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More "Thinker" Quotes from Famous Books



... influence is from the very start of that high sort in which he that takes becomes co-thinker with him that gives, Shakspere's absorption of Montaigne being as vital as Montaigne's own assimilation of the thought of his classics. The process is one not of surface reflection, but of kindling by contact; and we seem to see even the vibration of the style passing from one intelligence ...
— Montaigne and Shakspere • John M. Robertson

... a freshness and singleness of purpose about him, which, with the charm of his handsome young face and the genial simplicity of his manners, made him everywhere a favorite, and carried him into circles where a graver man and a deeper thinker could not find entrance; but let twenty years pass by, and Felix, she said to herself, would be nothing but a commonplace country clergyman, looking after his glebe lands and riding lazily about his parish, talking with old women and consulting ...
— Cobwebs and Cables • Hesba Stretton

... the little soliloquizing Creature, "and what It fills, It is. What It thinks, that It utters; and what It utters, that It hears; and It itself is Thinker, Utterer, Hearer, Thought, Word, Audition; it is the One, and yet the All in All. Ah, the happiness, ...
— Flatland • Edwin A. Abbott

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

... I are. It is all a mistake. We have lost nothing that they had which was worth the keeping; and we have gained a great deal which they had not. We have not to compare our relation to Christ with theirs, as we might do our relation to some great thinker or poet, with that of his contemporaries, but we have Christ in a better form, if I may so speak; and we, on whom the ends of the world are come, may have a deeper and a fuller and a closer intimacy ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: St. John Chaps. XV to XXI • Alexander Maclaren

... The inspired thinker sends out a thought to the world, it is taken up and passed through other brains, it becomes distorted or is recognized by them in its integrity according to the caliber of mind, or the idiosyncrasies of the one representing it. A thought ...
— Insights and Heresies Pertaining to the Evolution of the Soul • Anna Bishop Scofield

... such a science as psychometry—"the dawn of a new civilization," as it is considered by its adepts and its friends,—is alone an imperative demand for a journal to assist the diffusion and illustration of a science, which no honorable and logical thinker, after accepting its well-established facts, can regard as anything less than the beginning of an intellectual revolution, the magnitude of which is astounding to a conservative mind; for the revolutionary science of the last forty years has been concealed from the conservative majority, ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, February 1887 - Volume 1, Number 1 • Various

... while the mayor of Cambridge holds his office subject 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 the ...
— Civil Government in the United States Considered with - Some Reference to Its Origins • John Fiske

... So much so that in the last of the series a soured sportsman on one of the benches near the roof began in satirical mood to whistle the "Merry Widow Waltz." It was here that the red-jerseyed thinker for the first and last time came out of his meditative trance. He leaned over the ropes, ...
— Psmith, Journalist • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse

... wearing sandals and simple raiment, a raw tomato held firmly in his right hand, and says, "The affections of family and country alike are hindrances to the fuller development of human love;" but the plain thinker will only answer him, with a wonder not untinged with admiration, "What a great deal of trouble you must have taken in order to feel like that." High living will reject the tomato. Plain thinking will equally decisively reject the idea of the invariable sinfulness ...
— Heretics • Gilbert K. Chesterton

... the eyes, we should be able to see distinctly that strange thing that each one individual of the human race corresponds to some one of the species of the animal creation; and we could easily recognize this truth, hardly perceived by the thinker, that from the oyster to the eagle, from the pig to the tiger, all animals exist in man, and that each one of them is in a man. Sometimes even several of ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo

... telling;—and it is also apparent that this is his most vulnerable point as novelist. We get more from him just because he shoots beyond the fiction target. He is that rare thing in English novel-making, a notable thinker. Of all nineteenth century novelists he leads for intellectual stimulation. With fifty faults of manner and matter, irritating, even outrageous in his eccentricities, he can at his best startle with a brilliance that is alone of its kind. It is because ...
— Masters of the English Novel - A Study Of Principles And Personalities • Richard Burton

... justify the doctrine of karma. Whatever be that which makes consciousness, its relation to all the past and to all the future is unquestionable. Nor can the doctrine of Nirvana ever cease to command the profound respect of the impartial thinker. Science has found evidence that known substance is not less a product of evolution than mind,—that all our so-called "elements" have been evolved out of "one primary undifferentiated form of matter." And this evidence is startlingly suggestive ...
— Kokoro - Japanese Inner Life Hints • Lafcadio Hearn

... regarded as his daughter. He called her his Fannikin; and she in return called him her dear Daddy. In truth, he seems to have done much more than her real parents for the development of her intellect; for though he was a bad poet, he was a scholar, a thinker, and an excellent counsellor. He was particularly fond of the concerts in Poland Street. They had, indeed, been commenced at his suggestion, and when he visited London he constantly attended them. But when he grew old, and when ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... thinker," he said, "you are rather a pusillanimous jackass. A man of your convictions to shy at a shadow! Fie, sir, fie! What if the room were empty? The place was full enough of traps to permit ...
— At a Winter's Fire • Bernard Edward J. Capes

... leader of his people, not a patent-insides recorder of social functions, but a vigorous and independent thinker and writer. The subscribers to the newspaper published in the section were higher in proportion to population than in the State of New York and not greatly inferior to those of New England, although such eastern papers as the New York Tribune had an extensive circulation throughout ...
— The Frontier in American History • Frederick Jackson Turner

... came of a distinguished family. Her father, Dr. Richard Whately, for many years Archbishop of Dublin, was one of the most remarkable and prominent men of the first half of the nineteenth century, a voluminous writer, a strenuous thinker, and a statesmanlike ecclesiastic. Her mother, Elizabeth, daughter of Mr. W. Pope of Uxbridge, was, says Miss E.J. Whately, a woman of "grace and dignity of character, delicacy of mind and sensitive refinement, which ...
— Excellent Women • Various

... a profound thinker and a secret reader of sensational detective stories, had at one time made a report against John Minute for some technical offense, and had made it in fear and trembling, expecting his sergeant promptly to squash this ...
— The Man Who Knew • Edgar Wallace

... 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 ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman

... of burden, Ursus preferred Homo to a donkey. He would have felt repugnance to having his hut drawn by an ass; he thought too highly of the ass for that. Moreover he had observed that the ass, a four-legged thinker little understood by men, has a habit of cocking his ears uneasily when philosophers talk nonsense. In life the ass is a third person between our thoughts and ourselves, and acts as a restraint. As a friend, Ursus preferred ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo

... I come to the end of my letter I may repent of my temerity and unsay my charge. For are not all our circlets of will as so many little eddies rounded in by the great Circle of Necessity, and could the Truth-speaker, perhaps now the best Thinker of the Saxon race, have written otherwise? And must not we say that Drunkenness is a virtue rather than that ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, - 1834-1872, Vol. I • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson

... must leave Flaubert, the thinker. He never passes beyond that point in his vision of reconstruction: a "legitimate aristocracy" established in contempt of the average man—with the Academy of ...
— The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters • George Sand, Gustave Flaubert

