"Thinker" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... No impartial thinker dare deny that the British fleet has been the principal factor in preventing Europe's subjugation to German autocracy, and the world to German militarism. Yet the so-called party of freedom prays earnestly that this fleet ...
— What Germany Thinks - The War as Germans see it • Thomas F. A. Smith
... age of ninety-three that he claims. He is about five and one-half or six feet in height, weighs one-hundred and seventy-five pounds or more, and has good sight and hearing in addition to a skin that is almost devoid of any wrinkle. Besides all of this he is a clear thinker and has a good sense of humor. Following is an account of the experiences of Mr. Womble as a slave and of the conditions in general on the plantations ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves - Georgia Narratives, Part 4 • Works Projects Administration
... him as his music. He detested the stupidity of wealth and poverty, he rebelled against laws that aren't laws, but only interests enforced by authority, he fought against the sheer deadness of prejudice. How he hated all that! And why not? You see, Vera, he was sensitive to it not only as a thinker, but as a musician, too. It was all a part of the discord, and what I used to think his wasting himself was really an effort to create a larger harmony. He used to say that the beauty of music is only the image of beauty in life, and that life must come first. He couldn't endure discords ...
— Read-Aloud Plays • Horace Holley
... by inclination, very little of a worker. He is, first, a wanter—a bundle of instincts; second, a feeler—a bundle of emotions; last and least, he is a thinker. What real work he does is done not because he likes it but because it serves one of these first two ...
— How to Analyze People on Sight - Through the Science of Human Analysis: The Five Human Types • Elsie Lincoln Benedict and Ralph Paine Benedict
... go very wrong we need an unpractical man. Certainly, at least, we need a theorist. A practical man means a man accustomed to mere daily practice, to the way things commonly work. When things will not work, you must have the thinker, the man who has some doctrine about why they work at all. It is wrong to fiddle while Rome is burning; but it is quite right to study the theory of ...
— What's Wrong With The World • G.K. Chesterton
... in the Fortnightly Review, in 1876, and are now republished, with some other materials for the author's proposed work, under the title of The Postulates of English Political Economy.[10] These essays, which emanated from a well-trained, scientific mind, an independent thinker, and one who was perfectly free in his criticisms, deal almost exclusively with one side of what the author wished and intended to say; but as they stand, they prove that had he lived he would have shed much light on the problem, how the rapid ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 6 • Various
... in the issue. He was too unconventional a thinker ever to find himself in harmony with all the declarations of any party, and yet it was a necessity of his nature to be in the melee. He had his own array of facts, his own peculiar deductions; his own special charges of iniquity against this party and of criminal ...
— Dr. Sevier • George W. Cable
... outwards into space. Now these lines not only represent the path which the electric ray takes in its journey through space, but exactly coincide with the electric lines of force as conceived by Faraday. This great thinker and experimentalist not only conceived lines of magnetic forces existing in the dielectric or medium between two electrified bodies, which in this case is the Aether, but also conceived lines of electric force which started ...
— Aether and Gravitation • William George Hooper
... nothing but a coarse outside machinery to secure the freedom of individual thought. The President of the United States is only the engine driver of our broad-gauge mail-train; and every honest, independent thinker has a seat in the ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... slightly by marriage at the age of eleven,—crossed his mind. What ineffable rapture the first reading of Maimonides had excited, The Guide of the Perplexed supplying the truly perplexed youth with reasons for the Jewish fervor which informed him. How he had reverenced the great mediaeval thinker, regarding him as the ideal of men, the most inspired of teachers. Had he not changed his own name to Maimon to pattern himself after his Master, was not even now his oath under temptation: "I swear by the reverence which I owe my great teacher, Rabbi Moses ben Maimon, ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... blasphemies, derived from the ancient doctrine of the divine right of kings, because they increased his own ministerial power, exercised under a presidency and governorship chiefly nominal and honorary. But a thinker of his force, a statesman of his science, a man of his greatness, should have remembered what physiologists have demonstrated with regard to heredity, and should have known that it was his duty and that of the nation and ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 24, November, 1891 • Various
... perceive," said Miss Loring, with a smile, "and must have been a thinker, in some degree, to have ...
— The Hand But Not the Heart - or, The Life-Trials of Jessie Loring • T. S. Arthur
... die, it was a Law and 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 ...
— The Night Land • William Hope Hodgson
... which the original source is in Him who gave to tender and humble and uncorrupted souls the sense of right and wrong, which, after passing through various forms, has found its final expression in the use of material force. Behind the bayonet is the law-giver's statute, behind the statute the thinker's argument, behind the argument is the tender conscientiousness of woman, woman, the wife, the mother,—who looks upon the face of God himself reflected in the unsullied soul of infancy. "Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings ...
— Pages From an Old Volume of Life - A Collection Of Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... 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 ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... itself "but part of a great empire, extended by our virtue and our fortune to the furthest limits of the east and the west." Its parliament no longer looked on itself as the local legislature of England and Scotland; it claimed, in the words of the same great political thinker, "an imperial character, in which as from the throne of heaven she superintends all the several inferior legislatures, and guides and controls them all, without annihilating any." Its people, steeped in the commercial ideas of the time, saw in the growth of such a dominion, the monopoly of whose ...
— History of the English People, Volume VII (of 8) - The Revolution, 1683-1760; Modern England, 1760-1767 • John Richard Green
... turn a good penny to twenty bad halfpence. Then in spite of your sophistry, honest Will Wood Is a man of this world, all true flesh and blood; So you are but in jest, and you will not, I hope, Unman the poor knave for the sake of a trope. 'Tis a metaphor known to every plain thinker, Just as when we say, the devil's a tinker, Which cannot, in literal sense be made good, Unless by the devil we mean Mr. Wood. But some will object that the devil oft spoke, In heathenish times, from the trunk of an oak; And since we must grant there never were known More heathenish ...
