1861 • Various
... can we know?—these are entrancing problems for the profound thinker, and have been written upon frequently and at great length. But we can do little more at present than give the barest outline of the positions that have been taken up. Every search for truth must assume a certain position ...
— Rudolph Eucken • Abel J. Jones
... a particular sort 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 ...
— First and Last Things • H. G. Wells
... shoemaker and preacher, was educated though poor. In the picturesque little village of Llanystumdwy on the coast of Wales, Lloyd George grew up,—a leader among his mates, not only in his studies but in mischief as well. He was a good thinker and liked to debate with his uncle, and to be in his uncle's shop in the evening when the men of the village gathered to talk over questions of business and politics. As he grew older, he took part in their conversation and was acknowledged by them ...
— Winning a Cause - World War Stories • John Gilbert Thompson and Inez Bigwood
... does better: then, I believe, comes in, Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof. What beautiful and appropriate texts are to be found in Scripture, Miss Gourlay! By the way, the man that wrote it was a shrewd fellow and a profound thinker. The only pity is, that ...
— The Black Baronet; or, The Chronicles Of Ballytrain - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... out through his cobweb chains and go right forward with courage and in faith. So we are told with relentless and almost tiresome reiteration. It is the fashion, one might almost say, to have cast off fear, and the one thing an honest "modern thinker" is afraid of is being afraid. (To less honest ones it is the thought of being thought afraid that is a very real ...
— The Healthy Life, Vol. V, Nos. 24-28 - The Independent Health Magazine • Various
... had been impossible that the first wild ardour of spirit should abide unsinkingly in him. Youth goes. And there was not in Swinburne that basis on which a man may in his maturity so build as to make good, in some degree, the loss of what is gone. He was not a thinker: his mind rose ever away from reason to rhapsody; neither was he human. He was a king crowned but not throned. He was a singing bird that could build no nest. He was a youth who could not afford to age. Had he died young, literature would have ...
— And Even Now - Essays • Max Beerbohm
... the mine, not as a feudal castle belonging to a lord, but as an institution of public utility which the public has the right to control. The idea of possession in common has not been worked out from the slow deductions of some thinker buried in his private study, it is a thought which is germinating in the brains of the working masses, and when the revolution, which the close of this century has in store for us, shall have hurled confusion into ...
— The Place of Anarchism in Socialistic Evolution - An Address Delivered in Paris • Pierre Kropotkin
... the developments of philosophy on the principles of his master. And surely no man ever made a richer contribution. He may not have had the originality or breadth of Socrates, but he was more profound. He was preeminently a great thinker—a great logician—skilled in dialectics, and his "Dialogues" are such exercises of dialectical method that the ancients were divided whether he was a skeptic or a dogmatist. He adopted the Socratic method, and enlarged it. "Socrates relied on inductive reasoning, and ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... called our creative powers, we take it for granted that no correct thinker has ever applied such expressions literally. Strictly speaking, we can make nothing: we can only construct. But how vast a theatre is here laid open to the constructive powers of the finite creature; where the physical eye is permitted to travel for millions and millions of miles, while that ...
— Lectures on Art • Washington Allston
... 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 ...
— The Religious Sentiment - Its Source and Aim: A Contribution to the Science and - Philosophy of Religion • Daniel G. Brinton
... feature in all your old family notes than Lincoln's views at your many meetings with him, and your copy of his prayer is beautiful. Some of his views on Bible themes are very profound; but then he is a very profound thinker. It now looks as if he would become a national leader. Would not he and your father have enjoyed a meeting on the slavery question? I put all the letters with the other papers you gave me in a safe {p.46} ...
— The Jefferson-Lemen Compact • Willard C. MacNaul
... replied Boyd with emphasis. "He's a man, and a great man, too. That's Red Cloud, the war chief of the Ogalala Sioux, Mahpeyalute, they call him in their language, one of the bravest warriors that ever lived, and a thinker, as well. If he'd been born white he'd be governor of a big state by this time, and later on he might become ...