... imitate Alfieri, who, although it is the prevailing fashion to admire him, is too bold and manly a thinker to be tolerated on the stage. They have produced some single pieces of merit, but the principles of tragic art which Alfieri followed are altogether false, and in the bawling and heartless declamation of their actors, this tragic poetry, ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black

... began life as a sailor. After a few years came the desperate poverty of his early married life in California, as here described. His work as a printer led to casual employment as a journalist. This was the first step in his subsequently life-long career as an independent thinker, writer, and speaker. ...
— Stories of Achievement, Volume IV (of 6) - Authors and Journalists • Various

... countries and two courses. Ireland had cast him out and England would none of him. He hated Catholicism and Protestantism alike, and Protestants and Catholics alike disowned him. To every Church and every sect he was a free thinker, destitute of all religion. Yet few men were more religious. His enemies called him a turner and a twister; yet on any one of his lines no man ever ...
— The Tree of Heaven • May Sinclair

... whole tragedy and to justify its great victim is to feel something of the strain which comes to every thinker and fighter who, like Lassalle, writes and speaks persistently to vast audiences, often against great odds, and always with the prospect of a prison before him. That his nerves were utterly unstrung, that he ...
— Immortal Memories • Clement Shorter

... shop opposite to mine. This same John Titcomb, my very good friend, is a character peculiar to Yankeedom. He is part owner and landlord of the house I rent, and connected by birth with all the best families in town; a man of real intelligence, and good education, a great reader, and quite a thinker. Being of an ingenious turn he does painting, gilding, staining, upholstery jobs, varnishing, all in addition to his primary trade of carpentry. But he is a man studious of ease, and fully possessed with the idea that man wants but ...
— The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe • Charles Edward Stowe

... and rather sad expression occupied for a moment the mobile face. He interested Dick greatly. He seemed to him scholar and thinker as well as soldier. He and Warner long afterward attended the inauguration of this man as President of the ...
— The Guns of Shiloh • Joseph A. Altsheler

... the varnish of philosophical unbelief or finite reasoning. "In my opinion," says one of the characters in the Dialogue, (to be identified as the author,) "profound minds are the most likely to think lightly of the resources of human reason; and it is the pert superficial thinker who is generally strongest in every kind of unbelief. The deep philosopher sees changes of causes and effects, so wonderfully and strangely linked together, that he is usually the last person to decide upon the impossibility ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction—Volume 13 - Index to Vol. 13 • Various

... all the time —most always about religion, because Dan'l's a Dunker Baptist and Jinny's a shouting Methodist, and Jinny believes in special Providences and Dan'l don't, because he thinks he's a kind of a free-thinker—and they play and sing plantation hymns together, and talk and chatter just eternally and forever, and are sincerely fond of each other and think the world of Mulberry, and he puts up patiently with ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... overseer for the caravan, who is mounted on a good riding-donkey, and wearing a canoe-like tepee and sea-boots; and lastly, on, the splendid bay horse presented to me by Mr. Goodhue, myself, called Bana Mkuba, "the "big master," by my people—the vanguard, the reporter, the thinker, ...
— How I Found Livingstone • Sir Henry M. Stanley

... Aeschylus, the nascent democracy were his ideal and he was evidently put out by the ending of the period of "Periclean calm." He then has no solution for the problems in front of him. But it might be asked whether a dramatist's business is not rather to leave solutions to the thinker, concerning himself only with mirroring men's natures. With singular courage and at no small personal risk this man attacked the great ones of his day, scourging their hypocrisies and exposing the real tendencies ...
— Authors of Greece • T. W. Lumb

... to speak out will be quickly 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 ...
— Little Journeys To The Homes Of Great Teachers • Elbert Hubbard

... writer" to Carlyle is merely absurd—is one of those caprices which somebody once told us are the eternal foes of art—he is not unjust in denying that title to Emerson. But after justifying his policy of not "cracking up" by still further denying his subject the title of a great philosophic thinker, he proceeds to find a pedestal for him at last as a friend and leader of those who would "live in the spirit." With such a judgment one has no fault to find, because it must be in all cases an almost purely personal one. To some Gautier, with his ...
— Matthew Arnold • George Saintsbury

... that the apprentice system instills thoroughness. This may be true; but it also does another thing: It makes the man a mere machine. The true workman is a thinker. He is ever on the alert to find easier, quicker and more efficient means ...
— Practical Mechanics for Boys • J. S. Zerbe

... years of age. He was the head of the Sukarchakia misl, which had its headquarters at Gujranwala. Mean in appearance, his face marked and one eye closed by the ravages of smallpox, he was the one man of genius the Jat tribe has produced. A splendid horseman, a bold leader, a cool thinker untroubled with scruples, an unerring judge of character, he was bound to rise in such times. He set himself to put down every Sikh rival and to profit by the waning of the Durani power to make himself master of their possessions in the Panjab. Pluck, patience, and ...
— The Panjab, North-West Frontier Province, and Kashmir • Sir James McCrone Douie

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

... the mind. All his paradoxes and false analogies and inconsistencies come from this craving for a forceful expression. He apparently brought to bear all the skill he possessed of this kind on all occasions. One must regard him, not as a great thinker, nor as a disinterested seeker after the truth, but as a master in the art of vigorous and picturesque expression. To startle, to wake up, to communicate to his reader a little wholesome shock, is his aim. Not the novelty ...
— The Last Harvest • John Burroughs

... is ace high, Mac. Fancy costumes and masks. Y'u can rent the costumes over to Slauson's for three per. Texas, he's going to call the dances. Music from Gimlet Butte. Y'u want to get it tucked away in your thinker that this dance ain't on the order of culls. No, ...
— Wyoming, a Story of the Outdoor West • William MacLeod Raine

... profound student of history, somewhat dull as a narrator, but of unerring historic judgment. I suppose he would be placed by all our writers of history with great unanimity at the head of American historic investigators. James Walker was a great preacher and a profound thinker. In the judgment of his hearers, young and old, he was probably deemed nearly or quite the foremost ...
— Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2 • George Hoar

... I perceive," said Miss Loring, with a smile, "and must have been a thinker, in some degree, to ...
— The Hand But Not the Heart - or, The Life-Trials of Jessie Loring • T. S. Arthur

... I am even—permit me to say—a thinker, though to be sure, this name nowadays seems to be the monopoly of hawkers of revolutionary wares, the slaves of some French or German thought—devil knows what foreign notions. But I am not an intellectual mongrel. I think like a Russian. I think faithfully—and ...
— Under Western Eyes • Joseph Conrad

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

... patient, often commonplace endeavour; and the true lesson of scientific history lies in the close connection which it discloses between the most brilliant developments of knowledge and the faithful accomplishment of his daily task by each individual thinker and worker. ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke

... quick thinker, but he had never thought more quickly in his life. This young fellow had beaten him. There was no doubt of it. He might have principles, but he declined to let his principles hamper him. There was something about ...
— Stories of a Western Town • Octave Thanet

