"Thinker" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... doubting, but to give some means of resolving his doubts. Leonard then had to realize that Christophe was much more ill than he seemed, and that he would only allow himself to be convinced by the light of reason. But he still thought that Christophe was playing the free thinker—(it never occurred to him that he might be so sincerely).—He was not discouraged, and, strong in his recently acquired knowledge, he turned back to his school learning: he unfolded higgledy, piggledy, ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... he loses by the magnitude of his cosmic philosophizing.... From somewhere sound accents of an authority not sufficiently explained by the mere accuracy of his versions of life. Though it may indeed be difficult for a thinker of the widest views to contract himself to the dimensions needed for realistic art, and though he may often fail when he attempts it, when he does succeed he has the opportunity, which the mere worldling ...
— Contemporary American Literature - Bibliographies and Study Outlines • John Matthews Manly and Edith Rickert
... the interference of any insolent member of the insolent whole. It was this mixture of deep love and profound respect for the eternal PEOPLE, and of calm, passionless disdain for that capricious charlatan, the momentary PUBLIC, which made Ernest Maltravers an original and solitary thinker; and an actor, in reality modest and benevolent, in appearance arrogant and unsocial. "Pauperism, in contradistinction to poverty," he was wont to say, "is the dependence upon other people for existence, not on our own exertions; there is a moral pauperism in the ...
— Ernest Maltravers, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... freely, because the unusually intelligent face before us evidently belonged to a thinker. Candor of speech pleased him. Nevertheless, he answered as if musing, "They appear ugly to you: well they may be. Ja, but the most who look upon them are men and women acquainted with many sorrows—sudden deaths by falls from precipices, destruction of house and home by lightning, floods, avalanches, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - Vol. XI, No. 27, June, 1873 • Various
... committed suicide, the pistol would have been there," said Mr. Porter; who seemed to be a more acute thinker than ...
— The Gold Bag • Carolyn Wells
... redder mornings, By the beauty of brighter seas, Did he stand, the world's first thinker, Scorning his clan's decrees?— Seeking, with baffled eyes, In the dumb, inscrutable skies, A name for the greater glory That only the ...
— Dreams and Dust • Don Marquis
... may be a pseudo philosophy—at least it is an entertaining one—which cannot be said about all serious attempts at moulding the universe into a tiresome system, that is uprooted generally by the next thinker. The book opens with a very strong gale that ends with the arrival at a boarding house of a man who can stand on his head and has the name of Innocent Smith. He is somewhat like the person in the 'Passing of the Third Floor Back,' in that he revolutionizes the household, ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... wonderful immortal inhabitants to the population, was made, like Scott's, by what seems a divine chance, without apparent preparation or likelihood. In our day much more importance is given to a development which the scientific thinker would fondly hope to be traceable by all the leadings of race and inheritance into an evolution purely natural and to be expected; while, on the other hand, there is nothing which appears more splendid and dignified to others than the aspect of a life devoted to poetry, in which the man becomes ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant
... Jonathan Swift was published; and reviewers, who had no compunction in praising the dead, were quick to recognize the touch of a master hand, the trenchant style of a powerful thinker. For the public the book is of no great value; it is merely a curiosity of literature; but it is the only monument of his own rugged genius which bears the name ...
— Fenton's Quest • M. E. Braddon
... by study of the first volume of the Synthetic Philosophy, which an American friend had taught me how to read. I did not find it easy reading; partly because I am a slow thinker, but chiefly because my mind had never been trained to sustained effort in such directions. To learn the "First Principles" occupied me many months: no other volume of the series gave me equal trouble. I would read one section at a time,—rarely ...
— The Romance of the Milky Way - And Other Studies & Stories • Lafcadio Hearn
... afterwards elaborated into a system for the healing of diseases. Although his ideas were thus doubtless drawn from some of the same sources as those from which the Jewish Cabala descended, Paracelsus does not appear to have been a Cabalist, but a scientist of no mean order, and, as an isolated thinker, apparently connected with no secret association, does not enter further into the ...
— Secret Societies And Subversive Movements • Nesta H. Webster
... transition from the smiling landscapes of the Limousin to the sterner aspects of La Marche and Auvergne may offer to the thinker and the poet, as he passes them on his way, an image of the Infinite, that terror of certain minds; though it incites to revelry the woman of the world, bored as she travels luxuriously in her carriage,—to the inhabitants of ...
— The Village Rector • Honore de Balzac
... pass through a number of strange metamorphoses before they adopt their final shape. It is no more to be wondered at that one who is going to turn out a Roman Catholic, should have passed through the stages of being first a Methodist, and then a free thinker, than that a man should at some former time have been a mere cell, and later on an invertebrate animal. Ernest, however, could not be expected to know this; embryos never do. Embryos think with each stage of their development that they have now reached the only condition which ...
— The Way of All Flesh • Samuel Butler
... be lost sight of when judging Mr. Rhodes that he had been living for the best part of his life among people with whom he could not have anything in common except the desire to make money in the shortest time possible. He was by nature a thinker, a philosopher, a reader, a man who belonged to the best class of students, those who understand that one's mind wants continually improving and that it is apt to rust when not kept active. His companions in those first years which followed upon his arrival in South Africa would certainly ...
— Cecil Rhodes - Man and Empire-Maker • Princess Catherine Radziwill
... Finished most interesting review of John Foster's life. * * * Foster was a very deep thinker. He thought the boundary of the knowable wider than the generality do. This may be; but I fancy he does not always admit sufficient weight in his arguments to the manifest relations and actings of ...
— A Brief Memoir with Portions of the Diary, Letters, and Other Remains, - of Eliza Southall, Late of Birmingham, England • Eliza Southall
... are going to a concert, and I've found out that there's a really fine course of lectures to be given soon on "Literary Tendencies," or something like that. Quel chance. Landry is intensely interested. You've no idea what a deep mind he has, Laura—a real thinker. ...
— The Pit • Frank Norris
... itself, became the very centre of his religious life and as it were the soul of his soul. For the first time, no doubt, Francis had been brought into direct, personal, intimate contact with Jesus Christ; from belief he had passed to faith, to that living faith which a distinguished thinker has so well defined: "To believe is to look; it is a serious, attentive, and prolonged look; a look more simple than that of observation, a look which looks, and nothing more; artless, infantine, it has all the soul in it, it is a look of the soul and not the mind, a look which does ...