— Poems (Volume II.) • Jonathan Swift
... is to impress upon medical students the value of power and promptitude in combination, for their professional purposes; the uses to them of nearness of the {Nous}, and of happy guessing; and how you may see the sense, and neatness, and pith of that excellent thinker, as well as best of all story-tellers, Miss Austen, when she says in Emma, "Depend upon it, a lucky guess is never merely luck, there is always some talent in it." Talent here denoting intelligence ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... the abbot—"Bernard of Clairvaux, the greatest man, the greatest thinker, the greatest preacher, and the greatest saint of these ...
— Via Crucis • F. Marion Crawford
... A distinguished thinker, Stephen Pearl Andrews, from whose writings some of these suggestions concerning Methods have been borrowed, points out three sources of confusion in the minds even of the learned themselves, in connection ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol IV, Issue VI, December 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... truest and most true;" Murray, for using "quite wrong;" and Cobbett, for the phrase, "perfect correctness." "Correctness," says the critic, "does not admit of degrees of perfection."—Ib., pp. 143 and 151. But what does such a thinker know about correctness? If this excellent quality cannot be perfect, surely nothing can. The words which Dr. Bullions thinks it "improper to compare," because he judges them to have "an absolute or superlative signification," are "true, ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... not cause any one a shock to be told that "the greatest thinker of all time" was not exactly ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 12 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Scientists • Elbert Hubbard
... I could not help thinking of the wonderful chain of proof in Spinoza's 'Ethics,' the straining after demonstration by Spinoza gives me the impression that this acute thinker could not have believed in his own doctrines with his whole heart, and that he therefore felt the necessity of fastening every mesh of his net with the utmost care. "Still," I continued, "I must acknowledge I do not share this great admiration for ...
— Memories • Max Muller
... some grave, positive, stark, delineations are interspersed among those of the passive, lighter, and traditional sort presumably nearer to stereotyped tastes. For— while I am quite aware that a thinker is not expected, and, indeed, is scarcely allowed, now more than heretofore, to state all that crosses his mind concerning existence in this universe, in his attempts to explain or excuse the presence of ...
— Late Lyrics and Earlier • Thomas Hardy
... philistinism and gradgrindism in education, library science, science in general, and life in general. It is full of humor, rich in style, and eccentric in form and all suffused with the perfervid genius of a man who is not merely a thinker but a force. Every sentence is tinglingly alive, and as if furnished with long antennae of suggestiveness. I do not know who Mr. Lee is, but I know this—that if he goes on as he has been, we need no longer whine that we have no worthy ...
— The Education of the Child • Ellen Key
... Quintinie is the result of a fit of anti-clerical mania. George Sand gives, in this novel, the counterpart of Sibylle. Emile Lemontier, a free-thinker, is in love with the daughter of General La Quintinie. Emile is troubled in his mind because, as his fiancee is a Catholic, he knows she will have to have a confessor. The idea is intolerable to ...
— George Sand, Some Aspects of Her Life and Writings • Rene Doumic
... philosophical and socialistic systems, who gave him the substance of the Hegelian ideas. During the winter of 1844-45, Charles Grun had some long conversations with Proudhon, which determined, very decisively, not the ideas, which belonged exclusively to the bisontin thinker, but the form of the important work on which he labored after 1843, and which was published ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon
... 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 ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... vital, true, and human as well as divine, the whole world will pause to listen. Yes, Mary! In all its toil and stress, its scheming for self-advantage, its political changes, its little temporary passing shows of empires and monarchies, the world will stop to hear what the Thinker and the Writer tells it! The words of old Socrates still ring down the ages—the thoughts of Shakespeare are still the basis of English literature!—what a grand life it is to be among the least ...
— The Treasure of Heaven - A Romance of Riches • Marie Corelli
... shoulders. "Well, it is not too late," he said, bending over her. But the girl shrank from his arm, and he realised it instantly. He was aware directly that there was some feeling in her not quite fathomed nor understood. It puzzled him. He was far too deep a thinker, far too refined a nature to treat his women as inanimate toys to be used for his amusement, either with or without their consent, as the chance might be. He knew them to be, and treated them as, individual ...
— Six Women • Victoria Cross
... sources, was reflected in that of the Jews." It would be interesting to analyze this important process of assimilation, but we can concern ourselves only with the works of the Jewish intellect. Again we meet, at the threshold of the period, a characteristic figure, the thinker Sa'adia, ranking high as author and religious philosopher, known also as a grammarian and a poet. He is followed by Sherira, to whom we owe the beginnings of a history of Talmudic literature, and his son Hai Gaon, ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles
... not only a skilled performer on the keys, as you see, but she is a wide-idead thinker. If it would not detain you, sir, against previous inclination to the ball-room, I should like to read you some of ...
— Vesty of the Basins • Sarah P. McLean Greene
... proceed to Art Mystic and 'Columbus.' Art Mystic, I would briefly endeavor to define, as aiming at the illustration of fact on the highest imaginative principles. It takes a scene, for instance, from history, and represents that scene as exactly and naturally as possible. And here the ordinary thinker might be apt to say, Art Mystic has done enough." ("So it has," muttered Mr. Hemlock.) "On the contrary, Art Mystic has only begun. Besides the representation of the scene itself, the spirit of the age"—("Ah! quite right," said Lady Brambledown; "yes, yes, the spirit of the ...
— Hide and Seek • Wilkie Collins
... man of affairs like Piers should lose his head and endorse Sandercock's sweating post; but I always say that, if the gentlemen of England are to maintain their influence, they should live on their own acres." From this it will be seen that Sir James was a prolix rather than a clear thinker. ...
— Two Sides of the Face - Midwinter Tales • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... "As to his talk" — I quote again from Mr. Somerset — "he was a spendthrift. I mean that he never saved anything up as those writer fellows so often do. He was quite inconsequent and just rippled on, but was always ready to attack a careless thinker. On the other hand, he was extremely tolerant of fools, even bad poets who are the worst kind of fools — or rather the hardest to bear — but that was ...
— The Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke • Rupert Brooke
... best guide, philosopher, poet, thinker, and prophet, had fitly and most appropriately even foretold this very matter with regard to the Lion; maybe had prophesied it, when he told us there were sermons in ...