... and successful career as a writer and diplomatist would seem to be evidence of the presence of qualities of a high order, and yet no one who was near him accepted that opinion. His conversation was not instructive, certainly not in later years, nor was he an original thinker upon any subject. He was an enthusiast in politics in early and middle life, and while his mental faculties remained unimpaired his interest in political movements was great—and usually it was in sympathy with the Democratic Party. He was an adhesive man in politics, ...
— Reminiscences of Sixty Years in Public Affairs, Vol. 2 • George S. Boutwell

... a brilliant man. He was neither a thinker, like Seward, nor an orator, like Granger; but he was wise, wealthy, and eminently respectable, with enough of the statesman in him to be able to accept established facts and not to argue with the inexorable. Years before, he had founded the Albany Argus, editing ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander

... of Watts. Again Millais 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 ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore

... is Ethel! They both just love music, and they kept me whistling until I was tired. And how they do love stories! I 'magined for them till my thinker ran empty. I couldn't help wishing I was you, so's I could tell them all the beau-ti-ful fancies you make up as you lie here under the trees day in and day out. I told 'em about you and pictured this garden for 'em, and the flowers which Hicks cuts by the bushel-basket, ...
— The Lilac Lady • Ruth Alberta Brown

... at Paisley in the year 1788. His progenitors are said to have been remarkable for their acquaintance with the arts, and relish for elegant literature. His eldest brother, the late Dr Carlile of Dublin attained much eminence as a profound thinker and an accomplished theologian. Having received a liberal education, first at the grammar-school of Paisley, and afterwards in the University of Glasgow, the subject of this sketch settled as a ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various

... a modern thinker who does not agree that government, organized authority, or the State, is necessary ONLY to maintain or protect property and monopoly. It has proven efficient in that ...
— Anarchism and Other Essays • Emma Goldman

... inside the right foul line, pulling the first baseman away back almost to right field. Princeman stood gaping at that bingle in paralyzed dismay; but the batsman, who was a slow runner and slow thinker, stood a fatal second to see whether the ball was fair or foul. Almost at the crack of the bat Sam Turner started, raced down to first, caught the right fielder's throw and stepped on the stone, one handsome stride ahead of the runner! Then, as Blackrock, speechless ...
— The Early Bird - A Business Man's Love Story • George Randolph Chester

... was again silent, and there was a deeper air of reflection on his face than almost seemed natural to it, for he looked more of a soldier than a thinker. ...
— Sunrise • William Black

... Physiology are both good things. But water is one thing to drink, and another to be drowned in. In like manner, though Physiology is a large and noble science and a yet larger symbol, furnishing analogies to the thinker quite as often as uses to the medical doctor, nevertheless, Physiology in the form of a deluge, overflowing, swamping, drowning almost everything else, and leaving only Body, the sole ark, afloat,—this ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 79, May, 1864 • Various

... almost the first classically arranged one in the eighteenth century: and it must be confessed that the collection was both curious and valuable. Bridges was succeeded by ANTHONY COLLINS,[379] the Free Thinker; a character equally strange and unenviable. Book-fanciers now and then bid a few shillings, for a copy of the catalogue of his library; and some sly free-thinkers, of modern date, are not backward in shewing ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin

... Mr. Raymount's utterance may perhaps seem obscure to a better thinker. He concluded merely that his host was talking for talk's sake, so talking rubbish. The girl came in again, and the conversation dropped. Mr. Raymount went to his writing, Vavasor toward the piano. Willing to please ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald

... 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 times out of ...
— Jess • H. Rider Haggard

... the cow, however, nor how poor our ability to milk, there is still the milkman—we can read what others have seen and felt and thought. Often, indeed, such records will kindle within us that pre-essential and vital spark, the desire to be a thinker. ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein

... there shall come a form of union so much more close, intimate, all-pervading, and all-encircling, as that the present union with Him by faith, precious as it is, shall be, as the Apostle calls it in our context, 'absence from the Lord.' 'We have to be discharged,' says an old thinker, 'of a great deal of what we call body, and then we shall be more truly ourselves,' and more truly united to Him who, if we are Christian people at all, is the self of ourselves and the life of our lives. No man knows how close he can nestle to the bosom of Christ when the film of flesh ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: Romans Corinthians (To II Corinthians, Chap. V) • Alexander Maclaren

... The hearer went away with its expressive inflections and cadences still sounding in his ears. But his voice was not his only forte. He had a mind as full of sanctified wit and quick perception as an egg is full of food. A clear thinker, a cogent reasoner, and I may add, full of love and the Holy Ghost, it is not a matter of wonder that he excelled. What he might have achieved had he lived to an advanced age, God only knows. His death ...
— Life and Labors of Elder John Kline, the Martyr Missionary - Collated from his Diary by Benjamin Funk • John Kline

... for liberty." For the next twenty years he threw himself into the contest, and poured forth a succession of tracts, in English and Latin, upon the various public questions at issue. As a political thinker, Milton had what Bacon calls "the humor of a scholar." In a country of endowed grammar schools and universities hardly emerged from a mediaeval discipline and curriculum, he wanted to set up Greek gymnasia ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers

... increased with The Patriot's circulation), he deemed it advisable to moderate some of the more blatant features, on the same principle which had induced him to reform the Veridian lumber mill abuses, lest they be brought up to his political detriment later. A long-distance thinker, Tertius Marrineal. ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams

... the actual things heard, the actual facts mastered, is the lecture-system valuable to the student, as for the method of study which he derives from it. He is no longer like an automaton, a school-boy guided by his teacher and text-book, but is spoken to as an independent thinker. Authorities are quoted, which he may consult at his leisure. No subject is exhausted,—it is only touched upon. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 41, March, 1861 • Various

... a misty grandiose picture of the universe; but gradually they felt the want of some logical basis for their speculations, and Hegel became their favourite. Gallantly they struggled with the uncouth terminology and epigrammatic paradoxes of the great thinker, and strove to force their way through the intricate mazes of his logical formulae. With the ardour of neophytes they looked at every phenomenon—even the most trivial incident of common life—from the philosophical point of view, talked day and night about principles, ideas, subjectivity, ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace

... said, was a slow thinker, and the junior partner as a mathematical master was a novel and strange idea which she did not take in at once. 'I don't understand. How can Mr. Jones teach you algebra?' ...
— A City Schoolgirl - And Her Friends • May Baldwin

... happens that no writer names more authors, except Prynne,[279] than the learned Selden. La Mothe le Vayer's curious works consist of fifteen volumes; he is among the greatest quoters. Whoever turns them over will perceive that he is an original thinker, and a great wit; his style, indeed, is meagre, which, as much as his quotations, may have proved fatal to him. But in both these cases it is evident that even quoters who have abused the privilege of quotation are not necessarily writers of a ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli

... assassin's look, my dear little friend; but he is a great thinker. That is the sort of beau I recommend you to get ...
— The Youth of Jefferson - A Chronicle of College Scrapes at Williamsburg, in Virginia, A.D. 1764 • Anonymous

... Halberstadt, John: "It is not a thinker like Boehme, who will compensate us for the lost summer of our life; but a magician like John of Halberstadt, who can, at any moment, ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson

... 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 ...
— Second Sight - A study of Natural and Induced Clairvoyance • Sepharial

... answered the abbot—"Bernard of Clairvaux, the greatest man, the greatest thinker, the greatest preacher, and the greatest saint of ...
— Via Crucis • F. Marion Crawford

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

... 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,' ...
— Philebus • Plato

... that a thinker who could so clearly discern the secret of the great spiritual movements of human history, should fail to perceive that the same law governs and explains all the minor movements in which wide communities have been suddenly agitated ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 8: France in the Eighteenth Century • John Morley

... the majesty of a whole race, could be thus revived in a man, and my stupefaction increased after an hour's conversation. I could quite understand why such a Colossus had not wished for the Countess as his Egeria; she was a mere silly child to have dreamt of acting such a part to such a thinker. She had not felt the profoundness of that horrible philosophy which was hidden under that material activity, nor had she seen the prophet under that man of the barricades. Or, perhaps, he had not thought it advisable to reveal himself to her like ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume III (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant

... to his credit. The man is spiritually warped who is incapable of a deep and abiding friendship with one of his own sex; and to go a step farther, that man is utterly to be distrusted whose only friends are among women. We may not be prepared to accept the radical position of a certain young thinker, who proclaims, in season, but defiantly, that 'men are the idealists, after all;' yet it is easy to comprehend how one may take this point of view. The friendships of men are a vastly more interesting and poetic study than the friendships of men ...
— The Bibliotaph - and Other People • Leon H. Vincent

... 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 ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose

... a little hard to undertake to write about the personality of a thinker whose ideas one does not share, and whose reading of the events and tendencies of our time was in most respects directly opposite to one's own. But literature is neutral ground. Character is more than opinion. Here we may forget the loud cries and sounding strokes, the watchwords and the tactics ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 7: A Sketch • John Morley

... 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 ...
— The Astral Plane - Its Scenery, Inhabitants and Phenomena • C. W. Leadbeater

... 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, ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman

... found it cheaper to lend a man of that build a little money than to hire him. As a matter of fact, I have never known a fellow who was smart enough to think for the house days and for himself nights. A man who tries that is usually a pretty poor thinker, and he isn't much good to either; but if there's any choice the house ...
— Letters from a Self-Made Merchant to His Son • George Horace Lorimer

... it 'Plain Thoughts of a Practical Thinker?'" suggested Morgan. "And perhaps you might add a sub-title—'An attempt to investigate some questions of primary importance that are usually shelved.' How does that ...
— Cleo The Magnificent - The Muse of the Real • Louis Zangwill

... various phases of movement and change. The vicissitudes of his own inner or outer life he did not analyze. He was not given to introspection. Romanticism and mysticism were foreign to his nature. His temperament was rather that of the objective thinker. Not his own passions, hopes, and fears, but those of others invited his curiosity. With an humane attitude, the young Hegel approached religious and historical problems. The dramatic life and death of Jesus, the tragic fate of "the glory that was Greece and the grandeur that ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various

... 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, ...
— Crowded Out! and Other Sketches • Susie F. Harrison

... measures for the gradual abolition of slavery and the immediate abolition of the foreign slave-trade. On this great question the state of public opinion in America was more advanced than in England. So great a thinker as Edmund Burke, who devoted much thought to the subject, came to the conclusion that slavery was an incurable evil, and that there was not the slightest hope that the trade in slaves could be stopped. ...
— The Critical Period of American History • John Fiske

... will make everybody stop and listen 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, imperious Personality—is ...
— Crowds - A Moving-Picture of Democracy • Gerald Stanley Lee

... citizens of the several States in their most sacred rights—to think, reason, and decide all questions of religion and conscience for themselves, without fear or favor from the government. Popular sentiment and church persecution is all that an advanced thinker in science and religion should be called on to combat. The State should rather throw its shield of protection around those uttering liberal, progressive ideas; for the nation has the same interest in every new thought as it has in the invention of new machinery to lighten labor, in the ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various

... devotion as a means. This comes out very plainly in Patanjali. He has given many means whereby Yoga may be followed, and curiously, "devotion to Isvara'' is one of several means. There comes out the spirit of the scientific thinker. Devotion to Isvara is not for him an end in itself, but means to an endthe concentration of the mind. You see there at once the difference of spirit. Devotion to Isvara is the path of the mystic. He attains ...
— An Introduction to Yoga • Annie Besant

... neighbourhood in which we live. A wise man wrote: 'All reforms begin with man and not with men.' The first important step is to think good thoughts; for 'thoughts have wings,' and, when expressed, they are readily impressed upon the minds of those in sympathy with the thinker." ...
— Pictures of Jewish Home-Life Fifty Years Ago • Hannah Trager

... and peddles them, in printed form, in the streets; contributes, anonymously, to the "New England Courant," and temporarily edits that paper; becomes a free-thinker, ...
— The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin • Benjamin Franklin

... occasionally seek the society of ladies, by way of recovering some of that native gaiety of heart which had hitherto kept him alive. 'I blow on this spark,' to use his own words, 'just as an old woman blows among the ashes to get a light for her lamp.' A student and a thinker, De Maistre was also a man of the world, and he may be added to the long list of writers who have shown that to take an active part in public affairs and mix in society give a peculiar life, reality, and force to both scholarship and speculation. It was computed ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3) - Essay 4: Joseph de Maistre • John Morley

... that it is the power of intellect. Stonewall Jackson has impressed the whole army down to the last and least little drummer with a sense of his mental force. I tell you, sir, that he is a thinker, and thinkers are rare, much more rare than people generally believe. There is only one man out of ten thousand who does not act wholly according to precedent and experience. Habit is so powerful that when we think we are thinking we are not thinking at all, we are merely recalling the experiences ...
— The Scouts of Stonewall • Joseph A. Altsheler

... 'O no!' cries man, 'the household and the child Must claim her energies; and all her training Must be to qualify the wife and mother: For one force loses when another gains, Since Nature is a very strict accountant; And what you give the thinker or the artist, You borrow from the mother and the wife.' With equal truth, why not object to man That what he gives the judge or politician He borrows from the husband and the father? The wife and mother best are qualified When you allow the woman breadth of culture, ...
— The Woman Who Dared • Epes Sargent

... the lungs; for we find that what we now call the pulmonary vein is connected with the lungs, and branches out in them (Fig. 1). Finding that the greater part of this system of vessels was filled with air after death, this ancient thinker very shrewdly concluded that its real business was to receive air from the lungs, and to distribute that air all through the body, so as to get rid of the grosser humours and purify the blood. That was a very natural and very obvious suggestion, and a highly ingenious ...
— William Harvey And The Discovery Of The Circulation Of The Blood • Thomas H. Huxley

... waves, the unstable foam-crests dashing hither and thither, the playful ripples of the surface, and, blind to the still and measureless waters beneath, calls woman capricious, uncertain,—varium et mutabile. But the thinker and seer, undeceived by such externals, knows that beneath this seeming change is stability unequaled in the stronger sex, a power of will to which man is a stranger, a devotion and purpose which strike him with ...
— The Physical Life of Woman: - Advice to the Maiden, Wife and Mother • Dr. George H Napheys

... boundaries of knowledge." We are under different conditions in this country, but the importance of the principle should not be overlooked. Every one has not the desire or ability to be a great scholar and thinker, but preparation for all the so-called practical careers of life should at least carry the student through the rigorous discipline of a college course up to the Junior year, when he may elect studies of a more technical nature looking ...
— Colleges in America • John Marshall Barker

... a grim kind of fate that had given to Le Beau a wife. Had she been a witch, an evil-doer and an evil-thinker like himself, the thing would not have been such an abortion of what should have been. But she was not that. Sweet-faced, with something of unusual beauty still in her pale cheeks and starving eyes—trembling at his approach and a slave ...
— Nomads of the North - A Story of Romance and Adventure under the Open Stars • James Oliver Curwood

... face of which he in time changes through his new gift of reason, inventing tools and weapons and language, harnessing the physical forces to his own ends, and putting all things under his feet,—man the wonder-worker, the beholder of the stars, the critic and spectator of creation itself, the thinker of the thoughts of God, the worshiper, the devotee, the hero, spreading rapidly over the earth, and developing with prodigious strides when once fairly launched upon his career. Can it be possible, we ask, that this god was fathered by the low ...
— Time and Change • John Burroughs

... 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 ...
— Continental Monthly - Volume 1 - Issue 3 • Various

... either ill-paid, or not paid at all. I don't say it should be so, but it always is so. People, as a rule, only pay for being amused or being cheated, not for being served. Five thousand a year to your talker, and a shilling a day to your fighter, digger, and thinker, is the rule. None of the best head work in art, literature, or science, is ever paid for. How much do you think Homer got for his Iliad? or Dante for his Paradise? only bitter bread and salt, and going up and down other people's stairs. In science, ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin

... 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

... intellectual or as a moral movement. It is intellectual in that it presupposes a more or less general diffusion of intelligence, and moral in that its aim is justice. It could not have appeared or become a social force until man became a thinker and critic of existing social arrangements. It was first necessary that he should acquire a point of view and a habit of thought that give him a measure of intellectual independence and enable him to regard social institutions ...
— The Spirit of American Government - A Study Of The Constitution: Its Origin, Influence And - Relation To Democracy • J. Allen Smith

... an usual and a commendable practice to preface the discussion of the views of a philosophic thinker by some account of the man and of the circumstances which shaped his life and coloured his way of looking at things; but, though Zadig is cited in one of the most important chapters of Cuvier's greatest work, little is known about ...
— On the Method of Zadig - Essay #1 from "Science and Hebrew Tradition" • Thomas Henry Huxley

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

... time since that period, and shows that the human race must have attained a respectable age. Of course, it is all nonsense. But while I am indefatigably tramping the deck in a brown study, imagining myself no end of a great thinker, I suddenly discover that my thoughts are at home, where all is summer and loveliness, and those I have left are busy building castles in the air for the day when I shall return. Yes, yes. I spend rather too much time on this sort of ...
— Farthest North - Being the Record of a Voyage of Exploration of the Ship 'Fram' 1893-1896 • Fridtjof Nansen

... seriously, that obscurity is not always admirable, nor impetuosity always right; that disorder does not necessarily imply discretion, nor haste, security. It is sometimes difficult to understand the words of a deep thinker; but it is equally difficult to understand an idiot; and young students will find it, on the whole, the best thing they can do to strive to be clear;[31] not affectedly clear, but manfully and firmly. Mean something, ...
— Modern Painters, Volume IV (of V) • John Ruskin

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

... and a deep thinker. He liked to solve all questions for himself and did not accept readily other men's theories. He thought much on religious subjects and the future life, and liked to compare the Christian religion with the religions of Eastern countries, ...
— Vanished Arizona - Recollections of the Army Life by a New England Woman • Martha Summerhayes

... seemed as far from affecting my life as the source and flow of the sacred Ganges, and yet it was some trivial irritation of it that kept us from hearing his philosophy that night, and, more important to me, that sent another to expound ideas far different than could ever have come from the famous thinker. All the college, all in Harlansburg who were well-to-do and wise, watched for his coming expectantly; but when the door on the chapel platform opened and Judge Bundy stepped forth, he had on his arm, not the monumental ...
— David Malcolm • Nelson Lloyd

... free public libraries were clearly out of the question. Yet even here, and almost within the shadow of Bodley's great library, speaker after speaker assumed as axiomatic this curious fallacy—that a Poet is necessarily a thinker in advance of his age, and therefore peculiarly liable to persecution at the ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

... ranks of life, with suitable bon-mots and embellishments;—then a little French sentiment, by way of moral, with some philosophical axioms, to show that, though he had led such a gay life, he had been a deep thinker, and that, though nobody could have thought that he had had time for reading, his genius had supplied him, he could not himself really tell how, with what other people with the study of years could not master:—all ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. V - Tales of a Fashionable Life • Maria Edgeworth

... was chosen after interminable discussion; his qualifications were thoroughly canvassed; very large powers and dignities were put into his hands. Well, what did we commonly find when we examined this gentleman? We found, not a profound thinker, not a leader of sound opinion, not a man of notable sense, but merely a wholesaler of notions so infantile that they must needs disgust a sentient suckling—in brief, a spouting geyser of fallacies and sentimentalities, a cataract of unsupported ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken

... Wherever Lucien saw him, at the library or at Flicoteaux's, there was a dignity in his manner, springing doubtless from the consciousness of a purpose that filled his life, a dignity which made him unapproachable. He had the expression of a thinker, meditation dwelt on the fine nobly carved brow. You could tell from the dark bright eyes, so clear-sighted and quick to observe, that their owner was wont to probe to the bottom of things. He gesticulated very little, his demeanor was grave. Lucien ...
— A Distinguished Provincial at Paris • Honore de Balzac

... science defines in such cases "an image of memory which differs in intensity from the normal"—that is to say, a fixed idea so persistent and growing that to the thinker ...
— Library of the World's Best Mystery and Detective Stories • Edited by Julian Hawthorne

... want to fight? Do I want to fight?" cried the furious Free-thinker. "Why, you moonstruck scarecrow of superstition, do you think your dirty saints are the only people who can die? Haven't you hung atheists, and burned them, and boiled them, and did they ever deny ...
— The Ball and The Cross • G.K. Chesterton

... imagine the mind of Charles Lamb, even in early boyhood, to have been weak or childish. In his first letters you see that he was a thinker. He is for a time made sombre by unhappy reflections. He is a reader of thoughtful books. The witticisms which he coined for sixpence each (for the Morning Chronicle) had, no doubt, less of metallic lustre than those which he ...
— Charles Lamb • Barry Cornwall

... unusually modern thinker demonstrates his noble, righteous utilitarian personal philosophy, and meticulously records his personal and travel expenses, while journeying throughout Venice and various other European cities and divided German states. Numerous kings and laypeople sought to meet and host him, since he ...
— Memoirs of Journeys to Venice and the Low Countries - [This is our volunteer's translation of the title] • Albrecht Durer

... window-seat, came to a conclusion to which others have been led before him—that life is a small thing. Oddly enough, this discovery, though it belittled his fellowmen considerably, did not belittle the thinker at all, or rather affected him ...
— The Astonishing History of Troy Town • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

... St. Simon, and on that of Karl Marx, the founder of the new socialism, 'which has gained favor with the working classes in all civilized countries,' which agrees with Rousseau's plan in being democratic, and with St. Simon's in aiming at collective ownership.... The professor is an independent thinker, whose endeavor to be clear has resulted in the statement of definite conclusions. The book is a remarkably fair digest of the subject ...
— The Story of the Living Machine • H. W. Conn

... opinion. Although young, he was already deaf 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 of him. He said but little to me of myself or my books, ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau

... know nothing about manufacturing; the manufacturer may know nothing about farming; the artist, the explorer, the thinker, the inventor and the scientist may know nothing about any field of endeavor other than his own, ...
— Tyranny of God • Joseph Lewis

... be a superb fit. As the coat was the personal theatricals-equipment of Mr. Harris Hartwig, who was shaped like the dome of the county court-house, Lulu looked suspicious, but Harry was discovered making bread pills, and she was so engaged in telling him what she thought—Lord, what a thinker the little woman was!—that she ...
— The Innocents - A Story for Lovers • Sinclair Lewis

... reflections of a sage. Most of the extracts are from Latin and Greek authors, but not a few are from the Books of Ecclesiastes and Ecclesiasticus and the Epistles of St. Paul. Here one sees written by the hand of the sixteenth century thinker ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker

... been mischievous; and higher, whether praise or blame, I know not how to give. Nevertheless I would in the outset, and with the utmost sincerity, admit concerning Messrs. Wallace and Darwin that neither can be held as the more profound and conscientious thinker; neither can be put forward as the more ready to acknowledge obligation to the great writers on evolution who had preceded him, or to place his own developments in closer and more conspicuous historical connection with earlier thought upon the subject; ...
— Essays on Life, Art and Science • Samuel Butler

... to tea.' Once, on occasion of discussing an important problem of physical geography, Ritter quoted him, and every body looked up at him. Humboldt bowed to us, with his usual good nature, which put the youngsters into the happiest humor. We felt ourselves elevated by the presence of this great thinker and most laborious student. We seemed to be joined with him in the pursuit of great ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various

... pleasure in giving generously, but always judiciously and without ostentation. On one occasion he, with a few of his friends, paid off the debt from the house of an eminent scholar; on another, he helped to rebuild for a great thinker the home which had been burned. At Harvard, more than fifty years after his graduation, he founded a traveling scholarship and named it in honor of the president of ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various

... interference of any insolent member of the insolent whole. It was this mixture of deep love and profound respect for the eternal PEOPLE, and of calm, passionless disdain for that capricious charlatan, the momentary PUBLIC, which made Ernest Maltravers an original and solitary thinker; and an actor, in reality modest and benevolent, in appearance arrogant and unsocial. "Pauperism, in contradistinction to poverty," he was wont to say, "is the dependence upon other people for existence, not on our own exertions; there is a moral pauperism in the man who ...
— Ernest Maltravers, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... uplifting, have waked but poor ideas in poor minds; for words, if they seem to mean anything, must always seem to mean something within the scope of the mind hearing them. Words cannot convey the thought of a thinker to a no-thinker; of a largely aspiring and self-discontented soul, to a creature satisfied with his poverty, and counting his meagre faculty the human standard. Neither will they readily reveal the mind of one old in thought, to one who has but lately begun to think. The ...
— Hope of the Gospel • George MacDonald

... together in a definite organism; it is the life-breath within the organism, the portion of the universal Life-Breath, appropriated by the organism during the span of existence that we speak of as "a life". Kama is the aggregate of appetites, passions, and emotions, common to man and brute. Manas is the Thinker in us, the Intelligence. Buddhi is the vehicle wherein Atma, the Spirit, dwells, and in which alone it ...
— Death—and After? • Annie Besant

... some book afterwards, for he distinctly stated that he fell into a kind of doze, as he sat on the old axle-tree looking at the decayed mail coaches, and that he was suddenly awakened by some deep church bell striking two. Now, my uncle was never a fast thinker, and if he had thought all these things, I am quite certain it would have taken him till full half-past two o'clock at the very least. I am, therefore, decidedly of opinion, gentlemen, that my uncle fell into a kind of doze, without having ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens

... lately pointed out that Buffon's 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 ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen

... been the motives consciously or unconsciously affecting Mr. Gladstone's course of action—these and a hundred other enquiries of the like sort, which engage the attention and distract the judgment of the public, possess, in the eyes of any serious thinker occupied in estimating the strength of the arguments for and against Home Rule, no material importance whatever. His concern is the merit or demerit of a legislative enactment. He is not concerned at all with the conduct or the character of legislators. Mr. Gladstone's motives may be ...
— England's Case Against Home Rule • Albert Venn Dicey

... make-up, giving them a queer, sinister expression. Yank has not washed either face or body. He stands out in contrast to them, a blackened, brooding figure. He is seated forward on a bench in the exact attitude of Rodin's "The Thinker." The others, most of them smoking pipes, are staring at Yank half-apprehensively, as if fearing an outburst; half-amusedly, as if they saw a joke somewhere ...
— The Hairy Ape • Eugene O'Neill

... Eusebius "Nature's private secretary," and by Dante "the master of those that know,"—the greatest thinker of the ancient world, and the most influential of all time,—was born of Greek parents at Stagira, in the mountains of Macedonia, in B.C. 384. Of his mother, Phaestis, almost nothing is known. His father, Nicomachus, belonged to a medical family, and acted as private physician to Amyntas, ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner

... only mention to recall a great thinker to the mind of every well-informed man,—Shaftesbury lived at a time when much disturbance reigned in the religion of his native land, when the dominant church sought by force to subdue men of other modes of thought. State and morals were also ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. II • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke

... system of decoration by mosaics well advanced. The absolute necessity of using the dome was emphasised, not only by the Sunday evening services, but by the appointment of HENRY PARRY LIDDON to a resident's stall. Competent judges have asserted that Henry Melvill, though not the greater thinker, was the greater preacher of the two; but Melvill was almost past his best on his appointment in 1856, and he is rather associated with the choir than the dome. Be this as it may, Wren would have been gratified indeed to have seen the favourite offspring of ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of St. Paul - An Account of the Old and New Buildings with a Short Historical Sketch • Arthur Dimock

... and without explaining his pleasure to himself, the slender lines on the petals of dark flowers, the delicacy of their rich tunics of gold or purple, green or azure, the fringes, so profusely beautiful, of their calyxes or leaves, their ivory or velvet textures. Later, a thinker as well as a poet, he would detect the reason of these innumerable differences in a single nature, by discovering the indication of unknown faculties; for from day to day he made progress in the interpretation of the Divine ...
— The Hated Son • Honore de Balzac

... it will not cause any one a shock to be told that "the greatest thinker of all time" was not exactly a ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 12 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Scientists • Elbert Hubbard

... and unhealthy to go without these bandages. Their satisfied smiles gave no indication of the discomfort they might be feeling. But Nature always took her revenge. Every now and then there would arise some individual in revolt, some vigorous artist or unbridled thinker who would brutally break his bonds and set the city fathers by the ears. They were so clever that, if the rebel had not been stifled in the embryo, and became the stronger, they never troubled to fight him—(a fight might have produced all sorts of scandalous outbreaks):—they bought him up. If he ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland

... much attention to occult or mystical literature the name Boehme was utterly unknown to me, and at this point I asked Mr. U., "Did you ever hear of anyone by the name of B-o-e-h-m-e?" spelling the word. "Certainly," he replied, "Jacob Boehme, he was a German thinker who died—" my hand began to move just then, and he paused, and while the following was being written my mind reverted hazily to a German philosophical writer, who had died within a few years, and of whose life one of our friends ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 21, August, 1891 • Various

... knew a man who made me a map of the opposite hemisphere of the moon. He was crazy. I knew another who taught me what country lay upon the other side of the grave. He was a most acute thinker-as he ...
— The Fiend's Delight • Dod Grile

... the torrent of Douglas' thinking. His vision enthralled me. His outlook upon the country, its increasing power and wealth, fascinated my imagination. Was I not resolved to be rich myself? And for moments I was under the spell of his great power. He was a world thinker, but with his own country forefronted in the playing of a colossal part. It appealed to my English blood, that blood which does great deeds through great vision, and then repents the iniquities along ...
— Children of the Market Place • Edgar Lee Masters

... than its predecessor, with an ebb between each. At what point is the ebb checked, at what point does the fuller wave begin to flow? Always with the advent of individual genius. A great man rises who founds a dynasty; a great thinker, who publishes new truths; a great lawgiver or statesman, who establishes a new social system. New worlds need a Columbus, and the social Columbus is always a man with sufficient daring to stand by original convictions. ...
— The Quest of the Simple Life • William J. Dawson

... the armoured city of Berlin. But that was not all. For the bombardment kept up for days and the Emperor could not escape. On the fourth day came the second idea—two new ideas in less than a week! William III was a great thinker. ...
— City of Endless Night • Milo Hastings

... 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 ...
— Second Sight - A study of Natural and Induced Clairvoyance • Sepharial

... subject, without picking or choosing, without garbling or disguising. It yet remains as a work of the highest interest, to estimate (but for that to display) Coleridge in his character of great philosophic thinker, in which character he united perfections that never were united but in three persons on this earth, in himself, in Plato (as many suppose), and in Schelling, viz., the utmost expansion and in some paths ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. II (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey

... such a character, had almost found an unfortunate road to his heart. In a word, he had entered this labyrinth as a credulous enthusiast, had left it as a sceptic, and at length became a perfect free-thinker. ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller

... this suggest? How many centuries elapsed ere man thought of cultivating Indian corn? How many more ere it had spread over nearly a hundred degrees of latitude, and lost all semblance to its original form? Who has the temerity to answer these questions? The judicious thinker will perceive in them satisfactory reasons for dropping once for all the vexed inquiry, "how America was peopled," and will smile at its imaginary solutions, whether they suggest Jews, Japanese, or, as the latest ...
— The Myths of the New World - A Treatise on the Symbolism and Mythology of the Red Race of America • Daniel G. Brinton

... spirit; the very thirst for healthiness, which means congruity, and congruity which implies health, forming the vital and ever-expanding connection between the two orders of phenomena. Two orders, did I say? Surely to the intuition of this artist and thinker, the fundamental unity—the unity between man's relations with external nature, with his own thoughts and with others' feelings—stood revealed as the secret of the ...
— Renaissance Fancies and Studies - Being a Sequel to Euphorion • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)

... Hundreds could not gain admittance. Curtis lectured on "Fair Play for Women"; great success, but I feel that he has not yet been tried by fire. Afterwards visited with Curtis and Taylor, and Mr. Curtis said: "Rather than have a radical thinker like Mrs. Rose at your suffrage conventions, you would better give them up. With such speakers as Beecher, Phillips, Theodore Parker, Chapin, Tilton and myself advocating woman's ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 1 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper

... side of the heart with the lungs; for we find that what we now call the pulmonary vein is connected with the lungs, and branches out in them (Fig. 1). Finding that the greater part of this system of vessels was filled with air after death, this ancient thinker very shrewdly concluded that its real business was to receive air from the lungs, and to distribute that air all through the body, so as to get rid of the grosser humours and purify the blood. That was a ...
— William Harvey And The Discovery Of The Circulation Of The Blood • Thomas H. Huxley

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

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

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

... writer, we may be sure, would be so horrified as he at such a treatment. Indeed, the adulation of his worshippers has perhaps somewhat obscured the real position that he fills in literature. It is impossible to deny that, both as a writer and as a thinker, he has faults—and grave ones. His style, with all its delightful abundance, its inimitable ease, and its pleasant flavour of antiquity, yet lacks form; he did not possess the supreme mastery of language which alone can lead to the creation ...
— Landmarks in French Literature • G. Lytton Strachey

... But I assure them, very seriously, that obscurity is not always admirable, nor impetuosity always right; that disorder does not necessarily imply discretion, nor haste, security. It is sometimes difficult to understand the words of a deep thinker; but it is equally difficult to understand an idiot; and young students will find it, on the whole, the best thing they can do to strive to be clear;[31] not affectedly clear, but manfully and firmly. Mean something, and ...
— Modern Painters, Volume IV (of V) • John Ruskin

... Besides, it was musical. The hearer went away with its expressive inflections and cadences still sounding in his ears. But his voice was not his only forte. He had a mind as full of sanctified wit and quick perception as an egg is full of food. A clear thinker, a cogent reasoner, and I may add, full of love and the Holy Ghost, it is not a matter of wonder that he excelled. What he might have achieved had he lived to an advanced age, God only knows. His death was caused by an attack of pneumonia. He left a comparatively ...
— Life and Labors of Elder John Kline, the Martyr Missionary - Collated from his Diary by Benjamin Funk • John Kline

... Creed knew he was not. Yet he had pondered the matter deeply, and put it thus to himself: The peasant of Europe can only rise through stages of material prosperity to a point of development at which he craves intellectual attainment, or spiritual growth. But the mountaineer is always a thinker; he has even in his poverty a hearty contempt for luxury, for material gain at the expense of personality. With his disposition to philosophy, fostered by solitude and isolation, he readily overleaps those ...
— Judith of the Cumberlands • Alice MacGowan

... 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 ...
— Tom Swift and his Submarine Boat - or, Under the Ocean for Sunken Treasure • Victor Appleton