— Life of St. Francis of Assisi • Paul Sabatier
... to the end of my letter I may repent of my temerity and unsay my charge. For are not all our circlets of will as so many little eddies rounded in by the great Circle of Necessity, and could the Truth-speaker, perhaps now the best Thinker of the Saxon race, have written otherwise? And must not we say that Drunkenness is a virtue rather than that ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, - 1834-1872, Vol. I • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... as is the case here, with a question that is the subject of impassioned controversy. A man of science bent on verifying a phenomenon is not called upon to concern himself with the interests his verifications may hurt. In a recent publication an eminent thinker, M. Goblet d'Alviela, made the remark that, belonging to none of the contemporary schools, I am occasionally found in opposition of sundry of the conclusions of all of them. I hope this new work will merit a similar observation. To belong to a school is necessarily to ...
— The Crowd • Gustave le Bon
... that he is talking from his own consciousness in his own natural way. So far as tones and expressions and habits which belonged to the idiosyncrasy of the original are borrowed by the student of his life, it is a misfortune for the borrower. But to share the inmost consciousness of a noble thinker, to scan one's self in the white light of a pure and radiant soul,—this is indeed the highest form of ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... philosophic thinker and poet, of English Puritan descent, born at Boston, where he started in life as a Unitarian preacher and pastor, an office he resigned in 1832 for literature, in which he found he would have freer and fuller scope to carry out his purpose as a spiritual teacher; ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... position for loving Him and trusting Him than you and I are. It is all a mistake. We have lost nothing that they had which was worth the keeping; and we have gained a great deal which they had not. We have not to compare our relation to Christ with theirs, as we might do our relation to some great thinker or poet, with that of his contemporaries, but we have Christ in a better form, if I may so speak; and we, on whom the ends of the world are come, may have a deeper and a fuller and a closer intimacy with Him than was possible for men whose perceptions were disturbed by ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: St. John Chaps. XV to XXI • Alexander Maclaren
... your dividend—to earn your two thousand—you have to do work that brings you no pleasure in the doing. Content with five hundred, you could afford to do only that work that does give you pleasure. This is not a perfect world, we must remember. In the perfect world the thinker would be worth more than the mere jester. In the perfect world the farmer would be worth more than the stockbroker. In making the exchange I had to write myself down. I earn less money, but get more enjoyment out of life. I used to be able to afford champagne, but my liver was ...
— They and I • Jerome K. Jerome
... him in now, eh, Casaubon?" said Mr. Brooke. "He wouldn't come in till I had announced him, you know. And we'll go down and look at the picture. There you are to the life: a deep subtle sort of thinker with his fore-finger on the page, while Saint Bonaventure or somebody else, rather fat and florid, is looking up at the Trinity. Everything is symbolical, you know—the higher style of art: I like that up to a certain point, but not too far—it's rather straining ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... up, you're 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 ...
— The Merriweather Girls in Quest of Treasure • Lizette M. Edholm
... 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, and I don't ...
— A House-Boat on the Styx • John Kendrick Bangs
... a house-painter, a Socialist, and very evidently a sincere if somewhat raw thinker. He left to his heirs and assigns a manuscript of many thousand words. It was a novel, oddly entitled The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists (Grant Richards), and fell into the hands of Miss Jessie Pope, who recognised the genius in it (none too strong a word), made some excisions, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, May 6, 1914 • Various
... very 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, ...
— An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals • David Hume
... succeeded brilliantly, founded the "Revue de l'Est," in which he published an autobiographic novel, "L'Ambitieux par Amour," and met with warm support in his candidacy for the Chamber of Deputies (1834). Albert Savarus, with his mask of a deep thinker, might have seen all his dreams realized, but for the romantic and jealous fancies of Rosalie de Watteville, who discovered and undid the advocate's plans, by bringing about the second marriage of Madame d'Argaiolo. His hopes thus baffled, Albert Savarus became a friar of the parent institution ...
— Repertory Of The Comedie Humaine, Complete, A — Z • Anatole Cerfberr and Jules Franois Christophe
... Xenophanes of Colophon, in Elea, a town in western Italy. Migrating to an alien shore, colonization seems to have produced in philosophy the same results which it produced in politics: it emancipated the reason from all previous prejudice and prescriptive shackles. Xenophanes was the first thinker who openly assailed the popular faith (B. C. 538). He divested the Great Deity of the human attributes which human vanity, assimilating God to man, had bestowed upon him. The divinity of Xenophanes is that of modern philosophy—eternal, unalterable, and alone: graven ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... chamber. They 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, glorious ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... which a unity of the spirit was to spread, until, by material force as well as by the conquering mind, the European or Western man was recognized as in the forefront of the race. The supremacy of the Greek lay in his achievement in three directions, as a thinker, as an artist, and as the builder of the city-state. For our present purpose the first and the last are the most important and the first ...
— The Unity of Civilization • Various
... differs from the mere writer or thinker in this: he sustains a direct personal relation to his subject through emotion, intuition, will. The indirect, impersonal relation which works by reflection, comparison, and analysis is that of the critic and philosopher. The man is an artist when he gives us a concrete and immediate impression ...
— Whitman - A Study • John Burroughs
... was one of the three accompanying their Master to the Mount of Transfiguration, where they witnessed a sacred scene withheld from the others. His nature was affectionate and poetic, and he was a deep thinker. Often when the meaning of Jesus' words was beyond his hearers, John treasured the sayings in his memory. On the evening when Jesus sat at table with his disciples for the last time, John was near him, leaning on his Master's breast. When, on the next day, ...
— Correggio - A Collection Of Fifteen Pictures And A Portrait Of The - Painter With Introduction And Interpretation • Estelle M. Hurll
... it will not cause any one a shock to be told that "the greatest thinker of all time" was not ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 12 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Scientists • Elbert Hubbard
... The place was lonely and forbidding enough, isolated and withdrawn as 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 ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... Knox, of England, somewhat known as an ethnological lecturer and author,—a thinker in a sort, though of the "slam-bang" school, of far more force than faculty, and of a singular avidity for ugly news,—dogmatically proclaims that all Americans are undergoing a physical degeneration, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 12, October, 1858 • Various
... always to come 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 will soon recognize ...
— The Simple Life • Charles Wagner
... Western Science, while performing a marvelous work in piling up fact after fact to support its newly-discovered theory of Evolution, in a way utterly unknown to the Oriental thinker who seeks after principles by mental concentration—within rather than without—while actually proving by physical facts the mental conceptions of the Oriental Teachings, still misses the vital point of ...
— A Series of Lessons in Gnani Yoga • Yogi Ramacharaka
... fixed in an exact phraseology, its thinking is to very little purpose in the end. "Terms," says Whewell, "record discoveries." That which was seen, it may be with crystal clearness, and in bold outline, in the consciousness of an individual thinker, may fail to become the property and possession of mankind at large, because it is not transferred from the individual to the general mind, by means of a precise phraseology and a rigorous terminology. Nothing is in its own ...