— The Tale of Lal - A Fantasy • Raymond Paton
... conduct of Catharine de' Medici herself to any such motive is the extreme of absurdity. Even the author of the "Tocsain contre les massacreurs" rejects the supposition without hesitation. (Original edition, p. 157.) Catharine was certainly a free-thinker, ...
— History of the Rise of the Huguenots - Volume 2 • Henry Baird
... the seer of Poughkeepsie! In the above extracts, quoted from his "Thinker," he has vindicated the much maligned Epicurus better than his disciples Lucretius and Gassendi have done, and by some mysterious process (he calls it psychometry) he seems to know more of the old Athenian, and to have a more intimate ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 101, March, 1866 • Various
... with some views therein expressed, and I hope that, hereafter, I may have an opportunity of explaining what they are; but I am surprised that Dr. Lightfoot has failed to observe how singularly that great Thinker supports the general results of Supernatural Religion, to the point even of a frequent agreement almost in words. If Dr. Lightfoot had studied Mill a little more closely, he would not have committed the serious error ...
— A Reply to Dr. Lightfoot's Essays • Walter R. Cassels
... possible only by Thy help and as we have imitated Thy example. Thou art the great Architect and Builder. Thou art the great Mathematician and Engineer. Thou art the great Chemist and Electrician. Thou art the great Thinker and Artist. Our works are but pale and feeble copies of Thine, and are possible only because Thou workest until now and dost bless our works. The uniformity of Thy laws bids us work in confidence, and the unity of nature bids ...
— Final Report of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission • Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission
... and races have alike perished in the struggles of mankind, to revive again, indeed, but as surely to be again put to the edge of the sword. Here and there great thoughts and great masterpieces have survived the martyrdom of a thinker, the extinction of a school, the death of a poet, the wreck of a high civilisation. Socrates is murdered with the creed of immortality on his very lips; hardly had he spoken the wonderful words recorded in the Phaedo when the fatal poison sent its deathly chill through his limbs; the Greeks are ...
— The Witch of Prague • F. Marion Crawford
... another object than to discuss the niceties of words and the forms of phrases, a labour which is well in its place, if it be done well, but is not what needs to be done to such an author as Plutarch to render him useful. A man who was a great reader of Plutarch, a just and solid thinker above the measure of his age, and not surpassed in his way by any writer in our own, Montaigne, observes in his 'Essay of the Education of Children'—"Let him enquire into the manners, revenues, and alliances of princes, things in themselves very pleasant to learn, and very useful ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume I (of 4) • Plutarch
... deceit. She herself knew, and blindly satisfied herself with the knowledge, that she alone now came close into the life of "Beau" Law, the convict; "Jessamy" Law, the student, the financier, the thinker; John Law, her lord and master. Herein she found the sole compensation possible in her savage nature. She had found the master ...
— The Mississippi Bubble • Emerson Hough
... who uttered this precept[895] certainly did not wish to live unknown, for he uttered it to let all the world know he was a superior thinker, and to get to himself unjust glory by exhorting others ...
— Plutarch's Morals • Plutarch
... into Ann Veronica's nights at last and kept her awake, the perplexing contrast between the advanced thought and the advanced thinker. The general propositions of Socialism, for example, struck her as admirable, but she certainly did not extend her admiration to any of its exponents. She was still more stirred by the idea of the equal citizenship of men and women, by the realization that a big and growing organization ...
— Ann Veronica • H. G. Wells
... VEGETARIAN, non—resistant, free-thinker, in ethics a Christian; Orator apt at the rhine-stone rhythm of Ingersoll. Carnivorous, avenger, believer and pagan. Continent, promiscuous, changeable, treacherous, vain, Proud, with the pride that makes struggle a thing for laughter; With heart cored out by the ...
— Spoon River Anthology • Edgar Lee Masters
... forth in the subdivision of the universe between Zeus and his brothers, he taking the heavens, Poseidon the sea, and Hades the under world, all having the earth as their common theatre of action. The moral is prefigured by such myths as those of Prometheus and Epimetheus, the fore-thinker and the after-thinker; the historical in the deluge of Deucalion, the sieges of Thebes and of Troy. A harmony with human nature is established through the birth and marriage of the gods, and likewise by their sufferings, ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper
... of scientific or expert thinking is, in large part, concerned with devices for enabling the thinker more securely to trace the obscure and remote connections between actions and their consequences, between causes and effects. But, whether simple or complex, the essential feature of reflective activity is that it ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman
... suppose that Bodhidharma being the head of some heretical sect had to fly and followed the example of many monks in going to China. But if so, no record of his school is forthcoming from his native land, though the possibility that he was more than an individual thinker and represented some movement unknown to us cannot be denied. We might suppose too that since Nagarjuna and Aryadeva were southerners, their peculiar doctrines were coloured by Dravidian ideas. But our available documents ...
— Hinduism And Buddhism, Volume II. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... the greatest profit for science, religion, ethics, sociology, art. Darwin and Spencer, with their immense scientific experiences, were possible only in such a world-Empire as the English. The words of Tagore, the Indian thinker, can be heard to-day without great delay on the Atlantic and Pacific, as well as in India. When a genius is born in New Zealand his message reaches the world, and his glory cannot be concealed in the ...
— Serbia in Light and Darkness - With Preface by the Archbishop of Canterbury, (1916) • Nikolaj Velimirovic
... like the patient man!—and was obliged to claut his flesh with a bit of a broken crock, we might have some hope of repentance unto life. But Andrew Pringle, he's a gone dick; I never had comfort or expectation of the free-thinker, since I heard that he was infected with the blue and yellow calamity of the Edinburgh Review; in which, I am credibly told, it is set forth, that women have nae souls, but only a gut, and a gaw, and a gizzard, ...
— The Ayrshire Legatees • John Galt
... concession from Peter, who was a bit of a free-thinker, and spoke contemptuously in his ordinary conversation of that class ...
