"Thinker" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... early literature and art, no less than in history. With what success his faulty and imperfect theories were engrafted upon the literature of his nation, the learned and sagacious Schlosser conclusively proves in his History of the Eighteenth Century. Says this ripe scholar and deep thinker, 'All that Bolingbroke ridicules as tedious and without talent, all that he laughs at as useless and without taste, all that which, urged by his labors and those of his like-minded associates, had for eighty ...
— Continental Monthly - Volume 1 - Issue 3 • Various
... formed a perfect unit. Mortimer was Saxon—slow, conscientious, and deliberate; Scott was Celtic—quick, happy-go-lucky, and brilliant. Mortimer was the more solid, Scott the more attractive. Mortimer was the deeper thinker, Scott the brighter talker. By a curious coincidence, though each had seen much of warfare, their campaigns had never coincided. Together they covered all recent military history. Scott had done Plevna, the Shipka, the Zulus, Egypt, Suakim; ...
— The Green Flag • Arthur Conan Doyle
... requisite of success in any institution is a staff of eminent teachers, each of whom gives freely the best of which he is capable. The best varies with the individual; one may be an admirable lecturer or teacher; another a profound thinker; a third a keen investigator; another a skilful experimenter; the next, a man of great acquisitions; one may excel by his industry, another by his enthusiasm, another by his learning, another by his genius; but every member of a faculty should be distinguished by some uncommon attainments ...
— The History Of University Education In Maryland • Bernard Christian Steiner
... the tall man swinging along at a tremendous pace, "that this bell—there it is again, confound it; yet no, not confound it—can resemble that other bell I used to know. No, quite impossible. Is it likely that anything here," and the thinker spreads both long arms out to take in the entire landscape, "can resemble or remotely suggest the Old Country, or, as people call it, home? Home? Why this is home. That four-roomed and convenient, if not commodious, mansion I have just quitted is my home. ...
— Crowded Out! and Other Sketches • Susie F. Harrison
... Clink," echoed the School-master. "Very virile writer and a clear thinker," he added, with ...
— Coffee and Repartee • John Kendrick Bangs
... the Napoleon of 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 a crime to ...
— Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... makes disciplined minds." Ruth looked expectantly at Martin, as if waiting for him to change his judgment. "You know, the foot-ball players have to train before the big game. And that is what Latin does for the thinker. It trains." ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... 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 ...
— The Wrack of the Storm • Maurice Maeterlinck
... without any loss of moral dignity. Altogether, this humiliating affair showed me what a trap for the conscience these subscriptions are: how comfortably they are passed while the intellect is torpid or immature, or where the conscience is callous, but how they undermine truthfulness in the active thinker, and torture the sensitiveness of the tenderminded. As long as they are maintained, in Church or University, these institutions exert a positive influence to deprave or eject those who ought to be their most useful and ...
— Phases of Faith - Passages from the History of My Creed • Francis William Newman
... he said to himself aloud, as he turned his horse's head and rode leisurely away, "if the old volk are right after all, and if there is a God." Frank Muller was sufficiently impregnated with modern ideas to be a free-thinker. "It almost seems like it," he went on, "else how did it come that the one bullet passed under his belly and the other just touched his head without harming him? I aimed carefully enough too, and I could make the shot nineteen ...
— Jess • H. Rider Haggard
... and that little laugh, insignificant in themselves, tore a veil from the eyes of Charlie Brooke. He had always been fond of May Leather, after a fashion. Now it suddenly rushed upon him that he was fond of her after another fashion! He was a quick thinker and just reasoner. A poor man without a profession and no prospects has no right to try to gain the affections of a girl. He became ...
— Charlie to the Rescue • R.M. Ballantyne
... mobile clay takes shape under his fingers. He feels the significance of persons acting and reacting in their contact with one another: and he pens a novel or a drama. He is thrilled by the emotion attending the influx of a great idea; philosophy is touched with feeling: and the thinker becomes a poet. The discords of experience resolve themselves within him into harmonies: and he gives them out in triumphant harmonies of sound. The particular medium the artist chooses in which to express himself is incidental to the feeling to be conveyed. The stimulus to emotion ...
— The Gate of Appreciation - Studies in the Relation of Art to Life • Carleton Noyes
... terrible thing: "Woman is the nervous part of humanity, man the muscular." Humboldt himself, that serious thinker, has said that an invisible atmosphere surrounds the human nerves. I do not quote the dreamers who watch the flight of Spallanzani's bat, and who think they have found a sixth sense in nature. Such as nature is, her mysteries are terrible ...
— The Confession of a Child of The Century • Alfred de Musset
... Now, a superficial thinker might imagine that the work of elevating the people was almost done; but, in truth, it is but just commenced. The missionary looks upon his people, and wishes them not only to be Christians in name, but to exhibit also intelligence and good order, purity and loveliness, industry and ...
— Thoughts on Missions • Sheldon Dibble
... mention Count Alexis Tolstoy, the homonym of the great Russian thinker, to whom the critics predict a brilliant future. His first work appeared in 1909. He generally depicts landed proprietors. His recent stories, "The Asking in Marriage," and "Beyond the Volga," show signs of great strength and power ...
— Contemporary Russian Novelists • Serge Persky
... mind and he always had to figure why he was supposed to do a certain thing a certain way. Once he'd found out the reason he was satisfied. Professor Tweedy, our "math" teacher, used to say that "Rus" was a "natural born thinker." But geometry and trigonometry weren't the only subjects that "Rus" approached from all angles. He used his bean at ...
— Interference and Other Football Stories • Harold M. Sherman
... know the world well and many men, recalled the conversation of that night, and meditated upon the strange workings of the human mind: the fundamental philosophy of life differs little in the brain of the savage and the brain of the student-thinker. ...