— On the Study of Words • Richard C Trench
... Parton as produced on him by lager-bier, in that inquiry into the position of "The Coming Man" toward wine, some copies of which, we see, he is trying to distribute among the field-officers. On the contrary, he is, on the whole, a very sober man, and very powerful thinker, and very remarkable scholar. There is no field of human knowledge which he has not been among the first to explore; no heights of speculation which he has not scaled; no problem of the world over which he is not fruitfully toiling. Moreover, his thoroughness is the envy of the students of all other ...
— Reflections and Comments 1865-1895 • Edwin Lawrence Godkin
... The power of attention, the ability to 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 leaves sprout ...
— Architecture and Democracy • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... her commands rather than at the Pope's. Moreover, he was now renewing his friendship with Thomas White, a heretic Catholic priest, of several aliases, some of whose work had been placed on the Index. White was a philosophic thinker of considerable power and subtlety, and he and Digby acted and reacted on each other strongly—though Digby's debt is perhaps the greater. Their respective parts in the Two Treatises and in the Institutionum Peripateticorum libri quinque, published under White's name, but for which Sir ...
— The Closet of Sir Kenelm Digby Knight Opened • Kenelm Digby
... came to be the "peace of the king," and not of the bishop, that was broken within its borders. Here also ruled the baron-bishop Crewe, who was both a temporal and a spiritual peer, and Bishop Butler, the profound thinker. But the bishops live there no longer, their palace being moved to Auckland, while the university is located in the castle. It is the Northern University, first projected in Cromwell's time. About a mile to the westward of Durham was fought the battle of Neville's Cross in October, 1346. ...
— England, Picturesque and Descriptive - A Reminiscence of Foreign Travel • Joel Cook
... to the narrow circumstances of the poor, and still unused to the ways of the great, was called to the American Presidency. He was not brusque and warlike as Jackson had been; he was a kindly philosopher, a free-thinker in religion at the head of an orthodox people, or peoples. A shrewd judge of human character and the real friend of the poor and the dependent, Lincoln, like his aristocratic prototype, Thomas Jefferson, believed implicitly in the common man. He was ready to submit anything he proposed ...
— Expansion and Conflict • William E. Dodd
... the thinker's mind as rapidly as thought could travel. Adrienne observed her attentively; she remarked that the sewing-girl's countenance, which had lately brightened up, was again clouded, and expressed a feeling of painful humiliation. ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... letters from the profoundest woman thinker in England, Miss Martineau—letters which touched me deeply while they gave me pleasure I did ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1 of 2) • Frederic G. Kenyon
... by passion, the man was a genuine politician, cosmopolitan as well as patriotic, accustomed to consider what effect every vibration in that balance of European power, which no deep thinker can despise, must have on the destinies of civilised humanity, and on those of the nation to which he belongs. But are there not moments in life when the human heart suddenly narrows the circumference to which ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... endowments, the imaginative faculty is that which appears to be the most transcendent in the mental constitution of Burke. And so truly is this the case, that both among his contemporaries, as well as among his successors, this predominance of imagination has caused his just claims as a philosophic thinker and statesman to be partially overlooked. The union of ideal theory and practical realisation, of imaginative creation with logical induction, is indeed so rare, we cannot be surprised at the injustice which the genius of Burke has had to endure in this respect. And ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke
... an abnormally rapid thinker, but he began at this point to get a clearly defined impression that this lad, if invited, would waive the formalities and consent to join his meal. Indeed, the idea Archie got was that, if he were not invited pretty soon, he would ...
— Indiscretions of Archie • P. G. Wodehouse
... IN FRANCE.—Victor Cousin (1792—1867), a brilliant thinker and eloquent lecturer and writer, founded in France the eclectic school of philosophy. He aimed to construct a positive view on the basis of previous systems, which he classified under four heads,—idealism, sensualism, skepticism, ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... for the tool-maker; the subjugation of a universal force such as fire, or electricity, stands for the exaltation of power in every field of toil, for the creation of a new earth for the worker, new heavens for the thinker. As a corollary, we shall observe that an increasing width of gap marks off the successive stages of human progress from each other, so that its latest stride is much the longest and most decisive. And it ...
— Little Masterpieces of Science: - Invention and Discovery • Various
... in this—in his personal influence—that Mr. Maurice was greatest. True, he was a great and rare thinker. Those who wish to satisfy themselves of this should measure the capaciousness of his intellect by studying—not by merely reading— his Boyle Lectures on the Religions of the world; and that Kingdom of Christ, ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... change with 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 ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 26, December, 1859 • Various
... Mendelssohn enlarged in literary intercourse: he became a great and original thinker in many beautiful speculations in moral and critical philosophy; while he had gradually been creating a style which the critics of Germany have declared to be their first luminous model of precision and elegance. Thus a Hebrew vagrant, ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... and serious thinker, believed that marriages should be contracted on probation—say for five years, with the right on both sides to refuse ...
— Editorials from the Hearst Newspapers • Arthur Brisbane
... period, possessing neither originality nor power, could only interest the erudite and the searchers. The domain of prose is more enthralling. Leibnitz, who wrote in Latin and French, and even in German, is pre-eminently the great thinker he is reputed to be; but though he never possessed nor even pretended to possess originality in style, he is nevertheless highly esteemed for the purity, limpidity, and ...
— Initiation into Literature • Emile Faguet
... these it was, or whether neither of these, but a vision of other powers, or a dream, of which neither the prophet himself knew, nor can any other person yet know, the interpretation,—I suppose no modestly-minded and accurate thinker would now take upon himself to decide. Nor is it therefore anywise necessary for you to decide on that, or any other such question; but it is necessary that you should be bold enough to look every opposing question steadily in its face; and ...
— Lectures on Art - Delivered before the University of Oxford in Hilary term, 1870 • John Ruskin
... on didactic points at all; derived rather from Voltaire's Printed WORKS, where they lay derivable to all the world. Certain enough it is, Voltaire was at this time, and continued all his days, Friedrich's chief Thinker in the world; unofficially, the chief Preacher, Prophet and Priest of this Working King;—no better off for a spiritual Trismegistus was poor Friedrich in the world! On the practical side, Friedrich ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. X. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—At Reinsberg—1736-1740 • Thomas Carlyle
... code of principles, in which the prosperity or extension of this formed a leading object. For a monkish chronicler, it was natural to estimate the progress of affairs by the number of abbeys founded; the virtue of men by the sum-total of donations to the clergy. And for a thinker of the present day, it is equally natural to measure the occurrences of history by quite a different standard: by their influence upon the general destiny of man, their tendency to obstruct or to forward him in his advancement ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... when Bjoernson began to merge the artist in the thinker and prophet, his work has given a strong impetus to progress in religious, educational, and political affairs. As regards the first of these matters, it must be remembered that the sort of intolerance with which he has had to contend ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... the power and beauty of the Author's former works, we know none that mark the creative thinker, more than the present production. Its pages are full of new lights ...
— The Author's Printing and Publishing Assistant • Frederick Saunders
... indeed, any scholar or original thinker of temperament, can progress far in his chosen work without acquiring a certain philosophic attitude of his own that makes for religion; though it be no more than the result of orderly habits of thought: its premise gleaned merely from a continual ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... in. No; there were still those inflammatory tracts. Political I do not like to call them, for politics mean the art of government, and the tracts I speak of assailed all government which mankind has hitherto recognized. Sad rubbish, perhaps, were such tracts to you, O sound thinker, in your easy-chair! Or to you, practised statesman, at your post on the treasury bench—to you, calm dignitary of a learned church—or to you, my lord judge, who may often have sent from your bar to the dire Orcus of Norfolk's Isle the ghosts of men whom ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various
... for a Guide, excited the Curiosity of the Village to learn whence and what he might be. The Countryman (to whom they applied as most easy of Access) knew little more than that the Gentleman came from London to travel and see Fashions, and was, as he heard say, a Free-thinker: What Religion that might be, he could not tell; and for his own Part, if they had not told him the Man was a Free-thinker, he should have guessed, by his way of talking, he was little better than a Heathen; excepting only that he had been a good Gentleman to him, and made him drunk twice ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... been content with exposing these and other shams; and consequently his philosophy would have led nowhere. Carlyle is a greater thinker, and one who takes a wider view. He is no enemy of clothes, although fools have put them to wrong uses and made them the instruments of deception. His choice is not between worshipping and abandoning the world and its appearances. ...
— Among Famous Books • John Kelman
... tried 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 ...
— Peace Theories and the Balkan War • Norman Angell
... be seen, that he who would become a skilful trailer, must of necessity be an observer, as well as thinker; and remember, boys, that he who talks most, generally ...
— The Young Trail Hunters • Samuel Woodworth Cozzens
... be 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
... the passion of a character already profound, ardent, concentrated; that poor frail creature, pretty, fair-haired, rosy, and curly,—that orphan with another orphan for his only support, touched him to the bottom of his heart; and grave thinker as he was, he set to meditating upon Jehan with an infinite compassion. He kept watch and ward over him as over something very fragile, and very worthy of care. He was more than a brother to the child; he ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... Daudet, De Maupassant, Hugo and George Sand, whatever it might do to his morals. Mark Twain is a humorist of a kind. His humor is always rather broad, so broad that the polite world can justly call it coarse. He is not a reader nor a thinker nor a man who loves art of any kind. He is a clever Yankee who has made a "good thing" out of writing. He has been published in the North American Review and in the Century, but he is not and never will be a part of literature. The association and companionship of cultured ...
— A Collection of Stories, Reviews and Essays • Willa Cather
... ever occurred to a great thinker than that religion and science represent parallel and distinct lines of development, each having its own sphere of operation. It is all the more remarkable when we remember that with Spencer "religion" means all religion, past ...
— Theism or Atheism - The Great Alternative • Chapman Cohen
... was with the Swiss professor. He was always in the sanctum sanctorum of his spirit, striving to attain the truth; with Hamlet-like irresolution he poised in mind before the antinomies of the universe, alert to see around a subject, having the modern thinker's inability to be partisan. This way of thought is obviously unhealthy, or at least has in it something of the morbid. It implies the undue introspection which is well-nigh the disease of this century. There is in it the failure to lose one's life ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... and accords perfectly with the introductory paragraphs of the "Origin of Species;" it gives us the same picture of a solitary thinker, a poor, lonely, friendless student of nature, who had never so much as heard of Buffon, Erasmus Darwin, or Lamarck. Unfortunately, however, we cannot forget the description of the influences which, according to Mr. Grant Allen, did in reality surround Mr. Darwin's youth, and certainly they ...
— Luck or Cunning? • Samuel Butler
... one feature of American society upon which I think no foreigner has remarked, or if he have, it has been so cursorily as plainly to show that he was far from appreciating its importance: I mean the fact that here the thinker is also the worker. In England and the European States, the working class is distinct from the consumers, and there must be almost as great a contrast in the intellectual as in the physical condition of the two. All the refinement, the cultivation, must ...
— Evenings at Donaldson Manor - Or, The Christmas Guest • Maria J. McIntosh
... writer, not only in the proportion by which he transcends other writers as to extent and as to subtility of thinking, but also as to elevation and sublimity. Milton was not an extensive or discursive thinker, as Shakspeare was; for the motions of his mind were slow, solemn, sequacious, like those of the planets; not agile and assimilative; not attracting all things within its own sphere; not multiform: repulsion ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... social position of this lady and her established ability as a writer and thinker, she was prepared at the inception of the rebellion to exercise a strong influence in behalf of liberty and the Union; that it was felt and respected in Maryland during the darkest hours in that State's history, there can be no question. Her publications throughout the struggle ...
— A Military Genius - Life of Anna Ella Carroll of Maryland • Sarah Ellen Blackwell
... was a leader of his people, not a patent-insides recorder of social functions, but a vigorous and independent thinker and writer. The subscribers to the newspaper published in the section were higher in proportion to population than in the State of New York and not greatly inferior to those of New England, although such eastern papers as the New York Tribune ...
— The Frontier in American History • Frederick Jackson Turner
... may 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
... was originated by George Ripley, who also virtually directed it throughout. In his words it was intended "to insure a more natural union between intellectual and manual labour than now exists; to combine the thinker and the worker, as far as possible, in the same individual; to guarantee the highest mental freedom by providing all with labour adapted to their tastes and talents, and securing to them the fruits of their industry; to do away with the necessity of menial services by ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various
... years of age. He was the head of the Sukarchakia misl, which had its headquarters at Gujranwala. Mean in appearance, his face marked and one eye closed by the ravages of smallpox, he was the one man of genius the Jat tribe has produced. A splendid horseman, a bold leader, a cool thinker untroubled with scruples, an unerring judge of character, he was bound to rise in such times. He set himself to put down every Sikh rival and to profit by the waning of the Durani power to make himself master of their possessions in the Panjab. Pluck, patience, and guile ...
— The Panjab, North-West Frontier Province, and Kashmir • Sir James McCrone Douie
... business world as a doer, maker, or as any other executive, his worth to the state as an incorruptible official, his worth to his family as a devoted husband and father, his worth to literature or art as a thinker or maker,—these values are imprinted upon his personality, howbeit with ...
— The Etiquette of To-day • Edith B. Ordway
... and committee men didn't belong to the Church of England Church. Glover, for instance, was a Presbyterian, till they ran the picket fence of the manse two feet on to his property, and after that he became a free-thinker. But in Mariposa, as I have said, everybody likes to be in everything and naturally a Whirlwind Campaign was a novelty. Anyway it would have been a poor business to keep a man out of the lunches merely on account of ...
— Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town • Stephen Leacock
... That profound thinker, Mr Tony Weller, was never so correct as in his views respecting the value of an alibi. There are few better ...
— The Gold Bat • P. G. Wodehouse
... Hilaire Belloc and in books like the 1910 "What's Wrong with the World" he advocated a view called "Distributionism" that was best summed up by his expression that every man ought to be allowed to own "three acres and a cow." Though not known as a political thinker, his political influence has circled the world. Some see in him the father of the "small is beautiful" movement and a newspaper article by him is credited with provoking Gandhi to seek a "genuine" nationalism for India rather than one ...
— Heretics • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... were the results of the manifestations which astonished Rostopchin and made the more intelligent class of Russians fraternize more with the masses. In our day, this tendency has been eloquently illustrated by the greatest Russian artist and thinker, Tolstoy, who was the very incarnation of the ideas named above, and who always appears to us as a highly cultured peasant. The hero of "Resurrection" sums up in a few words this sympathy for the people: "This is it, ...
— Contemporary Russian Novelists • Serge Persky
... thinker sends out a thought to the world, it is taken up and passed through other brains, it becomes distorted or is recognized by them in its integrity according to the caliber of mind, or the idiosyncrasies of the one representing ...
— Insights and Heresies Pertaining to the Evolution of the Soul • Anna Bishop Scofield
... at Paisley in the year 1788. His progenitors are said to have been remarkable for their acquaintance with the arts, and relish for elegant literature. His eldest brother, the late Dr Carlile of Dublin attained much eminence as a profound thinker and an accomplished theologian. Having received a liberal education, first at the grammar-school of Paisley, and afterwards in the University of Glasgow, the subject of this sketch settled as a manufacturer in his native town. Apart from the avocations of business, much of his time has been devoted ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume IV. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... Sir James Stephen in his 'Digest of the Criminal Law.' All who publicly advocate the disestablishment of the Church are guilty under one clause, and half the leading writers of our age are guilty under another. It is difficult to find a book by any eminent scientist or thinker which does not contain open or covert attacks on Christianity and Scripture, and the Archbishop of Canterbury has pathetically complained that it is dangerous to introduce high-class magazines to the family circle, because they are nearly sure to contain a large quantity of scepticism. ...
— Prisoner for Blasphemy • G. W. [George William] Foote
... blasphemies, derived from the ancient doctrine of the divine right of kings, because they increased his own ministerial power, exercised under a presidency and governorship chiefly nominal and honorary. But a thinker of his force, a statesman of his science, a man of his greatness, should have remembered what physiologists have demonstrated with regard to heredity, and should have known that it was his duty and that of the nation ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 24, November, 1891 • Various
... Duke of Wellington and the bishops at its head. Of the declaration, he said, that instead of making the taker of office describe himself as belonging to some sort of religion, whether a Unitarian, a Catholic, or a Free-thinker, it did not require him to say, he had only to answer, that he was of the Christian faith; neither did it call on him to observe the declaration by such phrases as "I am a Christian," or as, "I stand in the presence of my God." The confidence to be reposed in the declaration ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... disappointing. So much so that in the last of the series a soured sportsman on one of the benches near the roof began in satirical mood to whistle the "Merry Widow Waltz." It was here that the red-jerseyed thinker for the first and last time came out of his meditative trance. He leaned over the ropes, and ...
— The Prince and Betty - (American edition) • P. G. Wodehouse
... original views, often sagacious and never otherwise than admirably exprest—appear to us precisely in the right. The many who look upon him as not only all this, but as a comprehensive and profound thinker, little prone to error, err essentially themselves. The source of the general mistake lies in a very singular consideration—yet in one upon which we do not remember ever to have heard a word of comment. ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. X (of X) - America - II, Index • Various
... came the desperate poverty of his early married life in California, as here described. His work as a printer led to casual employment as a journalist. This was the first step in his subsequently life-long career as an independent thinker, writer, and speaker. ...
— Stories of Achievement, Volume IV (of 6) - Authors and Journalists • Various
... address ourselves to the higher circles of society: we care not to disown it—the Pall Mall Gazette is written by gentlemen for gentlemen; its conductors speak to the classes in which they live and were born. The field-preacher has his journal, the radical free-thinker has his journal: why should the Gentlemen of England be unrepresented in ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... of the most valuable volumes published within recent years. The admirable volume should stand upon the shelf of every soldier, and of every thinker upon Imperial ...
— Cavalry in Future Wars • Frederick von Bernhardi
... first lecture he attended, in the schools attached to the friary, where the great works of Augustine and Aquinas formed the text books; no Creek as yet. He passed from Latin to Logic, as the handmaid of theology. The great thinker Aristotle supplied the method, not the language or matter, and became the ally of Christianity, under the rendering of a ...
— The House of Walderne - A Tale of the Cloister and the Forest in the Days of the Barons' Wars • A. D. Crake
... him fortitude to bear the slow martyrdom of poverty, contempt, and sickness of heart, which embittered the toiling years preceding its late realization. The steam-engine was invented by James Watt before he was thirty; but then Watt was a thinker from his cradle. Everybody will recollect his grandmother's reproof of what she called his idleness, at the time his boyish brain was busy with meditations destined to ripen in the most marvellous and revolutionizing of all industrial inventions,—an ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 93, July, 1865 • Various
... sceptic, no innovator in matters of opinion or observance, but a quiet student, a scholar, a man of books, a calm, bright-minded, whole-souled thinker, believing, hopeful, social, sunny, but absorbed in philosophical pursuits. Well does the writer of these lines recall the vision of a slender figure wearing in summer the flowing silk robe, in winter the long, dark blue cloak of the profession, walking with measured step from his residence in ...
— Brook Farm • John Thomas Codman
... 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
... 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 ...
— Dreamthorp - A Book of Essays Written in the Country • Alexander Smith
... long and often irksome study; they impart a veneer of general knowledge. There is nothing that achieves such immediate success as an explanation of the riddle of the universe in a word or two. The thinker does not travel so fast: content to know little so that he may know something, he limits his field of search and is satisfied with a scanty harvest, provided that the grain be of good quality. Before agreeing that the tool determines the trade, he wants to see things ...