— The Great Sioux Trail - A Story of Mountain and Plain • Joseph Altsheler
... will be clapped Into the stocks, with the red letter D Hung round about your neck for drunkenness. You're a free-drinker,—yes, and a free-thinker! ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... of work in this number deserves especial mention. Alfred Galpin's "Mystery" introduces to the association a thinker more gifted for his years than probably any other recruit within recent years. This judgment is not based alone on the short article under consideration, but even this little piece of thought, if carefully analysed, ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... these dissertations simply represented "a string of facts clumsily observed and a few quarrelsome discussions.'' Although he is the author of the best known treatise on psychology extant, the eminent thinker realises "the fragility of a science that oozes metaphysical criticism at every joint.'' For more than twenty years I have tried to interest psychologists in the study of realities, but the stream of university metaphysics is hardly yet turned aside, ...
— The Psychology of Revolution • Gustave le Bon
... symbol-world, as "being-in-itself," with things, we act once more as we have always acted—MYTHOLOGICALLY. The "non-free will" is mythology; in real life it is only a question of STRONG and WEAK wills.—It is almost always a symptom of what is lacking in himself, when a thinker, in every "causal-connection" and "psychological necessity," manifests something of compulsion, indigence, obsequiousness, oppression, and non-freedom; it is suspicious to have such feelings—the person betrays himself. ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... a philosophy, any more than it is itself a religion. On its intellectual side it has been called "formless speculation.[35]" But until speculations or intuitions have entered into the forms of our thought, they are not current coin even for the thinker. The part played by Mysticism in philosophy is parallel to the part played by it in religion. As in religion it appears in revolt against dry formalism and cold rationalism, so in philosophy it takes the field against materialism and scepticism.[36] It is thus possible to speak of speculative Mysticism, ...
— Christian Mysticism • William Ralph Inge
... contrary, is, and long has been, that the pentateuchal story of the creation is simply a myth. I suppose it to be an hypothesis respecting the origin of the universe which some ancient thinker found himself able to reconcile with his knowledge, or what he thought was knowledge, of the nature of things, and therefore assumed to be true. As such, I hold it to be not merely an interesting, but ...
— Mr. Gladstone and Genesis - Essay #5 from "Science and Hebrew Tradition" • Thomas Henry Huxley
... that work, as the boy carries it out, to deduce certain laws and develop the principles which underlie them. Wherever it is deemed possible to do so, it is planned to have the boy make these discoveries for himself, so as to encourage him to become a thinker and a reasoner instead of ...
— Electricity for Boys • J. S. Zerbe
... 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, yet ...
— Tyranny of God • Joseph Lewis
... sides to everybody, as there are to that piece of money Vacuous countenances Virtues of her deceased spouse We never need fear that he will undervalue himself What have I to do with time, but to fill it up with labor? What you hate in him is chiefly misfortune Wholesale thinker who handles knowledge by the cargo Young surgeon, ...
— Widger's Quotations from the Works of Oliver W. Holmes, Sr. • David Widger
... in this peaceful, wealthy portion of the Tyrol become daily more blindly attached to the priests. Should there happen to be a thinker amongst them, he must keep his questionings to himself: he will find no sympathy in his neighbors. In towns such as Innsbruck, however, he will discover many fellows, for a feeling of reaction has awakened there ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 28. July, 1873. • Various
... poet, as he is the intellectual poet in the great sonnet following; and it is his possession or promise of both imaginations that proves him greater than Coleridge. In his day they seem to have found Coleridge to be a thinker in his poetry. To me he seems to have had nothing but senses, magic, and simplicity, and these he had to the utmost yet known to man. Keats was to have been a great intellectual poet, besides all ...
— Flower of the Mind • Alice Meynell
... America?"—"He is a minister of the gospel," I answered. "Which church?"—"Unitarian." This puzzled him. After a moment he had an inspiration: "That is the same as a Free Thinker?"—I explained in French that it wasn't and that mon pere was a holy man. At last Monsieur told the moustache to write: Protestant; and the moustache ...
— The Enormous Room • Edward Estlin Cummings
... word, that man is no scoundrel, but a great thinker, a master-mind. He deserves a memorial. He is the essence of modern ingenuity, and combines in himself alone the genius of the lawyer, the doctor, and the financier. [He sits down on the lowest step of the terrace] And yet he has never finished a course of studies in any college; ...
— Ivanoff - A Play • Anton Checkov
... for instance, the letters on this page are no true image of the sounds they call up, nor the sounds of the thoughts, yet both may be correct enough if they lead the reader in the end to the things they symbolise. It is M. Bergson, the most circumspect and best equipped thinker of this often scatter-brained school, who has put this view in a frank and tenable form, avoiding the bungling it has sometimes led to about the "meaning of truth." Truth, according to M. Bergson, ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana |
