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Thinker   Listen
noun
Thinker  n.  One who thinks; especially and chiefly, one who thinks in a particular manner; as, a close thinker; a deep thinker; a coherent thinker.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Thinker" Quotes from Famous Books



... those of political and even of military foresight, and either inspire the besieged to a victorious resistance, or compel himself, alone in a cityful of fanatics, to counsel surrender. A siege can turn a prophet or quiet thinker into a hero. ...
— Jeremiah • George Adam Smith

... hands of all aspirants for academic distinction. He had earned a high 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 ...
— Erewhon Revisited • Samuel Butler

... of a dreadful catastrophe; the greatest thinker of the age, our most loved friend, who was like a light among ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac

... dark crypt, Babbalanja drew forth a few crumbling, illegible, black-letter sheets of his favorite old essayist, brave Bardianna. They seemed to have formed parts of a work, whose title only remained—"Thoughts, by a Thinker." ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. II (of 2) • Herman Melville

... Tavernake paused for a few moments. He was never a quick thinker and the situation was certainly ...
— The Tempting of Tavernake • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... forms in which this uncanny doctrine of absolute identity was avoided; but at the best it meant an endless monotonous iteration, which was singularly unlikely to stimulate speculative interest in the future. It must be remembered that no thinker had any means of knowing how near to the end of his cycle the present hour might be. The most influential school of the later Greek age, the Stoics, adopted the theory of cycles, and the natural psychological effect of the theory is vividly reflected ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury

... solace of an unquestioning faith. Arnold has been called "the poet of the Universities," because of the reflective scholarly thought in his verse. It breathes the atmosphere of books and of the study. Such poetry cannot appeal to the masses. It is for the thinker. ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck

... from whom I have learned so much that it cannot be estimated is Victor Maurel. He is a most remarkable man, a great thinker and philosopher. If he had turned his attention to any other art or science, or if he had been but a day laborer, he would be a great man anywhere, ...
— Vocal Mastery - Talks with Master Singers and Teachers • Harriette Brower

... new conceptions are prevailing, Aristotle is winning the day. A fresh kind of thinker has arisen, whose chief idea of "virtue" is to investigate patiently the facts of life; men of the type of Lister, any one of whom have done more to regenerate mankind, and to increase the sum of human happiness, than a wilderness of the amiably-hazy old doctrinaires who professed the same ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas

... the entire situation and finds that the essential conditions of success of a democracy are peace, education and adequate nutrition. But he shows that a great problem exists which must be worked out; and he shows how it must be worked out. Dr. Guest is not alone a thinker, but an observer; not a theorist, but a man of practical understanding, who has studied a problem at first hand and shows it forth simply but comprehensively and with an eye single to the needs ...
— When Winter Comes to Main Street • Grant Martin Overton

... 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 ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons

... 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 ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, August 1887 - Volume 1, Number 7 • Various

... at times. He would stab a man, but grieve upon a sparrow. At heart we fear he is a coward, and stupid. The Duke, on the contrary, is shrewd and he does a lot of thinking. He has heavy eyebrows. He is the kind of thinker that you just know that he is thinking. Both pirates are very cruel—and profane, but we ...
— Wappin' Wharf - A Frightful Comedy of Pirates • Charles S. Brooks

... "Because Barthorpe immediately sprang upon me the matter of the will. And I just as immediately recognized—I think I may count myself as a quick thinker—that the really important matter just then was not the murder of Jacob Herapath, but the ultimate disposal of Jacob ...
— The Herapath Property • J. S. Fletcher

... shaken. His cynicism dropped from him and gave place to curiosity and awe. "That was exactly like the birth of a thought," he said to himself, "but who was the thinker? Some great Living Mind is at work in this spot. He has intelligence, for all his shapes are different, and he has character, for all belong to the same general type.... If I'm not wrong, and if it's the force called Shaping or Crystalman, I've seen enough to ...
— A Voyage to Arcturus • David Lindsay

... transcendental stuff, stuff that at its best is pure hypothesis, and at its worst an outrage on the sane intelligence of his readers, stuff, mind you, utterly lacking in simplicity, sensuousness and passion, that writer may be a thinker, a mystic, a metaphysician of unspeakable profundity, but he is not a poet. He stands condemned in the ...
— The Creators - A Comedy • May Sinclair

... Revolution, but when it had been accomplished returned to his old allegiance to Lenin and, becoming President of the Northern Commune, remained in Petrograd when the Government moved to Moscow. He is neither an original thinker nor a good orator except in debate, in answering opposition, which he does with extreme skill. His nerve was badly shaken by the murders of his friends Volodarsky and Uritzky last year, and he is said to have lost his head after the attack on Lenin, to whom he is extremely devoted. ...
— Russia in 1919 • Arthur Ransome

... the beautiful little church in its exquisite design and completed perfection."'Out of keeping with early Norman walls!' Wise Leveson! He ignores all periods of transition as if they had never existed—as if they had no meaning for the thinker as well as the architect—as if the movement upward from the Norman, to the Early Pointed style showed no indication of progress! And whereas a church should always be a veritable 'sermon in stone' expressive of the various generations ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli

... contrary, we sympathise with him, especially in the big tragedy of his life, while quite admitting that to any casual acquaintance he must have appeared only a dull and uninteresting egoist. This I call clever, because it shows that Mr. LUCAS has created a real thinker, rather than striven to give him any unusual profundity of ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 146., January 21, 1914 • Various

... with instinctive readiness. Two things had made him clearly the intellectual superior of his fellows—the advantages of his early years by which he learned to read, and the habit of meditation which the solitude of his stricken life induced. This had made him a thinker, a philosopher far more profound than his general attainments would naturally produce. With the super-sensitiveness which always characterizes the afflicted, also, he had become a most acute and subtle observer of the human countenance, ...
— Bricks Without Straw • Albion W. Tourgee

... crime, Watson. He is the organizer of half that is evil and of nearly all that is undetected in this great city. He is a genius, a philosopher, an abstract thinker. He has a brain of the first order. He sits motionless, like a spider in the center of its web, but that web has a thousand radiations, and he knows well every quiver of each of them. He does little himself. He only plans. But his agents are numerous and splendidly organized. Is there ...
— Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

... bold and constructive thinker: the apple, for instance, fell from the tree precisely when Newton's mind was groping after the law of gravity, and as Diva stepped into her grocer's to begin her morning's shopping (for she had been occupied with roses ever since breakfast) the attendant was at the telephone at the back of the shop. ...
— Miss Mapp • Edward Frederic Benson

... 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 towards liberty, ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle

... was trained to think, and I get stunned by thoughts that strike me as being dug right out of the centre. Sometimes I'd like to write them down; but I can't write; I can only talk as I'm talking to you. If you weren't so high up, and so much cleverer than I am, and such a thinker, I'd like you to be my safety-ring, if you would. I could tell the key-thoughts to you when they came to me, before I forgot them with all their bearings; and by-and-by they'd do me a lot of good when I got away from this influence, and back into the machinery of ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... Index. Although he gave new and striking arguments to prove the existence of God, and humbled himself before the Jesuits, he was condemned by Catholics and Protestants alike. Since Roger Bacon, perhaps, no great thinker had been so completely abased and thwarted ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White

... 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

... feed but you put me in communication with all forests, fields, streams, seas. Give me one companion, and between us two is quickly repeated the history of the race. In a plant, an animal, a day or year, in elements, their feuds and fruitful marriages, in a private or public history, the thinker is admitted to the end of thought. A scholar can add nothing to my perfect wonder, though he bring Egypt, Assyria, and Greece. I find myself where I was, in Egypt, Assyria, and Greece: I find the old earth, the old sky, the old astonishment of man. Caesar and the grasshopper, both are alike ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 76, February, 1864 • Various

... a Portuguese poet who wrote dramas in both Portuguese and Castilian. A strong creative artist and thinker, Vicente is the greatest dramatist of Portugal and one of the great literary figures of the Peninsula. This Cancion to the Madonna occurs in El auto de la Sibila Casandra, a religious pastoral drama. Vicente himself wrote music for the song, which was intended to accompany a dance. ...
— Modern Spanish Lyrics • Various

... once liked him, afterwards became his bitterest haters. The truth is, he gave himself too little concern what he uttered, and in whose presence. He observed neither time nor place, and would e'en out with what came uppermost. With the severe religionist he would pass for a free-thinker; while the other faction set him down for a bigot, or persuaded themselves that he belied his sentiments. Few understood him; and I am not certain that at all times he quite understood himself. He too much affected that dangerous figure—irony. He sowed doubtful speeches, ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb

... a study for deep contemplation. A study to perplex the ordinary thinker, and task to the utmost the analysis of more profound reflection. William Gawtrey had possessed no common talents; he had discovered that his life had been one mistake; Lord Lilburne's intellect was far keener than Gawtrey's, and he had never made, and if he had ...
— Night and Morning, Volume 4 • Edward Bulwer Lytton

... out. The moment we reached the country and he sniffed the scent of the gardens the anxiety and preoccupation fell away. He almost became boyish. But when he began to discuss great problems the lightness vanished and he became the serious thinker. ...
— An African Adventure • Isaac F. Marcosson

... Alban dwelt on "the Measure," in which, when it was yet too unripe for practical statesmen, he had attached his faith as a thinker, the orator's eye flashed with young fire. A great truth is eternally clear to a great heart that has once nourished its germ and foreseen its fruits. But when Alban quitted that part of his theme, all the rest seemed wearisome to his listener. They had now wound their walk to the opposite side ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... is unquestionably the foremost living thinker in the psychological and sociological fields, and this volume is an important contribution to the science of which it treats.... It will prove more popular than any of its author's other creations, for it is more plainly addressed to the people and ...
— Fungi: Their Nature and Uses • Mordecai Cubitt Cooke

... the thought, whether high or low. No man can have a pure, clean character who does not habitually have pure, clean thoughts. The immoral man is invariably an impure thinker—whatever we harbor in the mind out-pictures ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden

... Surgeon sat 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 ...
— The Long Trick • Lewis Anselm da Costa Ritchie

... architect, military engineer; praised as a poet; befriended with the best and greatest of his contemporaries; recognised as unique, not only in the art of sculpture. If he felt some pride of race, we cannot blame the plain-liver and high-thinker, who, robbing himself of luxuries and necessaries even, enabled his kinsmen to maintain their rank among folk gently ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds

... 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 ...
— Heretics • Gilbert K. Chesterton

... and given shape to the life and thought of man, Agriculture and Architecture. Of the two, it would be hard to know which has been the more intimately interwoven with the inner life of humanity; for man is not only a planter and a builder, but a mystic and a thinker. For such a being, especially in primitive times, any work was something more than itself; it was a truth found out. In becoming useful it attained some form, enshrining at once a thought and a mystery. Our present study has to do with the second of ...
— The Builders - A Story and Study of Masonry • Joseph Fort Newton

... a short, sturdy, leisurely and weather-beaten man moving with professional sureness about his red-hot stove. His face was stolid and unreadable—something like that of a great thinker, or of one who had no thoughts to conceal. I thought his eye seemed unwarrantably superior to the elements and to the man, but quickly attributed that to the characteristic self-importance of a petty chef. "Camp cook" was the niche that I gave him in the Hall ...
— Waifs and Strays - Part 1 • O. Henry

... 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," ...
— "Written by Herself" • Baron Etienne Leon Lamothe-Langon

... reason why he should early be attracted by this fantastic thinker. In that notable work, "Le Contrat Social" (1762), Rousseau called attention to the antique energy shown by the Corsicans in defence of their liberties, and in a startlingly prophetic phrase he ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose

... Tocqueville was 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 observation, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 49, November, 1861 • Various

... farmer-folk who thought more of the virtue of cleanliness. On this subject my aunt was a deep and tireless thinker. She kept a watchful eye upon us. In her view men-folks were like floors, furniture and dishes. They were in the nature of a responsibility—a tax upon women as it were. Every day she reminded me of the duty of keeping my body clean. Its members had often suffered the tyranny of the soaped hand ...
— The Light in the Clearing • Irving Bacheller

... seated, "you have told me many things to-day—Shall I be equally communicative? Shall I show you that my accuracy of information matches yours? Shall I tell you, in a word, why you have at once resolved to push every one, from the Puritan to the free-thinker, upon a general attack of the Palace of Whitehall, without allowing me, a peer of the realm, time either to pause upon or to prepare for a step so desperate? Shall I tell you why you would lead or drive, seduce or compel me, into ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott

... something that's still more remarkable," said Kalle, looking over the top of the slate at his brother with the gaze of a thinker surveying the universe. "Otto, which can be read from both ends, means, of course, eight; but if I draw the figure 8, it can be turned upside down, and still be the same. Look here!" ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo

... "I'll go drive her clear away. I've seen things—now listen, pardner— Those things happened once to me Once down there in old Dodge City, Winding up a three weeks' spree. What you see is jest a 'lusion, 'Cause you're crazy in your head; When your thinker's runnin' proper You'll find 'She' is gone or dead. There, now, pardner, see what this is! Ain't it purty? Your tin cup; Found a little pinch o' coffee. That's the boy, ...
— Nancy MacIntyre • Lester Shepard Parker

... the case of an Italian of thirty, melancholic, and a deep thinker, who was observed one evening in his bed. It was seen that he slept with his eyes open but fixed and immovable. His hands were cold, and his pulse extremely slow. At midnight he brusquely tore the curtains of his bed aside, dressed himself, ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould

... clearly as the writer of the most pleasant 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 ...
— A Brief History of the English Language and Literature, Vol. 2 (of 2) • John Miller Dow Meiklejohn

... it was that he was 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, with more authority than order, his metaphysical ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland

... it is only an instantaneous impression made upon the brain by the astral body, when the latter returns to the physical body, on awaking. On the other hand, the cerebral ideation of the waking state is fatiguing if intense or prolonged, or if the nervous system of the thinker is deprived of its normal power of resistance (in neurasthenia); the commonplace (brain) dream is also fatiguing if ...
— Reincarnation - A Study in Human Evolution • Th. Pascal

... and the finished product are the same entity, only differing from each other in that the one has still to grow while the other is grown. Futile were it indeed to sketch a history of religion with the savage at one end of it and the Christian thinker at the other, if it could be said that in no point did the religion of the savage and that of the Christian coincide, but that the product was a thing of entirely different nature from the germ. It seems necessary, therefore, in the ...
— History of Religion - A Sketch of Primitive Religious Beliefs and Practices, and of the Origin and Character of the Great Systems • Allan Menzies

... Socrates, differing by so many outward marks, would really have been confounded in the mind of Anytus, or Callicles, or of any intelligent Athenian, with the splendid foreigners who from time to time visited Athens, or appeared at the Olympic games. The man of genius, the great original thinker, the disinterested seeker after truth, the master of repartee whom no one ever defeated in an argument, was separated, even in the mind of the vulgar Athenian, by an 'interval which no geometry can express,' from the balancer of sentences, the interpreter and reciter of the poets, the divider ...
— Sophist • Plato

... sermons is an excellent one. One of the greatest aids to education is the habit of writing out an analysis or a skeleton of a book or article after we have read it; also of a sermon or a lecture. This habit has made many a strong, vigorous thinker and writer. In this connection we cannot too strongly recommend the habit of saving clippings from our readings wherever possible of everything which would be likely to assist us in the future. These scrap-books, indexed, often become of untold advantage, ...
— How to Succeed - or, Stepping-Stones to Fame and Fortune • Orison Swett Marden

... a father, hatred of oppression, belief in the righteousness of the cause for which he fought, and delight in the prospect of wild animal excitement. He was full of high hopes, noble aspirations, superabundant energy, and, although not a deep thinker, could tell better than most men, by looking at it, whether the edge of a grindstone were rough ...
— In the Track of the Troops • R.M. Ballantyne

... 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, it was in ethics that ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia

... 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 ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen

... success his faulty and imperfect theories were engrafted upon the literature of his nation, the learned and sagacious Schlosser conclusively proves in his History of the Eighteenth Century. Says this ripe scholar and deep thinker, 'All that Bolingbroke ridicules as tedious and without talent, all that he laughs at as useless and without taste, all that which, urged by his labors and those of his like-minded associates, had for eighty years disappeared from ancient history, is again brought back in our ...
— Continental Monthly - Volume 1 - Issue 3 • Various

... denudes himself before us. And his heart, we find is strangely like our own. His reveries, his sadnesses, his exhilarations, are all ours, too. Like us he cries, "I wish I were unflinching and emphatic, and had big bushy eyebrows and a Message for the Age. I wish I were a deep Thinker, or a great Ventriloquist." Like us he has only a ghost, a thin, unreal phantom in a world of bank cashiers and duchesses and prosperous merchants and other Real Persons. Like us he fights a losing ...
— Shandygaff • Christopher Morley

... wonder of 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 ...
— Dreams and Dust • Don Marquis

... 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, ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin

... and professors were bound to the text, as were the teachers of the Seven Liberal Arts in the cathedral schools before them. There was no appeal to the imagination, still less to observation, experiment, or experience. Each generation taught what it had learned, except that from time to time some thinker made a new organization, or some new body of ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY

... agree more or less. We use different terms, pursue different lines of thought, that is all. It is only the dullard, who mistakes the symbol for the idea, the letter for the spirit, the metaphor for the thought within, who is a bigot. The true thinker is an artist, the true artist is a thinker, for Art is the expression of thought in thing. The highest thought, as Connie rightly told us before ...
— The Workingman's Paradise - An Australian Labour Novel • John Miller

... And it was not at tea. I accidentally dropped in on the Bethunes and found an Oriental had been lecturing there. Mrs. Muir was talking to him and I heard her. The man seemed to be a scholar and a deep thinker and as they talked a group of us stood and ...
— The Head of the House of Coombe • Frances Hodgson Burnett

... 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

... buttresses of Church and State, the son of a Quaker had subjected the whole fabric to a battery of violent rhetoric. It is scarcely too much to call Thomas Paine the Rousseau of English democracy. For, if his arguments lacked the novelty of those of the Genevese thinker (and even they were far from original), they equalled them in effectiveness, and excelled them in practicability. "The Rights of Man" (Part I) may be termed an insular version of the "Contrat Social," with this difference, that the English ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose

... shoulders above their contemporaries. These are Cotton Mather and Jonathan Edwards; the one the most busy man of his age in politics, religion, education and all philanthropic endeavor; the other a profound thinker, who was in the world but not of it, and who devoted the great powers of his mind to such problems as the freedom of the human will and the origin of ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long

... have to drive the peyondix-beam to the planet Strett; it was already there. And there was the monstrous First Lord Thinker Zoyar. ...
— Masters of Space • Edward Elmer Smith

... the clerical rationalists, not dissimilar in its purport, was administered to Jowett by a certain Russian thinker, who knew little as to Jowett's opinions, and had no intention of rebuking them. He was describing, as an interesting event, the development of a religion in Russia which claimed to be Christian and at the same time purely rational. "Was it a good religion?" asked ...
— Memoirs of Life and Literature • W. H. Mallock

... sanctifying the heart of man. Mountains seem to have been built for the human race, as at once their schools and cathedrals, full of treasures of illuminated manuscript for the scholar, kindly in simple lessons to the worker, quiet in pale cloisters for the thinker, glowing in ...
— The Road and the Roadside • Burton Willis Potter

... humorous story. The hero, an independent and vigorous thinker, sees life, and tells about it ...
— The House of Torchy • Sewell Ford

... regret that I can not invoke the authority of Sir William Hamilton in favor of my own opinions on Causation, as I can against the particular theory which I am now combating. But that acute thinker has a theory of Causation peculiar to himself, which has never yet, as far as I know, been analytically examined, but which, I venture to think, admits of as complete refutation as any one of the false or insufficient ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill

... of the house sat before a big writing-table, which was covered with papers. His face was that of a hard thinker; the head was fine in form, the forehead broad and high; the features regular, almost severe. The severity was softened by a genial expression. Mrs. Fullerton, though also obviously above the average of humanity, shewed signs of incomplete development. The shape ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird

... of his thought lay not the high esteem of the poet-thinker for beauty, but the cynical ...
— Amaryllis at the Fair • Richard Jefferies

... transformation but the singular nobility of his face, with its wise, youthful brow and deep, thoughtful eyes, also added such a curious piquancy to his fashionable attire, that the general effect was little short of startling. It is always so. Dress your scholar, your thinker, your poet, in clothes that Saville Row has carefully designed and carried out for a Society peacock, and the result is not a member of the phasianidae, but a golden eagle. It is as if the art of the tailor or shirt maker were grateful for once to adorn ...
— Too Old for Dolls - A Novel • Anthony Mario Ludovici

... the municipal administration, strained to the cracking-point by the tension of party conflict, were now isolated from the organism, abnormally developed, requiring the combining effort of a single thinker to reunite their scattered forces in one system or absorb them in himself. The indirect restraints which a calmer period of municipal vitality had placed upon tyrannic ambition, were removed by the leveling of classes and the presentation of an equal surface to the builder of the palace-dome ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds

... of intelligence, love, virtue, and magnificence. While possessing the greatest brain power, still he was the most humble man in Sageland. Although a giant in physical strength, yet he was as gentle as a lamb. He was the greatest thinker of all time, but there was no room in his brain for an impure thought. Notwithstanding he was still a young man, being but fifty years of age, nevertheless he had attained distinct success and fame as a musician, composer, scientist, inventor, architect, and athlete. He endeavored ...
— Born Again • Alfred Lawson

... Moreover, the difference in condition, education, religion, race, and climate is so great throughout the Union that it is unwise, as well as impossible, to get all of our forty-eight States to take the same view on this subject, the Spanish Catholic as the Maine free-thinker, the settler in wild and lonely regions as the inhabitant of the old New England town over-populated by spinsters. It was, therefore, the opinion of the State Commissioners that the matter of causes was best determined by States, according to their local conditions, ...
— Popular Law-making • Frederic Jesup Stimson

... particularly the latter. His drowsy brain utterly refused ordinary thoughts, was in a cloud and retained only fantastic fairy-tale images, which have the advantage of springing into the brain of themselves without any effort on the part of the thinker, and completely vanishing of themselves at a mere shake of the head; and, indeed, nothing that was around him disposed to ordinary thoughts. On the right there were the dark hills which seemed to be ...
— The Bishop and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov

... and for all eternity."[3] This constitutes celestial marriage. The thought that plural marriage has ever been the head and front of "Mormon" offending, that to it is traceable as the true cause the hatred of other sects and the unpopularity of the Church, is not tenable to the earnest thinker. Sad as have been the experiences of the people in consequence of this practise, deep and anguish-laden as have been the sighs and groans, hot and bitter as have been the tears so caused, the heaviest persecution, the cruelest ...
— The Story of "Mormonism" • James E. Talmage

... right 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 saving ...
— Dave Porter and His Double - The Disapperarance of the Basswood Fortune • Edward Stratemeyer

... 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 perceives ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill

... who is first in his peculiar walk; and who, moreover (which is much to my purpose), has had a share, as much as any one alive, in effecting the public recognition in these Islands of the principle of separating secular and religious knowledge. This brilliant thinker, during the years in which he was exerting himself in behalf of this principle, made a speech or discourse, on occasion of a public solemnity; and in reference to the bearing of general knowledge upon religious belief, ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman

... travels for a space beside the fish, then journeys along with the bird and the reptile for his fellow travellers; and only at last, after a brief companionship with the highest of the four-footed and four-handed world, rises into the dignity of pure manhood. No competent thinker of the present day dreams of explaining these indubitable facts by the notion of the existence of unknown and undiscoverable adaptations to purpose. And we would remind those who, ignorant of the facts, must be moved by authority, that no one has asserted the incompetence of the doctrine ...
— Lectures and Essays • T.H. Huxley

... squabbles which occasionally arose between the commander and the other adherents. These plebeians were inwardly flattered by the handshakes which he distributed on his arrival and departure. Roudier, however, like a free-thinker of the Rue Saint-Honore, asserted that the marquis had not a copper to bless himself with, and was disposed to make light of him. M. de Carnavant on his side preserved the amiable smile of a nobleman lowering himself to the level of these middle class people, without making ...
— The Fortune of the Rougons • Emile Zola

... black jaguars, red pumas, and dark-gray jaguarundis, were killed in the same locality, with the same environment. A glance at the skins and a moment's serious thought would have been enough to show any sincere thinker that in these cats the coloration pattern, whether concealing or revealing, is of no consequence one way or the other as a survival factor. The spotted patterns conferred no benefit as compared with the nearly or quite ...
— Through the Brazilian Wilderness • Theodore Roosevelt

... ugly, bow the young from the old, how the good from the evil, how the lucky from the unlucky, how the wise from the unwise, in the court of Death? Vain is ambition. Vain is fame. Vain is pleasure. Vain are struggles and efforts. All is in vain. An ancient Hindu thinker[FN144] says: ...
— The Religion of the Samurai • Kaiten Nukariya

... greatness of the world; that a 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 ...
— The German Classics Of The Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries, Volume 12 • Various

... give me a little time on this, will you? I'm not naturaly a quick thinker, and somhow my brain won't take it all in just yet. I suppose there's no use telling you not to worry, because you are not the ...
— Bab: A Sub-Deb • Mary Roberts Rinehart

... Russells. Lord Arthur was a close friend of Sir Louis Mallet, and I have already described my friendship with Sir Louis, first through his son, and then through my own admiration for that able and delightful man—a great charmer as well as a great thinker in the region of Political Economy, "a social creature," as Burke might have called him, as well as a wise man—a man who could be an earnest devotee of Cobden on the one side of his nature, and on the other fastidious ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey

... eyes were brown to match his hair and were the striking feature of a strong, rugged countenance, for they were spaced at that eminently proper interval which proclaims an honest man. His nose was high, of medium thickness and just a trifle long—the nose of a thinker. His ears were large, with full lobes—the ears of a generous man. The mouth, full-lipped but firm, the heavy jaw and square chin, the great hands (most amazingly free from freckles) denoted the man who would not avoid a fight worth while. Indeed, while the girl was looking covertly ...
— The Valley of the Giants • Peter B. Kyne

... grows more and more accustomed to regard the factory, the railway, or the mine, not as a feudal castle belonging to a lord, but as an institution of public utility which the public has the right to control. The idea of possession in common has not been worked out from the slow deductions of some thinker buried in his private study, it is a thought which is germinating in the brains of the working masses, and when the revolution, which the close of this century has in store for us, shall have hurled confusion into the camp of our exploiters, you will see that the mass of the people will demand ...
— The Place of Anarchism in Socialistic Evolution - An Address Delivered in Paris • Pierre Kropotkin

... physeos, the usual title of the pre-Socratic philosophers' works. The form, viz. a poem in heroic hexameters, containing a carefully reasoned exposition, in which regard was had above all to the claims of the subject-matter, was borrowed from the Sicilian thinker Empedocles [51] (460 B.C.). But while Aristotle denies Empedocles the title of poet [52] on account of his scientific subject, no one could think of applying the same criticism to Lucretius A general view of nature, as the Power most near to man, and most capable ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell

... marks of public consequence, the reader may be surprised to learn that John Shakespeare, the father of the world's greatest thinker and greatest poet, could not write his name! Such was undoubtedly the fact; and I take pleasure in noting it, as showing, what is too apt to be forgotten in these bookish days, that men may know several things, and may have witty children, without being initiated ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson

... 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 ...
— The Testing of Diana Mallory • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... 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

... transcendentalists took no direct part in it. The project 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 opening ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various

... boy, having reached my room, tired as I was, I did not want to go to rest before I had looked up in my Boethius one or two sentences appropriate to my state of mind. I could not find the very one fit for it. It must not be forgotten that this great thinker had not had occasion to meditate on the disgrace of having broken the head of a Farmer-general with a bottle out of his own cellar. But I was able to pick up here and there, in his admirable treatise, some maxims applicable to present conjunctures. Having done so, I ...
— The Queen Pedauque • Anatole France

... sense of the First Cause. Lao-tseu uses the term in other ways; but that primal and most important philosophical sense which he gave to it is well explained in the celebrated Chapter XXV. of the Tao-te-king.... The difference between the great Chinese thinker's conception of the First Cause—the Unknowable,—and the theories of other famous metaphysicians, Oriental and Occidental, is set forth with some definiteness in Stanislas Julien's introduction ...
— Some Chinese Ghosts • Lafcadio Hearn

... scandalized at the idea of your calling the book "word-painting." My dearest Susie, it is the chief provocation of my life to be called a "word-painter" instead of a thinker. I hope you haven't filled your book with descriptions. I thought it was the thoughts you ...
— Hortus Inclusus - Messages from the Wood to the Garden, Sent in Happy Days - to the Sister Ladies of the Thwaite, Coniston • John Ruskin

... these would be, if you made yourselves 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

... and the credit stands practically undisputed, for Watts made a hymn style that no human master taught him, and his model has been the ideal one for song worship ever since; and we can pardon the climax when Professor Charles M. Stuart speaks of him as "writer, scholar, thinker and saint," for in addition to all the rest he was a ...
— The Story of the Hymns and Tunes • Theron Brown and Hezekiah Butterworth

... 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 ...
— American Scenes, and Christian Slavery - A Recent Tour of Four Thousand Miles in the United States • Ebenezer Davies

... of Ways and Means, Justin S. Morrill, of Vermont, was appointed chairman—a Representative of ten years' experience in the House, who had seen several years of service on the same committee. While his abilities and habits, as a student and a thinker, well adapted him for the work of conducting his committee by wise deliberation to useful measures, yet they were not characteristics fitting him with readiest tact and most resolute will to "handle ...
— History of the Thirty-Ninth Congress of the United States • Wiliam H. Barnes

... good enough lass. Not much of a manager, brother Tony. Too much of a thinker, I reckon. She's got a temper of her own too. I'm a bit hurt, brother Tony, about that other girl. She must leave London, if she don't alter. It's flightiness; that's all. You mustn't think ill of poor Dahly. She was always the pretty one, and when they know it, they act up ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... with the world-famous A.E.G.—Allgemeine Electrizitaetsgesellschaft—at the head of which he now stands. During the war he scored a very remarkable and exceptional success as controller of the organization for the supply of raw materials. He is thus not merely a scholar and thinker, but one who has lived and more than held his own in the thick of commercial and industrial life, and who knows by actual experience the subject-matter ...
— The New Society • Walther Rathenau

... to sink the individual in the universal; it is Browning's special distinction that when he is most universal he is most individual. As a thinker he conceives of humanity not as an aggregate, but as a collection of units. Most thinkers write and speak of man; Browning of men. With man as a species, with man as a society, he does not concern himself, but with individual man and man. Every ...
— An Introduction to the Study of Browning • Arthur Symons

... 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 ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke

... all, the pain of their sting, or rather bite—for ants do not sting as wasps, but bite with the jaws, and then infuse poison into the wound—all these render them very unpopular creatures. A superficial thinker would suppose that such troublesome insects could be of no use, and would question the propriety of Nature in ...
— Popular Adventure Tales • Mayne Reid

... would be in 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 such it can ...
— Bergson and His Philosophy • J. Alexander Gunn

... barbarous, pagan, mediaeval, by those who condemn them out of traditional habit. Year after year the researches of science afford us new proof that the savage, the barbarian, the idolater, the monk, each and all have arrived, by different paths, as near to some point of eternal truth as any thinker of the nineteenth century. We are now learning also, that the theories of the astrologers and of the alchemists were but partially, not totally, wrong. We have reason even to suppose that no dream of the invisible world has ever ...
— The Wrack of the Storm • Maurice Maeterlinck

... has ever been so gushed over as Montaigne; and no writer, we may be sure, would be so horrified as he at such a treatment. Indeed, the adulation of his worshippers has perhaps somewhat obscured the real position that he fills in literature. It is impossible to deny that, both as a writer and as a thinker, he has faults—and grave ones. His style, with all its delightful abundance, its inimitable ease, and its pleasant flavour of antiquity, yet lacks form; he did not possess the supreme mastery of language which alone can lead to the creation of great works of literary art. His scepticism ...
— Landmarks in French Literature • G. Lytton Strachey

... Merging the senses having the mind for their sixth and all the objects of the senses into the inner Soul by the aid of the Understanding, and reflecting upon the three states of consciousness, viz., the object thought, the act of thinking, and the thinker, and abstaining by contemplation from every kind of enjoyment, equipping his mind with the knowledge that he is Brahma's self, laying aside at the same time all consciousness of puissance, and thereby making his soul perfectly tranquil, ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown

... acquiesce in the fetich, so also will he be damned financially and socially here if he does not join the church. The intent in every Christian community is to boycott and make a social outcast of the independent thinker. The fetich furnishes excuse for the hypnotic processes. Without assuming a personal God who can be appeased, eternal damnation and the proposition that you can win eternal life by believing a myth, there is no sane reason ...
— Love, Life & Work • Elbert Hubbard

... a thinker and a pioneer—would, it might be imagined, treat what is now one of his staple articles of diet at least as carefully as the out-of-date flesh-eater. But no! For the most part, his vegetables are boiled, and when the best part of the food constituents ...
— The Healthy Life Cook Book, 2d ed. • Florence Daniel

... 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 that in fact ...
— Flower of the Mind • Alice Meynell

... was not a rapid thinker. He enveloped her in a stodgy gaze. It was only too plain to Elizabeth that he was a man who liked to digest one idea slowly before going on to absorb the next. Jerry Nichols had told him to drive to Flack's. He had driven ...
— Uneasy Money • P.G. Wodehouse

... 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 was the bent of his nature and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various

... of this story when hearing a living thinker of some eminence once say that he considered Christianity to have been a misfortune. Intellectually it was absurd, and practically an offence, over which he stumbled; and it would have been far better for mankind, he thought, if they could have kept clear ...
— Froude's Essays in Literature and History - With Introduction by Hilaire Belloc • James Froude

... man who has been a leader among men—a brilliant lawyer, a keen thinker—taken from his place and confined in a hospital for the insane. The same evil power has done this. ...
— Crayon and Character: Truth Made Clear Through Eye and Ear - Or, Ten-Minute Talks with Colored Chalks • B.J. Griswold

... reads like a romance, and he has fought his way to his present enviable position by sheer grit, and ability, having had to combat with all the narrow criticism and misconceptions usual in the case of a progressive thinker in a small town. Indeed, it is said that even now his native village fails to recognize the honor ...
— The Tangled Threads • Eleanor H. Porter

... Garry O'Neil, who was not a deep thinker, not troubling himself much about anything beyond the present. "That's a puzzling question; but I, for one, wouldn't care to be of that way of ...
— The Ghost Ship - A Mystery of the Sea • John C. Hutcheson

... very little of a worker. He is, first, a wanter—a bundle of instincts; second, a feeler—a bundle of emotions; last and least, he is a thinker. What real work he does is done not because he likes it but because it serves one of these ...
— How to Analyze People on Sight - Through the Science of Human Analysis: The Five Human Types • Elsie Lincoln Benedict and Ralph Paine Benedict

... remarks, "if, as in my own belief, the moral feelings are not innate, but acquired, they are not for that reason less natural." It is with hesitation that I venture to differ at all from so profound a thinker, but it can hardly be disputed that the social feelings are instinctive or innate in the lower animals; and why should they not be so in man? Mr. Bain (see, for instance, 'The Emotions and the Will,' 1865, p. 481) and others believe that the moral sense ...
— The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex • Charles Darwin

... deserving of praise. Not unfrequently, indeed, a public man must take his choice whether by fully identifying himself with the existing conditions around him and employing them to the best advantages he will lead a useful and practical life, or whether as an advanced thinker he will associate himself with the cause that is one day to conquer, place himself in the van of progress and at the sacrifice of much present influence deserve the ...
— Historical and Political Essays • William Edward Hartpole Lecky

... action. Once his orders were carried out, he was nothing: action pursued its way without him. He watched it moving on, almost resigned to the injustice which touched him personally, though not altogether to that which concerned his faith. For although, as a free-thinker, he claimed to be free of all religion and used humorously to call Christophe a clerical in disguise, like every sturdy spirit, he had his altar on which he deified the dreams to which he sacrificed himself. The altar was deserted now, and Emmanuel suffered. How could he without ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland

... "He was a man of a strong and upright nature, bent on pure and high ideals, a man ever seeking, if I may use his own characteristic expression, to make known through his work the mysterious treasure that was laid up in his heart; he was a thinker, a theorist, and as you know, a writer; like many of the great artists of the Renaissance, he was steeped also in the love of science.... Superbly inexhaustible as a designer, as a draughtsman he was ...
— Frederic Lord Leighton - An Illustrated Record of His Life and Work • Ernest Rhys

... wholly democratic; all these things 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, the big world, the true world!" he says, on seeing the crowd ...
— Contemporary Russian Novelists • Serge Persky

... supposed to inhabit the body as a tenant a house, and have no relation to it other than that of a casual occupant. But that opinion is antiquated. More than three-fourths of a century ago the far-seeing thinker, Wilhelm von Humboldt, laid down the maxim that the phenomena of mind and matter obey laws identical in kind;[6-1] and a recent historian of science sums up the result of the latest research in ...
— The Religious Sentiment - Its Source and Aim: A Contribution to the Science and - Philosophy of Religion • Daniel G. Brinton

... 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, ...
— Timaeus • Plato

... was, in the words of Browning, only the "very superficial truth." He desired a knowledge of causes that did not dwell simply on what was secondary but led back to the First and Final Cause. To the mediaeval thinker, science was fascinating as Philosophy's little sister: it was to Philosophy what Nature was to man. Nature had been to St. Francis a little lovely, dancing sister. Science had been to St. Thomas the handmaid of philosophy. The modern world thought these proportions ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward

... setter, with a double nose; That one for Erato, for Clio this; He flushes both—not his fault if we miss;— Judge of the painter's art, who'll straight proclaim The hue of any color you can name, And knows a painting with a canvas back Distinguished from a duck by the duck's quack;— This thinker and philosopher, whose work Is famous from Commercial street to Turk, Has got a fortune now, his talent's meed. A woman left it him who could not read, And so went down to death's eternal night Sweetly unconscious ...
— Black Beetles in Amber • Ambrose Bierce

... hereby invite all persons who are willing to encourage so public-spirited a project to bring in their contributions as soon as possible; and to apprehend forthwith any politician whom they shall catch raving in a coffee-house, or any free-thinker whom they shall find publishing his deliriums, or any other person who shall give the like manifest signs of a crazed imagination. And I do at the same time give this public notice to all the madmen about this great city, that ...
— English Satires • Various

... necessary need not be decreased,—it may even be vastly increased, with proper encouragement and rewards. Are we today evoking the necessary ability? On the contrary, it is not the Inventor, the Manager, and the Thinker who today are reaping the great rewards of industry, but rather the Gambler and the Highwayman. Rightly-organized industry might easily save the Gambler's Profit and the Monopolist's Interest and by paying a more discriminating reward in wealth and ...
— Darkwater - Voices From Within The Veil • W. E. B. Du Bois