— Bramble-bees and Others • J. Henri Fabre
... but do not endorse the opinion that G.B.S. markedly resembles James Mill (Mr. Barker confuses the two Mills). Beer adds "Webb was the thinker, Shaw the fighter." This antithesis is scarcely happy. The collaboration of the two is much too complicated to be summed up ...
— The History of the Fabian Society • Edward R. Pease
... be as Maximilian Harden, the keenest thinker of the defeated Germans said: "Only one conqueror's ...
— Woodrow Wilson's Administration and Achievements • Frank B. Lord and James William Bryan
... owing to special circumstances and conditions of mind, or to peculiar temperaments, that the ideas of things do not remain as mere thoughts in the thinker's mind, but that they become so intense that they are for the moment held to be real, precisely as ...
— Myth and Science - An Essay • Tito Vignoli
... the profoundest thinker of antiquity, in his treatise on politics, defines a citizen to be "one who enjoys a due share in the government of that country of which he is a member." If he does not enjoy this right, then he is no citizen, but a subject. Every citizen, therefore, is entitled to a voice—a vote—a due share ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... 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 ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, August 1887 - Volume 1, Number 7 • Various
... soul?" he was saying. The Dean's daughter had accused him of being a free-thinker—well, and should not a man think freely? People imagined hell as a sort of house down under the ground, with the devil as host—or rather as sovereign lord. Then he spoke of the altar picture in the chapel, a figure of the Christ, with a few Jews and Jewesses; ...
— Pan • Knut Hamsun
... unruly black hair combined with his massive shoulders and chest to give him the appearance of a man who labored with his hands—until one looked at them. His hands were in strange contrast to the rest of him. Long, slim, mobile hands they were, with tapering nervous fingers—the hands of a thinker or of a musician. Telltale splotches of acid told of hours spent in a laboratory, a tale that was confirmed by the almost imperceptible stoop of ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science February 1930 • Various
... was created in God's own image, we have direct evidence in his ability of not only conceiving of God's contrivances, but even of reproducing them; and this, not as a mere imitator, but as an original thinker. He may occasionally borrow the principles of his contrivances from the works of the Original Designer, but much more frequently, in studying the works of the Original Designer does he discover in them the principles of his own contrivances. He has not been an imitator: he has merely been ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... immediate result, is not always of the most worldly advantage to the possessor. It is one of the slowest, because one of the most durable, of agencies. It may take a thousand years for a thought to come into power; and the thinker who originated it might have died in rags ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 2, No. 12, May, 1851. • Various
... appear. All we know is that he settled down in that quiet, out-of-the-way corner of the world, heedless of worldly ambition and indifferent to ecclesiastical honors and emoluments. He was no sceptic, no free-thinker, nor do we find him taking a part in the theological controversies of his age. No mention is made of what he thought and did in relation to the grand quarrel between Luther and Leo, or the Diet of Worms, or the burning of the bull at the gates of Wittenberg, or the other stirring events ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 3 of 8 • Various
... comes it, for instance, that he could write, and not only write but publish, in the same decade, and sometimes in the same year, poetry which is of our very best, and some which for frozen inanity it would be hard to equal anywhere? How could a thinker of his power of brain cover leagues of letter-paper with windy nonsense and mawkish insincerity? And finally, of what quality was the talk of one whose social life was entirely monologue? To the first of these questions Wordsworth perhaps helps with an analogy, but not ...
— In a Green Shade - A Country Commentary • Maurice Hewlett
... gay, and, this much said, it is needless to add it was not intellectual. But Professor Small was a thinker, and so was Governor Fauquier; and these two were firm friends, although very unlike in many ways. And to "the palace" of the courtly Fauquier, Small took his young friend Jefferson. Fauquier was often ...
— Little Journeys To the Homes of the Great, Volume 3 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... against a tall man in conical capucha and trailing robe of blue. He turned, his masked face close to mine, so close that even in the dusk I caught a flash of glittering eyes. Then, giving me a sudden push, he cried out, "Help—murder! An anarchist—a free-thinker! To ...
— The Car of Destiny • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... is believed that no historian was 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
... sentence. Paley, whom he never tires of treating to contemptuous abuse, was incapable of such feeble sophistry. De Quincey, in short, was a very able expositor; but he was not, though under better discipline he might probably have become, a sound original thinker. He is an interpreter, not an originator of thought. His skill in setting forth an argument blinds him to its most palpable defects. If language is a powerful weapon in his hands, it is only when the direction ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... affairs and studying out situations. Woodland creatures whose living is conducted largely automatically are automatically alert and do not walk straight up to danger which rustles and thuds warnings of its presence. It takes a thinker to get so immersed in his own affairs of the brain as to get ...
— Old Plymouth Trails • Winthrop Packard
... of age instead of the ripe old age of ninety-three that he claims. He is about five and one-half or six feet in height, weighs one-hundred and seventy-five pounds or more, and has good sight and hearing in addition to a skin that is almost devoid of any wrinkle. Besides all of this he is a clear thinker and has a good sense of humor. Following is an account of the experiences of Mr. Womble as a slave and of the conditions in general on the ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves - Georgia Narratives, Part 4 • Works Projects Administration
... came to me at times, vision—set itself in air. I saw A People who persecuted neither Jew nor thinker. It rose one Figure, formed of an infinite number of small figures, but all their edges met in one glow. The figure stood upon the sea and held apart the clouds, and was free and fair and mighty, and was man and woman melted together, and it took all colors and ...
— 1492 • Mary Johnston
... reputation for sobriety of judgement by resolutely refusing to have definite views on any subject; so safe a man was he considered, that while still quite young he had been appointed to the lucrative post of Thinker in Ordinary to the Royal Family. There was Mr. Principal Crank, with his sister Mrs. Quack; Professors Gabb and Bawl, with their wives and two or three ...
— Erewhon Revisited • Samuel Butler
... thinker, but these thoughts flashed through his mind in less time than it took him to obey Von Barwig. He sat down in the chair indicated by his friend and tried ...
— The Music Master - Novelized from the Play • Charles Klein
... unintelligible, and Tintoret by being impetuous. But I assure them, very seriously, that obscurity is not always admirable, nor impetuosity always right; that disorder does not necessarily imply discretion, nor haste, security. It is sometimes difficult to understand the words of a deep thinker; but it is equally difficult to understand an idiot; and young students will find it, on the whole, the best thing they can do to strive to be clear;[31] not affectedly clear, but manfully and firmly. Mean something, and say something, whenever you touch canvas; ...
— Modern Painters, Volume IV (of V) • John Ruskin
... speculation of Bruno. He did much also (we may easily infer) to encourage the independence of mind and the freedom in thinking Spinoza had already manifested in no inconsiderable degree. For although this Van den Ende was a Catholic physician and Latin master by profession, he was a free thinker in spirit and reputation. And if we are to believe the horrified public suspicion, he taught a select few of his Latin pupils the grounds of his heterodox belief. As one can easily understand, to study ...
— The Philosophy of Spinoza • Baruch de Spinoza
... of triumphant naturalism, he plunged at first into mere representation with almost self-obliterating earnestness; the pupil of Fra Filippo, he was trained to a love of spiritual genre; himself gifted with strong instincts for the significant, he was able to create such a type of the thinker as in his fresco of St. Augustin; yet in his best years he left everything, even spiritual significance, behind him, and abandoned himself to the presentation of those qualities alone which in a picture are directly life-communicating, and life-enhancing. Those of us who care ...
— The Florentine Painters of the Renaissance - With An Index To Their Works • Bernhard Berenson
... such, existed, the conduct of its inhabitants demonstrated their faith, their patriotism, their spirit of mutual helpfulness, and their temperance. The pioneer was not a philosopher or a thinker, because the rigorous struggle for survival, which was his, did not permit the leisure to develop these traits. He was a doer whose values and beliefs were ...
— The Fair Play Settlers of the West Branch Valley, 1769-1784 - A Study of Frontier Ethnography • George D. Wolf
... personality ... is but to repeat what has been said many times already. All these judgments are confirmed by his latest book, wherein may be noted the same impeccable correctness of language, the same firm grasp upon form, the same abundancy, force and originality of thought that make of him the only thinker among our writers of fiction, the same sad, ...
— Brazilian Tales • Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis
... Quintinie is the result of a fit of anti-clerical mania. George Sand gives, in this novel, the counterpart of Sibylle. Emile Lemontier, a free-thinker, is in love with the daughter of General La Quintinie. Emile is troubled in his mind because, as his fiancee is a Catholic, he knows she will have to have a confessor. The idea is intolerable to him, as, like Monsieur Homais, he considers that a husband could ...
— George Sand, Some Aspects of Her Life and Writings • Rene Doumic
... was irritated at 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 ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever
... scientific thinker of early Greece was Aristotle. He had lived by the seashore and knew better than any other man of his times the exquisite seaweeds and the still more beautiful marine animals. He was the first to think of them as a linked series, the higher developing ...
— The Meaning of Evolution • Samuel Christian Schmucker
... humble and uncorrupted souls the sense of right and wrong, which, after passing through various forms, has found its final expression in the use of material force. Behind the bayonet is the law-giver's statute, behind the statute the thinker's argument, behind the argument is the tender conscientiousness of woman, woman, the wife, the mother,—who looks upon the face of God himself reflected in the unsullied soul of infancy. "Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings hast thou ordained strength, ...
— Pages From an Old Volume of Life - A Collection Of Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... and easy prose; his pen was ready for any subject; and it has been said of him with perfect truth, that he touched nothing that he did not adorn. Burke was the most eloquent writer of his time, and by far the greatest political thinker that England has ever produced. He is known by an essay he wrote when a very young man— on "The Sublime and Beautiful"; but it is to his speeches and political writings that we must look for his noblest thoughts and most eloquent ...
— A Brief History of the English Language and Literature, Vol. 2 (of 2) • John Miller Dow Meiklejohn
... remarked the advanced thinker, "ter hear ez them tables o' stone war up on the bald o' the mounting thar. I hed drawed the idee ez 'twar in some other kentry somewhar—I dunno—" He stopped blankly. He could not formulate his geographical ignorance. "An' I never knowed," he resumed, presently, "ez thar war enough gold ...
— The Riddle Of The Rocks - 1895 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... later, Susan and Ernestine were in Philadelphia at a national woman's rights convention, and when Ernestine was proposed for president, Susan had her first opportunity to champion her new friend. A foreigner and a free-thinker, Ernestine encountered a great deal of prejudice even among liberal reformers, and Susan was surprised at the strength of feeling against her. Impressed during their trip to Washington by Ernestine's essentially fine qualities and her value to the cause, Susan fought for her behind the scenes, ...
— Susan B. Anthony - Rebel, Crusader, Humanitarian • Alma Lutz
... piety they beat us out of the field. "Spartan virtue" is a household word amongst us, but Sparta's claims to pre-eminence certainly do not rest upon her children's love either for honesty or for truth. The profoundest thinker of the nineteenth century has said that insufficient truthfulness "does more than any one thing that can be named to keep back civilisation, virtue, everything on which human happiness, on the largest scale, depends"—an abstract proposition ...
— Chinese Sketches • Herbert A. Giles
... to-night about him, although I realized my unfitness in many respects for such a function, I could not refuse the opportunity to point out how many of the sober, practical undertakings of to-day had been anticipated in all their principles by this solitary, shrewd, independent thinker, who, in an inconsecutive and almost ejaculatory way, wrought out many sentences and verses which will travel ...
— Four American Leaders • Charles William Eliot
... its own sake: one to whom woman was, indeed, the most important thing in the world, but to whom nothing in the world was indifferent. The bust which gives us the most lively notion of him shows us a great, vivid, intellectual face, full of fiery energy and calm resource, the face of a thinker and a fighter in one. A scholar, an adventurer, perhaps a Cabalist, a busy stirrer in politics, a gamester, one 'born for the fairer sex,' as he tells us, and born also to be a vagabond; this man, who is remembered now for his written account ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... there was a son of Ashton Chalmers, president of the First National Bank of Leesville. And suddenly Jimmie gave a start. Impossible! It could not be! But—it was! Young Emil Forster! Emil a Socialist, Emil a German, Emil a student and thinker, who had penetrated the hypocritical disguises of this capitalist war, and had fearlessly proclaimed the truth every Friday night at the local—here he was with a suit of khaki on his rather frail figure, a rifle in his ...
— Jimmie Higgins • Upton Sinclair
... grew out of the fear of the power she exercised at the period these teachings were given—a power which the saints believed prejudicial to good order and good morals. There is more than one profound thinker of our own period who has arraigned her influence—Strindberg and Nietzsche among them. You cannot turn a page of history that the woman is not on it or behind it. She is the most subtle and binding thread in the pattern ...
— The Business of Being a Woman • Ida M. Tarbell
... significant that Bacon was not thoroughly ignorant of them, but with deliberate consciousness preferred his own method. We do not think, indeed, that the notiones of which he speaks in any way correspond to what Whewell and Ellis would call "conceptions or ideas furnished by the mind of the thinker"; nor do we imagine that Bacon would have admitted these as necessary elements in the inductive process. But he was certainly not ignorant of what may be called a deductive method, and of a kind of hypothesis. This is clear from the use he makes of ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... into the library. She was at no time a very clear-headed thinker, and the difficulty of putting her question into a few words pressed ...
— Captain Bayley's Heir: - A Tale of the Gold Fields of California • G. A. Henty
... original who stands on his own feet, uses the thoughts of others only to stimulate and supplement his own, and who does his best to color borrowed thought with the hue of his own personality. Such a man, if he be not a creator, is at least a thinker, and a thinker need never be a literary thief. The entrance of any thought that will set the mind to working ...
— Writing the Photoplay • J. Berg Esenwein and Arthur Leeds
... from 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, ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... give edge to so murderous a thought, and wings to the feet of the thinker, a man both tall and broad came striding down the cottage garden. He was swinging a heavy axe as if it were a mere dress cane, and now and then dealing clean slash of a branch, with an air which ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore
... quite clear that this pagan attitude towards sex, this tendency to enjoy it in its place and leave it there, is one that, more than anything else, is irritating to women. If, as a German thinker says, every woman is a courtezan or a mother, it is obvious that the artists and thinkers who refuse alike the beguilements of the one and the ironic tenderness of the other, are not people to be "loved." ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys
... always the pleasantest people in the world. I never cared much for your deep-thinker—the man who believes he is sent into the world to promulgate his own particular gospel. But the men who write for newspapers—critics, ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... Plutarch's Roman Lives he deals with the modern epoch of Caesar 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 critic, that in this lively and fruitful way ...
— Selections from the Prose Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... between them cleaning a pipe with a collection of seagull's feather gathered for the purpose on the golf links ashore. He was thin, a grey-haired, silent man. His face, in repose, was that of a deliberate thinker whose thoughts had not led him to an entirely happy goal. Yet his smile when amused had a quality of gratitude to the jester, not altogether without pathos. He had a slightly cynical demeanour, a bitter tongue, and a curiously sympathetic, almost tender manner ...
— The Long Trick • Lewis Anselm da Costa Ritchie
... Ambrose Eveleth, Rector of Saint Bartholomew's, Olive's father, was one of a class numerous in the Anglican Church, a cultivated man, with pure tastes, with simple habits, a good reader, a neat writer, a safe thinker, with a snug and well-fenced mental pasturage, which his sermons kept cropped moderately close without any exhausting demand upon the soil. Olive had grown insensibly into her religious maturity, ...
— The Guardian Angel • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... courage. His conscientiousness was almost morbid. His temperament was melancholy, and his life was lonely. In early life he was twice in love, but poverty forbade his marriage. He was a clear and logical thinker, much given to refined exposition of constitutional theories, but deficient in large culture and philosophy. He held the doctrine of State sovereignty, but from first to last he opposed secession as against the true interest of the States. At the beginning of his career he was active ...
— The Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement • George S. Merriam
... photograph that I have seen. His forehead is not remarkably large, but comes forward at the eyebrows; it is not the brow nor countenance of a prominently intellectual man, (not a natural student, I mean, or abstract thinker,) but of one whose office it is to handle things practically and to bring about tangible results. His face looked capable of being very stern, but wore, in its repose, when I saw it, an aspect pleasant ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... To the priest's Heaven or Hell? Were they now telling their sins to some hard-faced angel while he checked the count from his book, reminding them of many that they had forgotten? Or were they fast asleep for ever and ever as a shrewd thinker whom I knew had told me secretly he was sure would be the fate of all of us, whatever the priests might teach and believe. And where was my mother whom I had loved and who loved me well, although outwardly she was so stern a woman, my mother whom I had seen ...
— The Virgin of the Sun • H. R. Haggard
... he was again silent, and there was a deeper air of reflection on his face than almost seemed natural to it, for he looked more of a soldier than a thinker. ...
— Sunrise • William Black
... of affairs, statesman, thinker, and pessimist, found in his new friendship with Diana at once that "agreement," that relaxation, which men of his sort can only find in the society of those women who, without competing with them, can yet by sympathy ...
— The Testing of Diana Mallory • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... am even—permit me to say—a thinker, though to be sure, this name nowadays seems to be the monopoly of hawkers of revolutionary wares, the slaves of some French or German thought—devil knows what foreign notions. But I am not an intellectual ...
— Under Western Eyes • Joseph Conrad
... beyond rivalry. Yet it was in these last two capacities that his reputation among his contemporaries was the most marked. It was left to a succeeding generation to fully enlighten the world in regard to his creative powers as a musical thinker. ...
— The Great German Composers • George T. Ferris
... resembles one. But those to whom you refer profess to appeal to facts. It is on the 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 ...
— The Portent & Other Stories • George MacDonald
... mechanical motions and their mechanical causes, and imagine their mechanical increase and their mechanical complication the largest possible; and still the life-motion of the organic will never result therefrom. If such a keen psychical and physiological investigator and thinker, and such an authority in the realm of the motions of atoms and molecules, as Gustav Theodor Fechner—"Einige Ideen zur Schoepfungs- und Entwicklungsgeschichte der Organismen" ("Some Ideas about the History ...
— The Theories of Darwin and Their Relation to Philosophy, Religion, and Morality • Rudolf Schmid
... lungs; for we find that what we now call the pulmonary vein is connected with the lungs, and branches out in them (Fig. 1). Finding that the greater part of this system of vessels was filled with air after death, this ancient thinker very shrewdly concluded that its real business was to receive air from the lungs, and to distribute that air all through the body, so as to get rid of the grosser humours and purify the blood. That was a very natural and very obvious suggestion, and a highly ingenious ...
— William Harvey And The Discovery Of The Circulation Of The Blood • Thomas H. Huxley
... dear. Patro, amiko, etc. : Mia kara : my dear. father, friend, etc. Estimata : esteemed. Samideano : fellow-thinker. Estiminda : estimable. Kunlaboranto : fellow-worker. Respektinda :respect-worthy. Sinjoro : Sir. Honorinda honourable. Sinjoroj : Gentlemen, Sirs. Sinjorino : Madame, ...
— The Esperanto Teacher - A Simple Course for Non-Grammarians • Helen Fryer
... indeed,' answered I, with a groan: 'for my part I don't much like it; and I could have been better pleased with one that was poor and honest, than this fine gentleman with his fortune and infidelity; for depend on't, if he be what I suspect him, no free-thinker shall ever have a child of mine.' 'Sure, father,' cried Moses, 'you are too severe in this; for heaven will never arraign him for what he thinks, but for what he does. Every man has a thousand vicious thoughts, which arise without his power to suppress. Thinking freely of religion, ...
— The Vicar of Wakefield • Oliver Goldsmith |