— The Valiant Runaways • Gertrude Atherton
... my counsels, perhaps the notion of anything like guidance offended him; perhaps it was the phrase, "bear-leadership," and the half-threat of betraying him, has done the mischief.' Now the gallant soldier was a slow thinker; it took him a deal of time to arrange the details of any matter in his mind, and when he tried to muster his ideas there were many which would not answer the call, and of those which came, there were not a few which seemed to present themselves in a refractory and unwilling spirit, ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever
... 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, he ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman
... for something more original than the old rehash of kings and queens, intrigues, and returning princes, etc. Again, Cummings seems to lack enough scientific acumen to make his other world different than this. Even a superficial thinker will readily see that the terrain of the other world would not faithfully follow our own in its salient features. However, forgive me for knocking—the story wasn't so bad, and Cummings doubtless can do better than ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, May, 1930 • Various
... general outline of all the branches of Inductive Science, and of the relations which they bear to each other; and they are expounded in a style singularly copious, clear, and forcible. He has acquired, in consequence, a high reputation as a philosophical thinker, and has already found, in our own country, some able allies, and not a few enthusiastic admirers. The "System of Logic," by John Stuart Mill, and "The Biographical History of Philosophy," by G. H. ...
— Modern Atheism under its forms of Pantheism, Materialism, Secularism, Development, and Natural Laws • James Buchanan
... civilization, and it is interesting to study the myths as to the origin of fire, and possibly even more interesting to compare the Greek and Japanese stories. As we know, old-time popular etymology makes Prometheus the fore-thinker and brother of Epimetheus the after-thinker. He is the stealer of the fire from heaven, in order to make men share the secret of the gods. Comparative philology tells us, however, that the Sanskrit Pramantha is a stick that ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis
... 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
... he remembered, was a Free-thinker, and Collins had gone astray. Ralph was a Free-thinker, and Ralph was a great sinner. Keith was a Free-thinker, and Keith was the greatest liar in Pennsylvania. Benjamin Franklin was a Free-thinker, and how shamefully he had behaved to Ralph's mistress, ...
— Benjamin Franklin, A Picture of the Struggles of Our Infant Nation One Hundred Years Ago - American Pioneers and Patriots Series • John S. C. Abbott
... essence of virtue is in doing good to others, while what is good may be one thing in one society, and its contrary in another. Yet, however we may differ as to the foundation of morals (and as many foundations have been assumed as there are writers on the subject nearly), so correct a thinker as Tracy will give us a sound system of morals. And, indeed, it is remarkable, that so many writers, setting out from so many different premises, yet meet all in the same conclusions. This looks as if they were guided unconsciously, ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... of varied learning, a traveller in the East, and an oriental scholar. He was appointed Professor of Greek at Cambridge, and also lectured on Mathematics. He was a profound thinker and a weighty writer, principally known by his courses of sermons on the Decalogue, the ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... deserves. But I cannot promise to tell how the change will be brought about, to describe the exact process by which social property will supplant capitalist private property. The only conditions under which any honest thinker could give such an answer would necessitate a combination of circumstances which has never existed, and which no one seriously expects to develop. To answer in definite terms, saying, "This is the manner in which the change will be made," ...
— Socialism - A Summary and Interpretation of Socialist Principles • John Spargo
... of extraordinary merit in matter and style, and does you great credit as a thinker and writer.—Hon. CALVIN E. PRATT, of ...
— Harper's Young People, January 6, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... and say by the President of the Immortals, who makes sport with more humans than Tess," he answered. "Mistakes may be deliberate, just as their reverse may be accidental. Even a mighty power may condescend sometimes to a very practical joke. To a thinker the world is full of apple-pie beds, and cold wet sponges fall on us from at least half the doors we push open. The soul-juggleries of the before-mentioned President are very curious, but people will not realize that soul transference from body to body is as much a plain fact as the daily ...
— The Return Of The Soul - 1896 • Robert S. Hichens
... Southerners, the whites who masters before the war, have not devided the negro vote, and uniting with those who were intelligent, gained control of the State so as to secure it an efficient government? It would seem to the ordinary political thinker that even three-sevenths whites could control the four-sevenths blacks. One thinks of the Saxon in India with the Hindoo, in Canada with the French, in Jamaica with the Negro, in Ireland, after a turbulent fashion, ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 7, 1922 • Various
... somewhat closely. That was nothing—a man not of the battery, a staff officer sitting on a disabled gun, waiting till he could make his way back to his chief—a moment's curiosity on an artilleryman's part, exhibited in a lull between fighting. Stafford had a certain psychic development. A thinker, he was adventurous in that world; to him, the true world of action. The passion that had seized and bound him had come with the force of an invader, of a barbaric horde, from a world that he ordinarily ignored. It ...
— The Long Roll • Mary Johnston
... big men are all zip!—like that. Mind made up and nothin' can change you. Even if you do miss somethin' good now and then, you don't mind because you have the satisfaction of bein' known as a quick thinker. We just got in a new consignment of cars to-day and if you're interested our place is at 1346 Broadway. Well, good-day, sir!" he winds up, reachin' for ...
— Alex the Great • H. C. Witwer
... of Clairvaux, the greatest man, the greatest thinker, the greatest preacher, and the greatest saint of these ...
— Via Crucis • F. Marion Crawford
... perhaps of mankind. To attempt an analysis of that system would lead us far from our present task. All that concerns us here, is its religious significance; and of that, all we can note is that Plato, the deepest thinker of the Greeks, was also among the farthest removed from the popular faith. The principle from which he derives the World is the absolute Good, or God, of whose ideas the phenomena of sense are imperfect ...
— The Greek View of Life • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... it was the severity of these two visitations that made John a thinker and an actor at the same time. The evil practices of the master produced the fruits ...
— The Underground Railroad • William Still
... but it consumed its own sparks. My papa had no self- control, no possibility of learning it: it was an unknown science, like geometry or algebra, to him; and he had very little imagination. It was this combination—want of self-control and want of imagination—which prevented him from being a thinker. ...