— J. S. Le Fanu's Ghostly Tales, Volume 4 • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... this apparent world with its distinction of knowing subjects and objects of knowledge?—Texts such as the following: 'One should not see (i. e. represent to oneself) the seer of seeing, one should not think the thinker of thinking' (Bri. Up. III, 4, 2); for this means that we should realise Brahman in the form of pure Seeing (knowledge), free from the distinction of seeing agents and objects of sight. Brahman is indeed accomplished through itself, but all the same it ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Ramanuja - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 48 • Trans. George Thibaut
... The Reverend Robert was a good fellow to everybody—a fairly sound-hearted, decent, handsome fellow, but not a man. To be that, one has to know things at first hand—especially work and trouble. He was a second-hand, school-made thinker. His doctrines came out of the books, but his conduct was mildly modern. He danced and smoked a little, and played bridge and golf, and made his visits in ...
— 'Charge It' - Keeping Up With Harry • Irving Bacheller
... concave and the convex of life. For the justly ordered life brings the identification of life, a continuous orderly intake and output of wholesome energy. This judgment, not of "sentimentalism" but of science, finds powerful but literally accurate expression in the saying of a great living thinker, "Life without work is guilt, work without art is brutality." Just in proportion as the truth of the latter phrase finds recognition the conditions which make "life without work" possible will disappear. Everything in human progress will be found to depend upon a progressive ...
— The Evolution of Modern Capitalism - A Study of Machine Production • John Atkinson Hobson
... distrust, mere 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 been prosperous and at an advantage ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... had no use for philosophy or speculative thought which could not be reduced to useful action. He was an eminently practical thinker. His mind was without subtlety, and he had little imagination. A life of thought for its own sake; the life of a dreamer or idealist; a life like that of Coleridge, with his paralysis of will and abnormal activity of the speculative faculty, eternally spinning metaphysical cobwebs, ...
— Four Americans - Roosevelt, Hawthorne, Emerson, Whitman • Henry A. Beers
... character itself, which has power to choose good and to be good if it will, or it is from a higher source—the grace of God, and the power of a Divine ordination. These are the only real lines of controversy. The Christian thinker may decline controversy on such a subject altogether, acknowledging that the mystery of character is in its roots beyond our ken,—that we know not, and in the nature of the case cannot know, where the Human ends and the Divine begins. In such ...
— Pascal • John Tulloch
... mystery till conjecture ends; The stream of time, known by birth-bursting bubbles; The gulf of silence, empty even of nought; Thought's high-walled maze, which the outed owner troubles Because the string's lost and the plan forgot: When I think on this and that here I stand, The thinker of these thoughts, emptily wise, Holding up to my thinking my thing-hand And looking at it with thought-alien eyes, The prayer of my wonder looketh past The universal darkness lone ...
— 35 Sonnets • Fernando Pessoa
... 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 ...
— Night and Morning, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... image of the "good man," that libel on God and the devil. Consider him well. If you had to choose a sire for a first-rate son, would you choose a consumptive Jew with the fires of eternity in his eyes, or an Iowa right-thinker with his hold full of Bibles and ...
— Damn! - A Book of Calumny • Henry Louis Mencken
... pattern shown on the Mount. If to John Fiske belongs the credit of first recognising in the scheme of evolution the significance of this mighty factor, the extension of infancy (he himself so believed and I do not think it can be questioned that he was the first to recognise it), what philosophic thinker has to a greater extent laid the world in debt? This I shall not further discuss. I am touching in these papers only upon light and exterior things, nor am I competent to deal with philosophical problems ...
— The Last Leaf - Observations, during Seventy-Five Years, of Men and Events in America - and Europe • James Kendall Hosmer
... 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 ...
— Darkwater - Voices From Within The Veil • W. E. B. Du Bois
... 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 ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... character already profound, ardent, concentrated; that poor frail creature, pretty, fair-haired, rosy, and curly,—that orphan with another orphan for his only support, touched him to the bottom of his heart; and grave thinker as he was, he set to meditating upon Jehan with an infinite compassion. He kept watch and ward over him as over something very fragile, and very worthy of care. He was more than a brother to the child; he became a ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... indeed, Michael was a trifle ashamed of his new client's friendship; it had taken many invitations to get him to Winchester and Wickham Manor; but he had gone at last, and was now returning. It has been remarked by some judicious thinker (possibly J.F. Smith) that Providence despises to employ no instrument, however humble; and it is now plain to the dullest that both Mr. Wickham and the Wallachian Hospodar were liquid lead and wedges in the ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 7 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... suppose that any considerable movement of opinion in Europe can be limited to the frontiers of one nation. Even at a time when it took half a generation for a thought to travel from one capital to another, a student or thinker in some obscure Italian, Swiss or German village was able to modify policy, to change the face of Europe and of mankind. Coming nearer to our time, it was the work of the encyclopaedists and earlier political questioners ...
— Peace Theories and the Balkan War • Norman Angell
... which affects the development of the law has, in modern England at least, often originated with some single thinker or school of thinkers. No doubt it is at times allowable to talk of a prevalent belief or opinion as "being in the air," by which expression is meant that a particular way of looking at things has ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... what we now call the pulmonary vein is connected with the lungs, and branches out in them (Fig. 1). Finding that the greater part of this system of vessels was filled with air after death, this ancient thinker very shrewdly concluded that its real business was to receive air from the lungs, and to distribute that air all through the body, so as to get rid of the grosser humours and purify the blood. That was a very natural and very ...
— William Harvey And The Discovery Of The Circulation Of The Blood • Thomas H. Huxley
... satisfies the conceit of shallow workers, and the deep stream that bubbles up of itself when it is once released, and flows freely from the convictions, the observations, and the knowledge of an earnest thinker. Diffidence is a help to some, but to Beth it was a hindrance, a source of weakness. There was no fear of her taking herself for a heaven-born genius. Her trouble had always been her doubt of the merit of anything she did. She should have been encouraged, but instead she had ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... putting on bumps of knowledge. "Rus" had one of them scientific slants of 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 ...