... are to accept Goethe's own statement, during the years 1773-4—the distracted period, that is to say, which followed his experiences at Wetzlar, and of which Werther and Clavigo are the characteristic products—he came under the influence of a thinker who transformed his conceptions, equally of the conduct of life and of man's relations to the universe—the Jewish thinker, Benedict Spinoza. The passage in which he expresses his debt to Spinoza is one of the best known in all his writings, and is, moreover, ...
— The Youth of Goethe • Peter Hume Brown

... place, I was trained for the work by a medical man—my friend Mr. James Hinton—first in his own branch of the London profession, and a most original thinker. To him the degradation of women, which most men accept with such blank indifference, was a source of unspeakable distress. He used to wander about the Haymarket and Piccadilly in London at night, and ...
— The Power of Womanhood, or Mothers and Sons - A Book For Parents, And Those In Loco Parentis • Ellice Hopkins

... is getting grey. It seemed well to seek out some young Japanese thinker and take his view of that "heathenism" concerning which Uchimura had delivered himself so unsparingly. Let me speak of my first visit ...
— The Foundations of Japan • J.W. Robertson Scott

... these restraining influences, the thoughts breathed forth by the lonely thinker were as living seed wafted abroad, and falling here and there on good ground, germinated and brought forth fruit. Sometimes his influence was acknowledged, sometimes it was repudiated; but it was there, nevertheless. ...
— Pantheism, Its Story and Significance - Religions Ancient And Modern • J. Allanson Picton

... naturally couldn't be a better all round man than Phil Acton. He's healthy; don't know what it is to have an hour's sickness; strong as a young bull; clean, honest, square, no bad habits, a fine worker, an' a fine thinker, too—even if he ain't had much schoolin', he's read a lot. Take him any way you like—just as a man, I mean—an' that's the way you got to take 'em—there ain't a better man that Phil livin'. Yet a lot of these folks would say he's nothin' but a cow-puncher. ...
— When A Man's A Man • Harold Bell Wright

... doubts that 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 ...
— English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century • Leslie Stephen

... imaginary, yet desirable, if it were possible: but this, their ideal of woman, is, according to our common idea of the marriage relation, wholly undesirable. The woman, we say, is not to guide, nor even to think for herself. The man is always to be the wiser; he is to be the thinker, the ruler, the superior in knowledge and discretion, ...
— Sesame and Lilies • John Ruskin

... originality. A. T. Stewart, what a fortune he made! He was original, he did things in a new way, advertised differently, got up new ideas, and pushed his business with close attention. He started without any money. I have no money. He was a hard worker, a thinker, an originator, a pusher. Why shouldn't I be a hard worker, a thinker, an originator and a pusher? I think I will. But these qualifications will win just as well in the manufacturing and banking business as in ...
— The Boy Broker - Among the Kings of Wall Street • Frank A. Munsey

... sequence may be noted within the body: the line-network of the nerves conveys the message of sensation from the surface of the body to some center in the solid, of the brain—and thence to the Silent Thinker, "he who is without and within," or in terms of our hypothesis, "he ...
— Four-Dimensional Vistas • Claude Fayette Bragdon

... insight is not without its effect. The heart is humbled as the eyes open to the grandeur of the scheme, and to the consequent littleness of individual manhood; but again, the breast swells with the purest of all pride, when the thinker says to himself: I am the King—because the hero or highest type of the Articulata, Radiata, Mammalia, or any order of vegetable or animal life. All these great and complicated developments are the beautiful works of the Great Unseen, but I am His masterpiece. One may well dream in ...
— How to See the British Museum in Four Visits • W. Blanchard Jerrold

... 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 ...
— The Way of All Flesh • Samuel Butler

... the genius of this profound thinker was devoted to more congenial and worthy objects. In 1726, he sold his office of president of the parliament of Bourdeaux, partly in order to escape from the toils of legal pursuit and judicial business, which, in that mercantile and rising community, was attended with great labour; partly ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 360, October 1845 • Various

... rapid 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 to ...
— The Music Master - Novelized from the Play • Charles Klein

... of him and for each to believe frantically that his views were proved by facts. For anyone who thinks he can hit off in a few neat generalities this complex, extraordinary personality, a single warning may suffice. Walt Whitman, who was perhaps the most original thinker and the most acute observer who ever saw Lincoln face to face has left us his impression; but he adds that there was something in Lincoln's face which defied description and which no picture had caught. After Whitman's conclusion that "One of the great portrait painters ...
— Abraham Lincoln and the Union - A Chronicle of the Embattled North, Volume 29 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Nathaniel W. Stephenson

... casuists contest the point; I'm not Disposed to grapple with so great a matter. 'T would tie my thinker in a double knot And drive me staring mad as any hatter— Though I submit that hatters are, in fact, Sane, and all other ...
— Shapes of Clay • Ambrose Bierce

... all the portions of the book which we have read, the author shows himself to be a clear, strong, bold, and generally sound thinker."—New Englander. ...
— What is Darwinism? • Charles Hodge

... most brilliant versifier. Dryden's strength turns in his work into something more fragile and delicate, polished with infinite care like lacquer, and wrought like filigree work to the last point of conscious and perfected art. He was not a great thinker; the thoughts which he embodies in his philosophical poems—the Essay on Man and the rest, are almost ludicrously out of proportion to the solemnity of the titles which introduce them, nor does he except very rarely get beyond the conceptions common ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair



Words linked to "Thinker" :   reasoner, muller, solver, brain-worker, ruminator, divergent thinker, classifier, brainworker, ratiocinator, philosophizer, speculator, creative thinker, intellectual, muser, philosophiser, rocket scientist, arranger, intellect, mind, wishful thinker, convergent thinker, organizer, ponderer



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