— Margot Asquith, An Autobiography: Volumes I & II • Margot Asquith
... a brilliant speaker, and a most cultured man, and a delightful talker. Of Mrs. Parkes, then President of the Women's Liberal League, I saw much. She was a fine speaker, and a very clear-headed thinker. Her organizing faculty was remarkable, and her death a year or two ago was a distinct loss to her party. Her home life was a standing example of the fallacy of the old idea that a woman who takes up public work must necessarily neglect her family. Mrs. Barbara Baynton was a woman ...
— An Autobiography • Catherine Helen Spence
... understand," said Peter, and looked as bewildered as he felt. He wasn't a quick thinker. "What is it you ...
— The Purple Heights • Marie Conway Oemler
... have gone crazy over a man if I'd remained unmarried forty thousand years," she retorted, severely. "I married Socrates because I loved him and admired his sculpture; but when he gave up sculpture and became a thinker he simply tried me beyond all endurance, he was so thoughtless, with the result that, having ventured once or twice to show my natural resentment, I have been handed down to posterity as a shrew. I've never complained, and I don't complain now; but when a woman is married to a philosopher who ...
— A House-Boat on the Styx • John Kendrick Bangs
... writer describes the deep impression made on his mind by certain groups of facts observed in South America. Mr. Huxley goes on: "The facts to which reference is here made were, without doubt, eminently fitted to attract the attention of a philosophical thinker; but, until the relations of the existing with the extinct species, and of the species of the different geographical areas with one another, were determined with some exactness, they afforded but an unsafe foundation for speculation. It was not possible that this determination should ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin
... lies in his assertion that the knowledge of causality may be obtained through habit because we perceive the connection of similars, and the understanding, through habit, deduces the appearance of the one from that of the other. These assertions of the great thinker are certainly correct, but he did not know how to ground them. ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... 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 ...
— The Meaning of Evolution • Samuel Christian Schmucker
... earnest searchers after the certitudes of life; it has permeated the intellectual world, and found admirers and expounders in all the universities of Europe and America. "No man has ever been found," says Grote, "strong enough to bend the bow of Socrates, the father of philosophy, the most original thinker of antiquity." His teachings gave an immense impulse to civilization, but they could not reform or save the world; it was too deeply sunk in the infamies and immoralities of an Epicurean life. Nor was his philosophy ever popular in ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume I • John Lord
... that the doctrine which we have just outlined is not Scriptural, but represents the grossest perversion of Scripture. They say this doctrine originated in "the erratic brain of Luther." Luther "was not an exact thinker, and being unable to analyze an idea into its constituents, as is necessary for one who will apprehend it correctly, he failed to grasp questions which by the general mass of the people were thoroughly ...
— Luther Examined and Reexamined - A Review of Catholic Criticism and a Plea for Revaluation • W. H. T. Dau
... 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 ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... engineers are now devising plans to pump out the Zuyder Zee, an area of two thousand square miles. There is plenty of power of every kind for anything, material, mental, spiritual. The problem is the application of it. The thinker is king. ...
— Among the Forces • Henry White Warren
... and gouty. This rendered his motions deliberate and very grave, and although he was fond of disputing, he in general spoke but little because his hearing was bad. I was struck with his exterior, and said to myself, this is a thinker, a man of wisdom, such a one as anybody would be happy to have for a friend. He frequently addressed himself to me without paying the least compliment, and this strengthened the favorable opinion I had already formed ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... his childhood was distinguished by any precocity. "Do not suppose that I was a very deep thinker, or was marked as a precocious person," says Faraday, when alluding to his early life. "I was a very lively, imaginative person, and could believe in the 'Arabian Nights' as easily as the 'Encyclopaedia,' but facts were important to me, and saved me. I could trust a fact and always cross-examined ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIV • John Lord
... and turned the ear of the strangling man close to my mouth. I had little time to think; but thought flies fast when such deadly peril menaces the thinker as that which I must face if I failed to make terms with the man who was in my power. I knew that notwithstanding his intensely disagreeable nature, if he gave his promise either by spoken word or equivalent sign, I could depend upon him. ...
— The Crack of Doom • Robert Cromie
... words of good omen, and to hearken to my prayer. O sovereign King, immeasurable Air, who keepest the earth suspended, and through bright Aether, and ye august goddesses, the Clouds, sending thunder and lightning, arise, appear in the air, O mistresses, to your deep thinker! ...
— The Clouds • Aristophanes
... chosen Grand Master of the Brotherhood, his wife stole out of the room and put the things in Bennie's sock, and then, just to please Bennie, she put a rubber rattle in the baby's little stocking. Her husband, being a great thinker, would not consent to having his hosiery hung up, so she would wait till breakfast time and hide the gloves under his plate. Then she went over to tuck the cover in around Bennie. He was smiling—dreaming, doubtless, of red sleds and firecrackers—and ...
— Snow on the Headlight - A Story of the Great Burlington Strike • Cy Warman
... had no use for philosophy or speculative thought which could not be reduced to useful action. He was an eminently practical thinker. His mind was without subtlety, and he had little imagination. A life of thought for its own sake; the life of a dreamer or idealist; a life like that of Coleridge, with his paralysis of will and abnormal activity of the speculative ...
— Four Americans - Roosevelt, Hawthorne, Emerson, Whitman • Henry A. Beers
... confronted the spirit of the nation and of the age. I had almost said he set himself against nature, as if he had been a decree of God over-riding all these other insuperable obstacles. That was his function. Mr. Phillips was not called to be a universal orator any more than he was a universal thinker. In literature and in history widely read, in person magnificent, in manners most accomplished, gentle as a babe, sweet as a new-blown rose, in voice clear and silvery, yet he was not a man of tempests, he was not an orchestra of a hundred instruments, he was not an organ, ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller
... is not a science, it cannot, like a science, be made a subject of teaching." Professor Blackie, again, an open-minded and eloquent scholar, cannot doubt that virtue may be verbally imparted, nor, therefore, that the great Athenian thinker so ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 84, October, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... when the old creeds are swept away for a new, and a grander, wider, purer form of faith is accepted by the people. For religion in Al-Kyris to-day is a hollow mockery,—a sham, kept up partly from fear,—partly from motives of policy,—but every thinker is an atheist at heart, . . our splendid civilization is tottering towards its fall, . . and should the fore-doomed destruction of this city come to pass, vast ages of progress, discovery, and invention will be swept away as though they had ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... an adherent of the teetotal abstinence movement, I beg that everything I write may be accepted with this reservation. I have never seen that any great thinker has found any help or benefit from the use of stimulants-either alcohol or tobacco. My observations and experiences are unfavourable to both classes of stimulants. In my own case, I gave up smoking before my scientific work began. Alcoholic drinks I used moderately, but I was ...
— Study and Stimulants • A. Arthur Reade
... Above, was the high, broad forehead of the philosopher, with keen, humorous eyes looking out from under thick, strong brows. Below, was the heavy jowl of the sensualist curving in a broad crease over his cravat. That brow was the brow of the public Charles Fox, the thinker, the philanthropist, the man who rallied and led the Liberal party during the twenty most hazardous years of its existence. That jaw was the jaw of the private Charles Fox, the gambler, the libertine, the drunkard. ...
— Rodney Stone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... brilliantly remarks that possibly the best attitude to take towards it would be to follow the advice of Aenesidemus himself, and suspend one's judgment altogether regarding it. Is it possible to suppose that so sharp and subtle a thinker as Aenesidemus held at the same time ...
— Sextus Empiricus and Greek Scepticism • Mary Mills Patrick
... your Majesty will permit me to disclaim," replied Quijada resolutely. "The great thinker, who never loses sight of the most distant goal, who weighs and considers again and again ere he determines upon the only right course in each instance—the great general who understands how to make far-reaching plans for military campaigns as ably as to direct ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... full face, which, however, is much better in the real man than in any 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 and dignified; it is not, in its character, an American ...
— Sketches and Studies • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... the manly and sensible advice he gives us, falls into inconsistencies one would hardly expect in such a careful thinker. The same man who would have children take an ice-cold bath summer and winter, will not let them drink cold water when they are hot, or lie on damp grass. But he would never have their shoes water-tight; and why should they let in more water when the child is hot than when he is cold, ...
— Emile • Jean-Jacques Rousseau
... have reformed me. She never says more to me than civility demands. 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 ...
— The Head of the House of Coombe • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... brown as a berry; if anything, his cold grey eyes were harder and more penetrating than in the days when they looked out from a whiter countenance. He was a strong, dominant figure despite, the estate to which he had fallen,—a silent, sinister figure that might well have been described as "The Thinker." For he was ...
— West Wind Drift • George Barr McCutcheon
... at his father, his eyes shining with anticipation. Mr. Swift was not a quick thinker, but the idea his son had proposed made an impression on him. He reached out his hand for the paper in which the young inventor had seen the account of the sunken treasure. Slowly he read it through. Then he passed it ...
— Tom Swift and his Submarine Boat - or, Under the Ocean for Sunken Treasure • Victor Appleton
... the acme of his wishes. After having pompously announced that the seat of the soul is in the meninges (cerebral membrane), could there be any thing to fear from the liberal thinker of Ferney? He had only forgotten that the patriarch was above all a man of good taste, and that the book on the body and soul offended all the proprieties of life. Voltaire's article appeared. He began with this severe and just lesson—"We ...
— Biographies of Distinguished Scientific Men • Francois Arago
... had for some years filled the pulpit as a Presbyterian minister. The stress of reconstruction and obvious necessity for ability in secular matters induced him to enter official life. Naturally indomitable, he more than fulfilled the expectations of his friends and supporters by rare ability as a thinker and speaker, with unflinching fidelity to his party principles. I found him at Tallahassee, the capital, in a well-appointed residence, but his sleeping place in the attic contracted, and, as I perceived, considerable of an arsenal. He said that for better vantage it had been his resting ...
— Shadow and Light - An Autobiography with Reminiscences of the Last and Present Century • Mifflin Wistar Gibbs
... serious topics, her voice steadied perceptibly, the blue in her eyes took on a deeper and darker hue, the half-satirical smile vanished from her adorable lips, and she spoke with the gravity of a profound thinker. Barnes watched her, fascinated, bereft of the power to concentrate his thoughts on anything else. He hung on her every movement, hoping and longing for the impersonal glance or remark with which she ...
— Green Fancy • George Barr McCutcheon
... Navarre went, among others, Berruguete, Becerra, and the marvellous deaf-mute Navarrete. The luxurious city of Valentia sent Juan de Juanes and Ribalta. Luis de Vargas went out from Seville, and from Cordova the scholar, artist, and thinker, Paul of Cespedes. The schools of Rome and Venice and Florence were thronged with eager pilgrims, speaking an alien Latin and filled with ...
— Castilian Days • John Hay
... relegated to private life. Successful merchants depending on a local constituency find it expedient to cater to popular superstitions by heading subscription-lists for the support of things in which they do not believe. No avowed independent thinker would be tolerated as chief ruler of any of the ...
— Little Journeys To The Homes Of Great Teachers • Elbert Hubbard
... than the style of his elaborate discussions. It was in one of his letters that I first found the apothegm, "Men are born either Platonists or Aristotelians," a happy drawing of the line which separates the hard-headed scientific thinker of to-day from the thinkers of ...
— The Reminiscences of an Astronomer • Simon Newcomb
... back at the beautiful little church in its exquisite design and completed perfection."'Out of keeping with early Norman walls!' Wise Leveson! He ignores all periods of transition as if they had never existed—as if they had no meaning for the thinker as well as the architect—as if the movement upward from the Norman, to the Early Pointed style showed no indication of progress! And whereas a church should always be a veritable 'sermon in stone' expressive of the ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... Confucius. But we miss the reach of thought and capacity for administration which belonged to the Sage. It is with him, how- 1 This conversation is given in the Li Chi, II. Sect. II. Pt. ii, 1. ever, as a thinker and writer that we have to do, and his rank in that capacity will appear from the examination of the Chung Yung in the section iv below. His place in the temples of the Sage has been that of one ...
— THE CHINESE CLASSICS (PROLEGOMENA) Unicode Version • James Legge
... point; I'm not Disposed to grapple with so great a matter. 'T would tie my thinker in a double knot And drive me staring mad as any hatter— Though I submit that hatters are, in fact, Sane, and all other human ...
— Shapes of Clay • Ambrose Bierce
... given thirty seconds in which to project their thought. A force of six men shall be hired to supervise the operation and handle the crowds in the neighborhood of the vault. A trust fund has been already set up to pay this group. The balance of my wealth lies awaiting the lucky thinker in the vault—all save this estate itself, an item of trifling value in comparison to the rest, which I bequeath to the State with the stipulation that the other terms of the will are ...
— Mr. Chipfellow's Jackpot • Dick Purcell
... bitterness, having reason to thank his stars that his father respected the inside of his head whilst cuffing the outside of it; and this made it easy for Francis to do yeoman's service to his country as that rare and admirable thing, a Freethinker: the only sort of thinker, I may remark, whose thoughts, and consequently whose ...
— A Treatise on Parents and Children • George Bernard Shaw
... out. It was bright and sunny in the street, but in Mr. Buffin's heart there was no sunlight. He was not a quick thinker, but he had come quite swiftly to the conclusion that London was no longer the place for him. Sid Marks had been in court chewing a straw and listening with grave attention to the evidence, and for one ...
— Death At The Excelsior • P. G. Wodehouse
... character, political intricacies, and ambitions of the French race than any public man or writer of history of his own or in subsequent years. He always based his conclusions on a sound logical point. He was an accurate thinker, who refused to form his judgments on light, faulty and inaccurate newspaper paragraphs about what was going on around him. He was opposed to Pitt and his supporters' policy of carrying on war with France. He wanted peace, but they wanted the ...
— Drake, Nelson and Napoleon • Walter Runciman
... too strong for them, retreated into smooth water, waiting, like a defeated political party, for a favorable change of the tide. When, therefore, Matthew Arnold came to America in the autumn of 1883 expressly to lecture on Emerson, as a writer and thinker, there was great expectation on both sides, and both were equally disappointed. His friends who knew that he liked Emerson, thought he had found too much fault with him, and the other party considered he had ...
— Sketches from Concord and Appledore • Frank Preston Stearns
... was full of ambition, and soon saw the opening which lay before him for distinction and wealth as the ultimate owner of the Blaycke estates. To this end he bent all his energies. He had had in England a good legal education; he was a clear thinker and a ready speaker, and speedily made himself so well known and well thought of, that when his father died there were many who said it was well the old man had been taken away in time to leave the young Willan a property worthy of his talents ...
— Between Whiles • Helen Hunt Jackson
... denunciations of Capitalism and appeals for a Socialism as featureless as smoke, are unsatisfactory when one regards them as the entire contribution of the ascendant worker to the discussion of the national future. The labour thinker has to become definite in his demands and clearer upon the give and take that will be necessary before they can be satisfied. He has to realise rather more generously than he has done so far the enormous moral difficulty there is in bringing people who have ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... have been exhibited in the Zoological Park, two stand out with special prominence, by reason of their unusual mental qualities. They differed widely from each other. One was a born actor and imitator, who loved human partnership in his daily affairs. The other was an original thinker and reasoner, with a genius for invention, and at all times impatient of training and restraint. The first was named Rajah, the ...
— The Minds and Manners of Wild Animals • William T. Hornaday
... Roberts showed him to be a different sort of a man, though perhaps harder to read. Square shoulders and attenuated figure—a mixture of energy and nervous force without muscular strength; a tyrannous forehead overshadowing lambent hazel eyes; a cordial frankness of manner with a thinker's tricks of gesture, his nervous ...
— Elder Conklin and Other Stories • Frank Harris
... 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; yield neither to ...
— Modern Painters, Volume IV (of V) • John Ruskin
... age of fifteen to enter the order of S. Dominic, exchanging his secular name for Tommaso. But the old alliance between philosophy and orthodoxy, drawn up by scholasticism and approved by the mediaeval Church, had been succeeded by mutual hostility; and the youthful thinker found no favour in the cloister of Cosenza, where he now resided. The new philosophy taught by Telesio placed itself in direct antagonism to the pseudo-Aristotelian tenets of the theologians, and founded ...
— Sonnets • Michael Angelo Buonarroti & Tommaso Campanella
... 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, ...
— Lectures and Essays • T.H. Huxley
... terminology makes the following statement as an introduction to certain remarks advocating a more definite use of terms relating to tone production by the human voice:—"The correct use of words is the most potent factor in the development of the thinker." If this statement has any basis of fact whatsoever to support it then it must be evident to the merest novice in musical work that the popular use of many common terms by musicians is keeping a good many people from clear and logical thought ...
— Music Notation and Terminology • Karl W. Gehrkens
... 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 ...
— Life of St. Francis of Assisi • Paul Sabatier
... the functions of the brain to his faculty of introspective vision or second sight, and it is of interest to observe that all the more important discoveries in this department of physiology during the last two centuries are clearly anticipated by him. The scientific works of this great thinker are far too little known by the majority, who are apt to regard him only as a visionary and a ...
— Second Sight - A study of Natural and Induced Clairvoyance • Sepharial
... 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 knowledge was ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY
... Greek thinker seems to contest the righteousness and desirability of slavery. It is one of the usual, nay, inevitable, things pertaining to a civilized state. Aristotle the philosopher puts the current view of ...
— A Day In Old Athens • William Stearns Davis
... a great deal more than that patient observer and deep thinker Charles Darwin ever claimed, nor have his wiser disciples claimed it for him. It is familiar that he explained how variations once arisen would be clinched, if favourable in the struggle, by the action of heredity and survival; but the source or origin of the variations ...