— Interference and Other Football Stories • Harold M. Sherman
... its own medium. That is to say, the free citizen who devotes himself to the public life of his community, sharing in the management of its affairs and winning personal honor and distinction, lives a life accompanied by reason. But the thinker, the man who devotes himself to scientific inquiry and philosophic speculation, works, so to speak, in reason, not simply by *. Even the activity of the citizen in his civic relations, in other words, retains some of the taint of practice, of external or merely instrumental ...
— Democracy and Education • John Dewey
... gives us the noble features, the extravagant 'hure'[35] of the Tennyson whom his contemporaries saw, alive, glowing with force; Watts has exalted this conception to a higher level and has portrayed the thinker whom the world will honour many centuries hence. Some will perhaps prefer the more objective treatment; and it is certain that Watts's ambition led him into difficult paths. Striving to represent the soul of his sitter, he was conscious at times that he failed—that he could not ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore
... a movement imposed by geography. While France based her action upon an English humorist's paradox, England based hers upon a French thinker's maxim: Lorsqu'on veut redoubler de force, il faut redoubles de grace. Although her diplomatic, military, and naval representatives did participate in every measure of coercion and intimidation as a matter of policy, they ...
— Greece and the Allies 1914-1922 • G. F. Abbott
... when that movement had nearly spent itself. Thomas a Kempis, as Dr. Bigg has said,[1] was only a semi-mystic. He tones down the most characteristic doctrines of Eckhart, who is the great original thinker of the German mystical school, and seems in some ways to revert to an earlier type of devotional literature. The "Imitation" may perhaps be described as an idealised picture of monastic piety, drawn at a time when the life of the cloister ...
— Light, Life, and Love • W. R. Inge
... forehead shows him to be a student and a thinker. The waving hair is brushed back to form an aureole about his face. It is the face of a dreamer in a moment of inspiration. Eagerly he writes his words of mingled poetry and prophecy. He is full of youthful enthusiasm for his work, a nature fitted for action as well ...
— Michelangelo - A Collection Of Fifteen Pictures And A Portrait Of The - Master, With Introduction And Interpretation • Estelle M. Hurll
... original remark was le style c'est de l'homme. That only proves that, like many other good sayings, it has been polished and brought to perfection by the process of attrition in numerous minds, instead of being struck out at a blow by a solitary thinker. From a purely logical point of view, Buffon may be correct; but the very essence of an aphorism is that slight exaggeration which makes it more biting whilst less rigidly accurate. According to Buffon, the style might belong to a man as an acquisition rather than to ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... sixteen had been married for les convenances to her cousin, Count Bruno von Rothenfels, a man a good deal older than herself, though not preposterously so, and whose ample possessions and old name gave social position of the highest kind. But he was a Protestant by education, a thinker by nature, ...
— The First Violin - A Novel • Jessie Fothergill
... Rose; and with reliance and hope, as if she had been speaking to a father, she explained their distress and perplexity, then stood in silence while the good doctor, a slow thinker, considered. ...
— The Pigeon Pie • Charlotte M. Yonge
... German lands. An intelligent and ardent Protestant, he attempted to elevate his miserable peasants, after the ravages of the Thirty Years' War, by a wise economic administration and universal education. With the help of a disciple of the greatest educational thinker of the period, John Amos Comenius (chapter XVII), he worked out a School Code (Schulmethode, 1642) which was the pedagogic masterpiece of the seventeenth century (R. 163). In it he provided for compulsory school attendance, and regulated the details of method, grading, and courses ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY
... Blakeney, had something of the refined beauty of his lovely sister, but the features though manly—had not the latent strength expressed in them which characterised every line of Marguerite's exquisite face. The forehead suggested a dreamer rather than a thinker, the blue-grey eyes were those of an idealist rather than ...
— El Dorado • Baroness Orczy
... glories of the English name, and added the most wonderful immortal inhabitants to the population, was made, like Scott's, by what seems a divine chance, without apparent preparation or likelihood. In our day much more importance is given to a development which the scientific thinker would fondly hope to be traceable by all the leadings of race and inheritance into an evolution purely natural and to be expected; while, on the other hand, there is nothing which appears more splendid ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant
... on moral and intellectual grounds. They regarded it as a question of law, and discussed it from the point of view of the legal relations between State and Church. It had been considered long ago from this standpoint by an original Italian thinker, Marsilius of Padua (thirteenth century), who had maintained that the Church had no power to employ physical coercion, and that if the lay authority punished heretics, the punishment was inflicted for the violation not of divine ordinances but of ...
— A History of Freedom of Thought • John Bagnell Bury
... by submission, a resting-place for the heart, and a starting-point and a goal for the loftiest flights of hope. Out of it have come the purifying of family and civic life, the culture of all noble social virtues, the sanctity of the household, and the elevation of the state. The thinker has found the largest problems raised and solved therein. The setting forth of a loftier morality, and the enthusiasm which makes the foulest nature aspire to and reach its heaven-touching heights, are found together there. To it poet ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Mark • Alexander Maclaren
... greatest mathematicians of to-day; and that we are entitled to believe that the higher intellectual and moral nature of man has been approximately stationary during the whole period of human history. This great and intrepid thinker states his view with characteristic incisiveness thus: "Many writers thoughtlessly speak of the hereditary effects of strength or skill due to any mechanical work or special art being continued generation after generation in the same ...
— The Black Man's Place in South Africa • Peter Nielsen
... Veron Crevel [13 Crevel is a character of Balzac, drawn after Dr. Veron, the proprietor of the "Constitutional" newspaper, as a type of the dissolute Parisian Philistine.] is their preacher of morality, and Granier de Cassagnac their thinker. When Guizot, at the time he was Minister, employed this Granier on an obscure sheet against the dynastic opposition, he used to praise him with the term: "C'est le roi des droles." [14 "He Is the king of the clowns."] It were a mistake ...
— The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte • Karl Marx
... worth reading, as containing some thoughtful remarks, expressed occasionally with a good deal of epigrammatic force. A few of his hymns and short meditations rise to a higher poetical level. They are referred to with much praise by Mr. G. Macdonald,[581] who adds the just remark that 'The mystical thinker will ever be found the reviver of religious poetry.' Like Law, John Byrom was a great admirer of Behmen. He learnt High Dutch for the purpose of studying him in the original, and, nowise daunted by the many dark parables he found there, paraphrased ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton
... movements of progress among us—movements that can never at any period of social history cease—are by many so seriously misunderstood. We cannot escape from our traditions. There never has been, and never can be, any "age of reason." The most ardent co-called "free-thinker," who casts aside as he imagines the authority of the Christian past, is still held by that past. If its traditions are not absolutely in his blood, they are ingrained in the texture of all the social institutions into which ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... 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 ...
— Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... goes to show that sisters in Bible times were much the same as now. Mary and Martha had a different attitude toward life. Martha was a housekeeper—she reveled in housecleaning—she had a perfect mania for sweeping and dusting. Mary was a thinker. She looked beyond the work, and saw something better and more important, something more ...
— In Times Like These • Nellie L. McClung
... between nature and man. "I am much better," he writes, "and my new and tender health is all over me like a voluptuous feeling." And whatever fame, or charm, or life-inspiring gift he has had as a speculative thinker, is the vibration of the interest he excited then, the propulsion into years which clouded his early promise of that first buoyant, irresistible, self-assertion. So great is even the indirect power of a sincere effort towards the ideal life, of even a temporary ...
— Appreciations, with an Essay on Style • Walter Horatio Pater
... 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 vast majority of cases upon the astral plane also; but it may not be quite so generally known that if a man thinks strongly of himself as present at any given place, the form assumed by that particular thought will be a likeness of the thinker himself, which will appear ...
— Clairvoyance • Charles Webster Leadbeater
... most interesting review of John Foster's life. * * * Foster was a very deep thinker. He thought the boundary of the knowable wider than the generality do. This may be; but I fancy he does not always admit sufficient weight in his arguments to the manifest relations and actings of the unknown upon the known. He was Calvinistic; this, joined to a strong view of the moral perfection ...
— A Brief Memoir with Portions of the Diary, Letters, and Other Remains, - of Eliza Southall, Late of Birmingham, England • Eliza Southall
... series of short puffs of steam-like appearance. Again, it will twist along like an eel or snake. Another time it will twist its way like a corkscrew. At other times it will appear as a bomb, or series of bombs projected from the aura of the thinker. Sometimes, as in the case of a vigorous thinker or speaker, these thought-form bombs will be seen to explode when they reach the aura of the person addressed or thought of. Other forms appear like nebulous things resembling an octopus, ...
— Clairvoyance and Occult Powers • Swami Panchadasi
... thoughts followed the thinker far inland; whereas in most other parts of the island, at five miles from the ocean, he has all but forgotten the existence of such an element as salt water. The great Greenland trade of the coasting towns was the main and primary cause of this, no doubt. But there ...
— Sylvia's Lovers, Vol. I • Elizabeth Gaskell
... Gray—a deep thinker with a mind of comprehensive grasp—was travelling in the North of England when he saw a train of coal-wagons drawn by steam along a colliery tramroad. "Why," he questioned the engineer, "are not these tramroads laid down all over England, so as ...
— Railway Adventures and Anecdotes - extending over more than fifty years • Various
... touched by Mrs Trumbler's way of looking at the world; he did think—and confessed it to Janie—that there was something very remarkable in the way Harry Tristram had been cleared from his path. He was in no sense an advanced thinker, and people in love are apt to believe in what are called interpositions. Further, he was primitive in his ideas; he had won the lady, and that seemed to him enough. It was enough, if he could keep her; and in these days that really depends ...
— Tristram of Blent - An Episode in the Story of an Ancient House • Anthony Hope
... Flanders, but the patience of the world. With such a flood of loud jingling appurtenances does he lumber along, prosecuting his conquests in Flanders; wonderful to behold. So nevertheless it was and had been: to some solitary thinker it might seem strange; but even to ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... depends the success of the essayist. Montaigne said the most familiar things in the finest way. Goldsmith could not be termed a thinker; but everything he touched he brightened, as after a month of dry weather, the shower brightens the dusty shrubbery of a suburban villa. The world is not so much in need of new thoughts as that when thought grows old and worn with usage ...
— Dreamthorp - A Book of Essays Written in the Country • Alexander Smith
... California forests black-and-silver compositions of filmy fluttering light and solid bedded shade. I am thinking also of that patch of pre-historic cypresses in Monterey. These differ from the straight, symmetrical classic redwoods as Rodin's "Thinker" differs from the Apollo. Monstrous, contorted shapes—those Monterey cypresses look like creatures born underground, who, at the price of almost unbearable torture, have torn through the earth's crust, ...
— The Native Son • Inez Haynes Irwin
... rapid thinker. He had clean forgotten his headache. This was adventure with a capital letter. There was still something of romance in the world which his jaded ...
— The Phantom Lover • Ruby M. Ayres
... his own character and temperament in such vivid colours, that scarcely a touch need be added to the portrait. He was an original thinker, a vigorous writer, a keen observer, but from his youth up a disproportion was evident in the structure of his mind, that pointed only too clearly to insanity. His judgment, as Mr. Taylor observes, was essentially ...
— Little Memoirs of the Nineteenth Century • George Paston
... from the army, and divided his interest between politics and speculation. He employed his leisure moments in writing very indifferent plays, which, although published under a nom de guerre (St. Remy), he depended upon the servility of the Parisian press to carry through. He was not a deep thinker, nor was his intellectual horizon a broad one; but his views were liberal, his shallow mind was brilliant and versatile, and to the graceful frivolity of a man of the world he united a taste for the serious financial and political problems ...
— Maximilian in Mexico - A Woman's Reminiscences of the French Intervention 1862-1867 • Sara Yorke Stevenson
... society, were assembled in the cathedral. It was known that the governor's wife was to make her appearance there for the first time since her arrival amongst us. I must mention that there were already rumours that she was a free-thinker, and a follower of "the new principles." All the ladies were also aware that she would be dressed with magnificence and extraordinary elegance. And so the costumes of our ladies were elaborate and ...