— Life and Matter - A Criticism of Professor Haeckel's 'Riddle of the Universe' • Oliver Lodge
... Usage that there was placed with the Dead, the Diskos of the Dead, there upon The Last Road in the Country Of Silence, and was thus made to give back unto the Earth-Current, the power that did lie in it. And this doth seem to a careless thinker, as it were that I told once again those olden customs of the Ancient Folk; but this is otherwise, and had a sound reason to it; yet, if you do so believe, I doubt not but that a right human sentiment was something at the bottom, ...
— The Night Land • William Hope Hodgson
... minds, is to be seriously and energetically deprecated. It is with presentment that the artist has, fundamentally, to concern himself. If he cannot present poetically then he is not, in effect, a poet, though he may be a poetic thinker, or a great writer. Browning's eminence is not because of his detachment from what some one has foolishly called "the mere handiwork, the furnisher's business, of the poet." It is the delight of the true artist that the product of his talent should be wrought ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp
... the conversational dogmatist on the imperial scale becomes every year more and more an impossibility. If he is in intelligent company he will be almost sure to find some one who knows more about some of the subjects he generalizes upon than any wholesale thinker who handles knowledge by the cargo is like to know. I find myself, at certain intervals, in the society of a number of experts in science, literature, and art, who cover a pretty wide range, taking them all together, of human knowledge. I have not the least ...
— The Poet at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... about Habbakuk. He left two or three pages of passionate complaint against the iniquity of the land, but his "burden" lacks those outbursts of lyric poetry which are found in most of the other minor prophets. Donatello gives him the air of a thinker. He holds a long scroll to which he points with his right hand while looking downward, towards the door of the Cathedral. It is a strong head, as full of character as the Jeremiah. But Habbakuk is less the man ...
— Donatello • David Lindsay, Earl of Crawford
... prose-writer, and a bolder and more varied versifier than Pope. He was a more vigorous thinker, a more correct and logical declaimer, and had more of what may be called strength of mind than Pope; but he had not the same refinement and delicacy of feeling. Dryden's eloquence and spirit were possessed in a higher degree by others, and in nearly the same degree by Pope himself; but that by ...
— Lectures on the English Poets - Delivered at the Surrey Institution • William Hazlitt
... well said, by one who has himself been a leader in one of the great philanthropic enterprises of the day,[A] that, "if the truthful history of any invention were written, we should find concerned in it the thinker, who dreams, without reaching the means of putting his imaginings in practice,—the mathematician, who estimates justly the forces at command, in their relation to each other, but who forgets to proportion ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 6, April, 1858 • Various
... have known thee, my brave Noble thinker, lover, doer! The best knowledge last I have. But thou comest as the thrower Of fresh ...
— The Poetical Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume IV • Elizabeth Barrett Browning
... orator, Beecher, who has just passed away, was estimated by many as intellectually great; but Mr. Beecher never took the position of independence that any great thinker must have occupied. He never moved beyond the sphere of popularity. He never led men but where they were already disposed to go. Upon the great question of the return of the spirit, one of the most important and fundamental of all religious questions, ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, May 1887 - Volume 1, Number 4 • Various
... dusk when she was on the street again, looking down the steep incline to the Luxembourg Gardens. In the rainy twilight the fierce tension of the Rodin "Thinker" in front of the Pantheon loomed huge and tragic. She gave it a glance of startled sympathy. She had never understood the statue before. Now she was a prey to those same ravaging throes. There was for the moment no escaping them. She felt none ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... and beside a merry brook that tumbled down from the Blue Hill range, was the home of Loring Camp, his wife, and his only daughter, Liddy. He was not a member of either of the two orthodox churches, but a fearless, independent thinker, believing in a merciful God of love and forgiveness, rather than a Calvinistic one, and who might be classed as a Unitarian in opinion. Broad-chested, broad-minded, outspoken in his ways, he was at once a ...
— Pocket Island - A Story of Country Life in New England • Charles Clark Munn
... and placed upon the Roman 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 ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... but very remarkable consequence of this manifold activity and lifelong absorption in public affairs was the failure of so great a thinker to produce a single systematic and elaborate work containing a complete and detailed exposition of his philosophical, and especially his ontological views. For such an exposition Leibnitz could find at no period of his ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... use of the word is justified by custom (like the use of other words which at first referred only to the body, and then by a figure have been transferred to the mind), still, why should we make an ambiguous word the corner-stone of moral philosophy? To the higher thinker the Utilitarian or hedonist mode of speaking has been at variance with religion and with any higher conception both of politics and of morals. It has not satisfied their imagination; it has offended their taste. To elevate pleasure, 'the most fleeting of all things,' into a general idea seems ...
— Philebus • Plato
... to the Hebrides, but said he would now content himself with seeing one or two of the most curious of them. He said, 'Macaulay[145], who writes the account of St. Kilda, set out with a prejudice against prejudices, and wanted to be a smart modern thinker; and yet he affirms for a truth, that when a ship arrives there, all the inhabitants are seized with ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... great theologian nor a deep thinker," said I, "but no man ever uttered a more profound saying. God may ignore our petty rebellions against Himself; but when we, little mites, sit in contemptuous judgment on one another, He cannot keep His hands from us! And ...
— My New Curate • P.A. Sheehan
... to removal by the President of the United States, we may safely predict further extensive changes in the character of the American people and their government. It was not for nothing that our profoundest political thinker, Thomas Jefferson, attached so much importance to ...
— Civil Government in the United States Considered with - Some Reference to Its Origins • John Fiske
... nature by different ages, nations, churches, points of view, are but fractional and imperfect expressions of one essential unity, from which they all proceed—crude endeavors or distorted parts, to be regarded both as distinct and united. In short (to put it in our own form, or summing up,) that thinker or analyzer or overlooker who by an inscrutable combination of train'd wisdom and natural intuition most fully accepts in perfect faith the moral unity and sanity of the creative scheme, in history, science, and all life and ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... his adherents all over the country were carrying on a successful and effective propaganda. When Henry George himself came to Hull-House one Sunday afternoon, the gymnasium which was already crowded with men to hear Father Huntington's address on "Why should a free thinker believe in Christ," fairly rocked on its foundations under the enthusiastic and prolonged applause which greeted this great leader and constantly interrupted his stirring address, filled, as all of his speeches were, with high moral enthusiasm and humanitarian fervor. Of the remarkable congresses ...