— The Possessed - or, The Devils • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... with a depth of expression which moved the whole company, even though that areopagus of judges were digesting a good dinner, as to which they had not restrained themselves. Emile Blondet, who was more of a political thinker than a man of imagination, was completely carried away by his enthusiasm. As the song ended, Felicien Vernou and Lousteau went up to Sir Francis Drake and reproached him for wishing to take such a treasure from France, at the same time flattering him ...
— The Deputy of Arcis • Honore de Balzac
... I've always been fond of your mother." She paused a moment, absently twisting the strings of her bonnet, then twitched it from her head with a quick movement and looked at him squarely in the bright light. "Claude, you haven't really become a free-thinker, ...
— One of Ours • Willa Cather
... making it a thing of national interest, and of freeing it from a false philosophy. To find out by incessant and unwearying search what the world really was, and not to make known facts fit in with the ideas of some thinker on what the world ought to be, this we found to be the main difference between Cosmas or even Ptolemy and any true leader of discovery. For a real advance of knowledge, fancy must follow experiment, and no merely hypothetical system or Universe as shewn ...
— Prince Henry the Navigator, the Hero of Portugal and of Modern Discovery, 1394-1460 A.D. • C. Raymond Beazley
... that the gods exist and that they exercise providence. Here we are reminded of Locke's declaration: "'Tis as certain there's a God as that the opposite angles made by the intersection of two straight lines are equal." The Stoics indeed had great affinities with that thinker or rather he with them. The Stoic account of the manner in which the mind arrives at its ideas might almost be taken from the first book of Locke's Essay. As many as nine ways are enumerated of which the first corresponds ...
— A Little Book of Stoicism • St George Stock
... 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, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 360, October 1845 • Various
... better 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 ...
— Lectures on the English Poets - Delivered at the Surrey Institution • William Hazlitt
... of affairs, this sudden stoppage of the wheels of industry, this unforeseen and wide spread of the conditions of war portend? Emerson has said: "When a great thinker comes into the world all things are at risk." There is potency in this, and also in a variation of Emerson's text which we shall venture to make: "When a great war comes upon the world all things are at risk." Everything which we have looked upon as fixed and stable quakes as if ...
— A History of The Nations and Empires Involved and a Study - of the Events Culminating in The Great Conflict • Logan Marshall
... inspiration in the most modern of them, just as we still do in Plato's immortal Republic. But in this, as in other matters, we must exercise a little intelligence. We must not confuse the brilliant excursion of some solitary thinker with the well-grounded proposals of those who are concerned with the sober possibilities of actual life in our own time. People who are incapable of exercising a little shrewd commonsense in the ...
— Little Essays of Love and Virtue • Havelock Ellis
... succeeded and Socrates failed. They went home to drink wine and feast, while Socrates went to the jail to drink a cup of poison. But who succeeded? The judges whose names are written low down and bespattered with dirt—or Socrates, whose name fills the sky and who has become the thinker for ...
— The Blot on the Kaiser's 'Scutcheon • Newell Dwight Hillis
... that Eugenie was no follower of things received. She had been a friend of Renan and of Taine in her French days; and he, who was a Gallic with a leaning to the Anglican Church, had sometimes guessed with discomfort that Eugenie was in truth what his Low Church wife called a 'free-thinker.' She never spoke of her opinions, directly, even to him. But the books she ordered from Paris, or Germany, and every now and then the things she let fall about them, were enough for any shrewd observer. It was here too, perhaps, that she and Arthur were in closest sympathy; and every one ...
— Fenwick's Career • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... 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
... in the role of thinker was unexpected. But she answered, honestly as always, "I believe she has. Nature often makes use of unworthy vessels to accomplish her own ends—poor little vessels! Mag is waste, perhaps. Her child will not be waste.—I'll see to that. So the ...
— Kildares of Storm • Eleanor Mercein Kelly
... 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: ...
— Contemporary Russian Novelists • Serge Persky
... 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 ...
— Miss Mapp • Edward Frederic Benson
... that is already there, and that there would be a grand peace! (Laughter). But, not to trifle with it, woman is excitable. Woman is yet to be educated. Woman is yet to experience the reactionary influence of being a public legislator and thinker. And let her sphere be extended beyond the family and the school, so that she should be interested in, and actively engaged in, promoting the welfare of the whole community, and in the course of three generations ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... been—is expressive of its doer's attitude, of his way of feeling and thinking. But what determines a man's way of thinking except his essential thoughts concerning the relationship between God and the world, the visible and the invisible? Every serious thinker, therefore, must recognize the importance of faith in the furtherance of science, the progress of nations and the life of the state. It is a fearful delusion that man can be immoral, an unbeliever, even an enemy of the cross of Christ, and yet a furtherer ...
— Hymns and Hymnwriters of Denmark • Jens Christian Aaberg
... 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 ...
— An Autobiography • Catherine Helen Spence
... mind of Mendelssohn enlarged in literary intercourse: he became a great and original thinker in many beautiful speculations in moral and critical philosophy; while he had gradually been creating a style which the critics of Germany have declared to be their first luminous model of precision and elegance. Thus a Hebrew vagrant, first perplexed in the voluminous labyrinth of Judaical ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... invisible currents one human brain may transmit its ideas to other human brains with the same rapidity as a thought promulgated by visible means. And as thought is imperishable—as it leaves its stamp behind it in the natural world even when the thinker has passed out of this world—so the thought of the living may have power to rouse up and revive the thoughts of the dead—such as those thoughts were in life—though the thought of the living cannot reach the thoughts which the dead now ...
— The Haunters & The Haunted - Ghost Stories And Tales Of The Supernatural • Various
... 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 ...
— Landmarks in French Literature • G. Lytton Strachey
... thinker, Goethe, claimed that three kinds of reverence should be taught to youth,—for superiors, for equals, and forinferiors. This was an advance over the old ideas; but, in a republic like ours, reverence is not up and down; it is not measured by class distinctions,—it is a spirit, to be ...
— The True Citizen, How To Become One • W. F. Markwick, D. D. and W. A. Smith, A. B.