— Twenty Years At Hull House • Jane Addams
... certain disdain as more of a poet than an astronomer; but he soon vindicated, by several important discoveries, his title to be regarded as a man of science. "Urania," which appeared in 1889, is an excellent example of his ability as a thinker, and of his charm as a writer. The work is hardly a novel, though it is far more popular than many books of fiction. It is really an essay in philosophy dealing with the question of the immortality of the soul; and it has ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IV. • Editors: Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... Russo-Turkish conflict. It was at this time also that he became known in the world of letters, the intellectual subtlety and literary capacity of his Defence of Philosophic Doubt (1879) suggesting that he might make a reputation as a speculative thinker. Belonging, however, to a [v.03 p.0251] class in which the responsibilities of government are a traditional duty, Mr Balfour divided his time between the political arena and the study. Being released from his duties as private secretary by the general election of 1880, he began to take ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 2 - "Baconthorpe" to "Bankruptcy" • Various
... in his calling, he was convinced that his belief was wrong, and in 1845 he entered the Roman Catholic Church. In 1879 he was created cardinal by Pope Leo XIII. but he continued to reside in England, where he died in 1890. Besides his great influence as a spiritual thinker, Newman's writings and sermons were characterized by a forcible and elevated style and by remarkably melodious utterance. Lead, Kindly Light ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 10 - The Guide • Charles Herbert Sylvester
... years of spiritual wandering; but, as it was, he fell in with one after another, each in his own way as literal and unspiritual as the other—each impressed with one aspect of religious truth, and with one only. In the end he became perhaps the widest-minded and most original thinker whom I have ever met; but no one from his early manhood could have augured this result; on the contrary, he showed every sign of being likely to develop into one of those who can never see more than one side of a question at a time, in spite of their seeing that side with singular clearness of ...
— Selections from Previous Works - and Remarks on Romanes' Mental Evolution in Animals • Samuel Butler
... means of delighting and 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 holiness ...
— The Road and the Roadside • Burton Willis Potter
... subject of a pamphlet by Rudolf Goldscheid, of Vienna, now published in Switzerland, with a preface by Professor Forel, as originally written a year earlier, because it is believed that in the interval its conclusions have been confirmed by events.[2] Goldscheid is an independent and penetrating thinker in the economic field, and the author of a book on the principles of Social Biology (Hoeherentwicklung und Menschenoekonomie) which has been described by an English critic as the ablest defence of Socialism yet written. By the nature of his studies ...
— Essays in War-Time - Further Studies In The Task Of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... strengthening the old 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 writer pointed the way ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... first requisites of good thinking is a reliable memory. One must have facts to reason, and these facts must come to one in memory to be available for thought. If one wishes to become a great thinker in a certain field, he must gain experience in that field and organize that experience in such a way as to remember it and to recall it when ...
— The Science of Human Nature - A Psychology for Beginners • William Henry Pyle
... Hypothesis. My poets and scientists not merely told me of things I had never known, they confirmed me in certain conceptions which had come to me without effort in the past. I became an evolutionist in the fullest sense, accepting Spencer as the greatest living thinker. Fiske and Galton and Allen were merely assistants to the Master Mind whose generalizations included in their circles ...
— A Son of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... speaks of Aristotle as "that clear thinker and concise writer." I strongly suspect that his knowledge of Aristotle was limited to the single sentence which he had translated or got translated. Aristotle is concise in phrase, not in book, and is powerful and profound in thought: but no one who knows that his writing, all ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume II (of II) • Augustus de Morgan
... and figure (Rep.). His mind lingers around the forms of mythology, which he uses as symbols or translates into figures of speech. He has no implements of observation, such as the telescope or microscope; the great science of chemistry is a blank to him. It is only by an effort that the modern thinker can breathe the atmosphere of the ancient philosopher, or understand how, under such unequal conditions, he seems in many instances, by a sort of inspiration, to have ...
— Timaeus • Plato
... a narrow-minded man, painfully conscientious in his statements lest he should be unjust to somebody; a slow thinker, unable to let a subject drop when once he had started upon it. He had no sooner uttered his remark about hard times than he was ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris
... This he considered even worse. My father was for obedience and non-resistance, and could not see that we were fighting a battle for the liberty of all Englishmen. He simply repeated his opinions, and was but a child in the hands of this clear-headed thinker. My father might well have feared for the effect of Mr. Wilson's views on a lad of my age, in whose mind he opened vistas of thought far in advance of those which, without him, ...
— Hugh Wynne, Free Quaker • S. Weir Mitchell
... mingles with the wholesome grain. The attempt is sometimes made to destroy, or, at least, to weaken, our claim for Christ as the supreme teacher by placing a few selected sayings of His side by side with the words of some other ancient thinker or teacher. And if they who make such comparisons would put into their parallel columns all the words of Jesus and all the words of those with whom the comparison is made, we should have neither right to complain nor reason to fear. Wellhausen puts the ...
— The Teaching of Jesus • George Jackson
... all of their blood, had given to the German national idea a golden setting, and to the history of civilization a new meaning. Now they were experiencing the struggles, ventures, and victories of a great man. Work on in your study, peaceful thinker, fantastic dreamer! You have learned over-night to look down with a smile upon foreign ways and to expect great things of your own talent. Try to realize, now, what flows from ...
— The German Classics Of The Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries, Volume 12 • Various
... to him, cablegrams and all. Horace Greeley and Samuel Bowles and Charles A. Dana have passed from the press, and the march of the crowd through the miles of their columns every day is trampling on their graves. The newspaper is the mass machine, the crowd thinker. To and fro, from week to week and from year to year, its flaming headlines sway, now hither and now thither, where the greatest numbers go, or the best guess of where they are going to go; and Personality, creative, triumphant, masterful, ...
— Crowds - A Moving-Picture of Democracy • Gerald Stanley Lee
... what a wonderful boy you are, to think that all out yourself!" said Beppina. "You're such a wonderful thinker! Why can't you think of ...
— The Italian Twins • Lucy Fitch Perkins
... console him for her own loss. The sonnet is remarkable in more senses than one, first for its psychological truth, and then still more for the light it throws on Dante's inward history as poet and thinker. Hitherto he had celebrated beauty and goodness in the creature; henceforth he was to celebrate them in the Creator whose praise they were.[175] We give an extempore translation of this sonnet, in which the meaning is preserved so far as is possible where the ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell
... learning. He is never weak or dull; though he fails often enough, is often enough wrong-headed, fantastical, affected, and has never laid bare the deeper arteries of humanity, for good or for evil. Neither is he altogether an original thinker; as one would expect, he has over-read himself: but then he has done so to good purpose. If he imitates, he generally equals. The table of fare in 'The Ordinary' smacks of Rabelais or Aristophanes: but then it is worthy of either; and if one cannot help suspecting that 'The Ordinary' never would ...
— Plays and Puritans - from "Plays and Puritans and Other Historical Essays" • Charles Kingsley
... Albucasis and Avenzoar. Albucasis was "the Arabian restorer of surgery." Averroes, called in the Middle Ages "the Soul of Aristotle" or "the Commentator," is better known today among philosophers than physicians. On the revival of Moslem orthodoxy he fell upon evil days, was persecuted as a free-thinker, and the saying is attributed to him—"Sit anima mea ...
— The Evolution of Modern Medicine • William Osler
... always to be, but has not always been, put as a round sum to his credit in this part of the account that he heartily recognised the value of Scott as a novelist. A hasty thinker might be surprised at this; not so ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... in mind: If that thy roof be made of glass, It shows small wit to pick up stones To pelt the people as they pass. Win the attention of the wise, And give the thinker food for thought; Whoso indites frivolities, Will but by ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... to give the order, and Innocent, left to herself for a moment, moved softly up to her father's picture and gazed upon it with all her soul in her eyes. It was a wonderful face—a face expressive of the highest thought and intelligence—the face of a thinker or a poet, though the finely moulded mouth and chin had nothing of the weakness which sometimes marks a mere dreamer of dreams. Timidly glancing about her to make sure she was not observed, she kissed the portrait, the cold glass which covered it meeting her warm caressing lips with a repelling ...
— Innocent - Her Fancy and His Fact • Marie Corelli
... never, however, has it appeared with so little attempt at disguise. It has been left for questionable poets and novelists to idealise the rascal genus; philosophers have escaped into the ambiguities of general propositions, and we do not remember elsewhere to have met with a serious ethical thinker deliberately laying two whole organic characters, with their vices and virtues in full life and bloom, side by side, asking himself which is best, and answering gravely that it ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... encounter a different spirit—a spirit thoroughly impregnated with Christian faith, and little disposed to covenant with slavery. There we begin to see that race of Puritan farmers, but lately represented by John Brown. Has not the attempt been made to transform him also into a free thinker, a philosophic enemy of the Bible, and, from this very cause, an enemy to slavery? We need nothing more than his last letter to his wife, to show from what source he had drawn that courage, so misdirected but so indomitable, which he displayed at Harper's Ferry; the Christian, the Biblical and orthodox ...
— The Uprising of a Great People • Count Agenor de Gasparin
... case as Cuvier sifted the earth's crust. Like that great thinker, he proceeded from deduction to deduction before drawing his conclusions, and reconstructed the past career of a conscience as Cuvier reconstructed an Anoplotherium. When considering a brief he would often wake in the night, startled by a gleam of truth ...
— The Commission in Lunacy • Honore de Balzac
... rights, the nature of which does not 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 ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 3 of 8 • Various
... Socialism is not merely a cry of pain; if it were only that its plaints might have proved more effectual. It is a cry of avarice, of jealousy, and very often of extreme laziness as well. Every socialistic theory that we have yet heard of is self-damning. Each real thinker, whether he be Croesus or pauper, comprehends that to empower the executive with greater responsibility than it already possesses would mean to tempt national ruin, and that until mankind has become a race of angels ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 20, July, 1891 • Various
... ear: 'I cannot play the lute, but I can make a small state great.' I felt an interest in thy strenuous and troubled career. I believe that knowledge, to spread amongst the nations, must first find a nursery in the brain of kings; and I saw in the deed-doer, the agent of the thinker. In those espousals, on which with untiring obstinacy thy heart is set, I might sympathise with thee; perchance"—(here a melancholy smile flitted over the student's pale lips), "perchance even as a lover: priest though I be now, and dead to human love, once ...
— Harold, Complete - The Last Of The Saxon Kings • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... trouble as I thought we were. There's a dozen things I want to do that I can't because we haven't got the stuff. Don't say 'I told you so,' either—I know you did! You're the champion ground-and-lofty thinker of the ...
— Spacehounds of IPC • Edward Elmer Smith
... dealt at length with this forgotten thinker in a Presidential Address to the Aristotelian Society, printed in their ...
— Philosophy and Religion - Six Lectures Delivered at Cambridge • Hastings Rashdall
... The thinker confronted by a situation for which his present knowledge is not adequate, recognizes the difficulty and suspends judgment; in other words, does not jump at a conclusion but undertakes to think it out. To do this control is continually necessary. ...
— How to Teach • George Drayton Strayer and Naomi Norsworthy
... the New England sub-species, thin lips, suggestive of delicacy, but having nothing like primness, still less of the rigidity which is often noticeable in the generation succeeding next to that of the men in their shirt-sleeves, he would have been noticed anywhere as one evidently a scholarly thinker astray from the alcove or the study, which were his natural habitats. His voice was very sweet, and penetrating without any loudness or mark of effort. His enunciation was beautifully clear, but ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... when they do yield to the force of evidence and accept extraordinary new discoveries, they either do it in a blundering and perverted manner, or they try to appropriate it as their own and continue to rob the pioneer thinker. ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, November 1887 - Volume 1, Number 10 • Various |