... one of the most valuable volumes published within recent years. The admirable volume should stand upon the shelf of every soldier, and of every thinker upon Imperial things.'—Army and ...
— Cavalry in Future Wars • Frederick von Bernhardi
... call death transform a human being? It is merely the loss of one part of the mechanism of consciousness. The soul, the thinker, has lost connection with the physical world because the physical body has ceased to exist. The mental body and the astral body remain and they enable him to think and feel. But he can not think more than he knows, nor feel what he has not evolved. All that has happened ...
— Elementary Theosophy • L. W. Rogers
... both the one and the other at the same glance, in this case the knowing of the conclusion would not be caused by understanding the premisses, since a thing cannot be its own cause; and yet, it would be true that the thinker would understand the premisses to be the cause of the conclusion. It is the same with the will, with respect to which the end stands in the same relation to the means to the end, as do the premisses to the conclusion with ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I (Prima Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... Hardy, 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
... Maximilian Harden, the keenest thinker of the defeated Germans said: "Only one conqueror's work will ...
— Woodrow Wilson's Administration and Achievements • Frank B. Lord and James William Bryan
... old settled countries may appear to a casual thinker a dreadful calamity; and yet it is but the natural means employed by Providence to force the poorer classes, by the strong law of necessity, to emigrate and spread themselves over the earth, in order to bring into cultivation ...
— Life in the Clearings versus the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... justice of resistance appealed immediately to the mind of Flaccus, whose combative instincts found their natural satisfaction in the prospect of an interchange of blows. The finer and more complex spirit of Gracchus issued in a more uncertain mood. The bane of the thinker and the patriot was upon him. Was a man who had led the State to fight against it, and the rule of reason to be exchanged for the base arbitrament of the sword? None knew the emotions with which he turned from the ...
— A History of Rome, Vol 1 - During the late Republic and early Principate • A H.J. Greenidge
... know, who are reared d'emblee in theories of atheism, scepticism, and materialism. In former days," said Golenishtchev, not observing, or not willing to observe, that both Anna and Vronsky wanted to speak, "in former days the free-thinker was a man who had been brought up in ideas of religion, law, and morality, and only through conflict and struggle came to free-thought; but now there has sprung up a new type of born free-thinkers who grow up without ...
— Anna Karenina • Leo Tolstoy
... are not monists, and that the supposed inseparable connection between Mysticism and Monism is being thrown overboard. Even the older mystics, when wrestling with the problem of evil, were dualists in their own despite. Of the moderns, so representative a thinker as Lotze suggested that Reality may run up, not into one solitary peak, but into a mountain chain. Hoeffding contends that we have not yet gained the right to career rough-shod over the antinomies of existence. James, a typical modern mystic, was an ...
— Nature Mysticism • J. Edward Mercer
... girl may not be in reality better educated than her British sister, nor a more profound thinker; but her mind is indisputably more agile and elastic. In fact, a slow-going Britisher has to go through a regular course of training before he can follow the rapid transitions of her train of associations. She has the happiest faculty in getting at another's point of view and in putting herself ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... wind-tanned, long-striding...." Don Alonso put a finger to his high yellow forehead. "There is in Castile a potential beauty, my friend, something humane, tolerant, vivid, robust.... I don't say it is in me. My only merit lies in recognizing it, formulating it, for I am no more than a thinker.... But the day will come when in this gruff land we shall have ...
— Rosinante to the Road Again • John Dos Passos
... associates it with Alpine regions. Just so must there be something in a man which determines his birth in a certain environment. Causes belonging to the physical world alone are not sufficient to account for this. To a more profound thinker such an explanation appears in somewhat the same light as when one has dealt another a blow, the motive for which is not attributed to the feelings of the one but is to be explained by the physical mechanism of ...
— An Outline of Occult Science • Rudolf Steiner
... decapitated and Agrippina gone, of the imperial house there remained but Antonia and himself. The latter he invited to marry him; she declined. He invited her to die. He was then alone, the last of his race. Monsters never engender. A thinker who passed that way thought him right to have killed his mother; her crime was ...
— Imperial Purple • Edgar Saltus
... says a great thinker (Degerando, "Du Perfectionment Moral," chapter ix., "On the Difficulties we encounter in Self-Study")—"if one concentrates reflection too much on one's self, one ends by no longer seeing anything, or seeing only what one wishes. By the very act, as it were, ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... in his chair and folded his fat hands in undisguised satisfaction. 'Now, you are a thinker of exceptional penetration,' he broke out. 'Do you know, Miss Cayley, I have tried to make that point clear to the War Office, and the Prime Minister, and many leading financiers in the City of London, and I can't get them to see it. They have no heads, those people. ...
— Miss Cayley's Adventures • Grant Allen
... ladies of eighteen stone, not your old ladies I mean, but ours. We've everything you have, I am revealing one of our secrets out of friendship for you; though it's forbidden. This legend is about Paradise. There was, they say, here on earth a thinker and philosopher. He rejected everything, 'laws, conscience, faith,' and, above all, the future life. He died; he expected to go straight to darkness and death and he found a future life before him. He was astounded and indignant. 'This is against my principles!' he said. ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... artist of Italy, renowned as painter, architect, military engineer; praised as a poet; befriended with the best and greatest of his contemporaries; recognised as unique, not only in the art of sculpture. If he felt some pride of race, we cannot blame the plain-liver and high-thinker, who, robbing himself of luxuries and necessaries even, enabled his kinsmen to maintain their rank among folk gently born and ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... border, 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 loving husband, ...
— Pocket Island - A Story of Country Life in New England • Charles Clark Munn
... created by a strong definite thought, but simply with the result produced by the stream of half-conscious, involuntary thoughts which the majority of mankind allow to flow idly through their brains, so that the intelligence is obviously not derived from the mind of the thinker; and we certainly cannot credit the elemental essence itself, which belongs to a kingdom further from individualization even than the mineral, with any sort of awakening of the manasic quality. Yet it does possess a marvellous adaptability which often seems to come very near it, and it is no doubt ...
— The Astral Plane - Its Scenery, Inhabitants and Phenomena • C. W. Leadbeater |