... and millionnaire. A Russian, he knew that—yet he looked more like the monk one sees depicted on the canvases of the early Flemish painters. His high, wide brow and deep-set, dark eyes proclaimed the thinker; and because of his physique, he might ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker

... replied, "this is a villainous character." "Ah, I do not pretend to introduce to you an Aristides or an Epaminondas, or any other soul of similar stamp. He is a man of letters, full of wit, a deep thinker, a superior genius, and our reputations are in his hands. If he flatters us, posterity will know it; if he laugh at us, it will know it also. I counsel you therefore to use him well, if you would have him behave so towards you." "I will act ...
— "Written by Herself" • Baron Etienne Leon Lamothe-Langon

... art. He chooses the story form in preference to the treatise as a more powerful medium to drive home his ideas. That the result has proved successful is due to the happy admixture in Strindberg of thinker and artist. His artist's sense never permitted him to distort or misrepresent the truth for the sake of proving his theories. In fact, he arrived at his theories not as a scholar through the study of books, but as ...
— Married • August Strindberg

... flesh and blood were attracted thither by the wide-spreading influence of a great original thinker, who had his earthly abode at the opposite extremity of our village. His mind acted upon other minds of a certain constitution with wonderful magnetism, and drew many men upon long pilgrimages to speak with ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IX (of X) - America - I • Various

... established church by the possession of a system of doctrines held in common. The name by which they were known was a nickname which might cover almost any amount of diversity in opinion, like the modern epithets "free-thinker" and "agnostic." The feature which characterized the Lollards in common was a bold spirit of inquiry which led them, in spite of persecution, to read Wyclif's English Bible and call in question such dogmas and rites of the church as did not seem to find warrant ...
— The Beginnings of New England - Or the Puritan Theocracy in its Relations to Civil and Religious Liberty • John Fiske

... He got it out of that; he created an excitement and kept it up. He got at his little bit of mind through his senses. Honor to all the great arts! The limit to their beauty and their usefulness has never yet been found and never will. Painting was the golden key this thinker held to the Bramah lock of an imbecile's understanding the ponderous wards were beginning to revolve—when a blockhead came and did his ...
— It Is Never Too Late to Mend • Charles Reade

... 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 and will in action. In all sciences except those called exact, this happy guessing ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown

... never having paid much attention to occult or mystical literature the name Boehme was utterly unknown to me, and at this point I asked Mr. U., "Did you ever hear of anyone by the name of B-o-e-h-m-e?" spelling the word. "Certainly," he replied, "Jacob Boehme, he was a German thinker who died—" my hand began to move just then, and he paused, and while the following was being written my mind reverted hazily to a German philosophical writer, who had died within a few years, and of whose life one of our friends had written a sketch. His name began with B, and I ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 21, August, 1891 • Various

... his racy stories; but few more powerful intellects passed through Oxford in his time, and he has justified his University reputation by his distinction since, both as a Roman Catholic theologian and professor, and as a profound metaphysical thinker, the equal antagonist on their own ground of J. Stuart Mill and Herbert Spencer. But his intellect at that time was as remarkable for its defects as for its powers. He used to divide his friends, and thinking people in general, into those ...
— The Oxford Movement - Twelve Years, 1833-1845 • R.W. Church

... and imagine their mechanical increase and their mechanical complication the largest possible; and still the life-motion of the organic will never result therefrom. If such a keen psychical and physiological investigator and thinker, and such an authority in the realm of the motions of atoms and molecules, as Gustav Theodor Fechner—"Einige Ideen zur Schoepfungs- und Entwicklungsgeschichte der Organismen" ("Some Ideas about the History of the {136} Creation and Development of Organisms"), Leipzig, 1873, p. 1, f.—can ...
— The Theories of Darwin and Their Relation to Philosophy, Religion, and Morality • Rudolf Schmid

... the individual self, this impersonal contemplation of a personal wrong, this contemptuous yet passionate scrutiny of the very emotions which rend the heart and inflame the spirit and poison the very blood of the thinker, is the special seal or sign of original inspiration which distinguishes the type most representative of Tourneur's genius, most significant of its peculiar bias and its peculiar force. Such a conception, clothed in mere prose or in merely passable verse, would be proof sufficient ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne

... points at all; derived rather from Voltaire's Printed WORKS, where they lay derivable to all the world. Certain enough it is, Voltaire was at this time, and continued all his days, Friedrich's chief Thinker in the world; unofficially, the chief Preacher, Prophet and Priest of this Working King;—no better off for a spiritual Trismegistus was poor Friedrich in the world! On the practical side, Friedrich soon outgrew him,—perhaps ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. X. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—At Reinsberg—1736-1740 • Thomas Carlyle

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

... were the advantages, the limitations, and the effects of this combination. I shall not disguise the fact that, on the whole, my own preferences are on the side of Hamilton rather than of Jefferson. He was the sound thinker, the constructive statesman, the candid and honorable, if erring, gentleman; while Jefferson was the amiable enthusiast, who understood his fellow-countrymen better and trusted them more than his rival, but who ...
— The Promise Of American Life • Herbert David Croly

... learn his secret, I insist that his main intention must ever be kept in mind. Much of his so-called obscurity, harshness, and uncouthness falls immediately into its proper place, is indeed necessary. The proof of his true greatness not as a philosopher, thinker, psychologist, but as a poet, lies in the simple fact that when the subject-matter he handles is beautiful or sublime, his style is usually adequate to the situation. Browning had no difficulty in writing melodiously when he placed the ...
— Robert Browning: How To Know Him • William Lyon Phelps

... the extent of his sins. More weak and foolish than our friend and hero he had been, but not to my knowledge more wicked. But it is to the vain and foolish that the punishments fall;—and to them they fall so thickly and constantly that the thinker is driven to think that vanity and folly are of all sins those which may be the least forgiven. As for Cradell I may declare that he did marry Amelia, that he did, with some pride, take the place of master of the house at ...
— The Small House at Allington • Anthony Trollope

... with in asylums; showing his lordship plainly that he could tell any insane person whatever from a sane one, and vice versa. This was the most remarkable part of the trial, to see this shrewd old judge extracting from a real observer and logical thinker those positive indicia of sanity and insanity, which exist, but which no lawyer has ever yet been able to extract from any psychological physician in the witness-box. At last, he was relieved, and sat sucking an orange among the spectators; for they had parched his ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade

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

... 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 time, present ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman

... good health. The others followed her example, and Comus drained his glass with a brief "thank you all very much." The sense of constraint which hung over the company was not, however, marked by any uncomfortable pause in the conversation. Henry Greech was a fluent thinker, of the kind that prefer to do their thinking aloud; the silence that descended on him as a mantle in the House of Commons was an official livery of which he divested himself as thoroughly as possible in private life. He did not propose to sit through dinner as a mere listener to Mr. ...
— The Unbearable Bassington • Saki

... wrote an article on "The Coming Slavery," which conveyed the impression that the great thinker saw what he thought to be signs of the inevitable triumph of Socialism. All over the world Socialists were cheered by this admission from their implacable enemy. In this connection it is worthy of note that Spencer continued ...
— Socialism - A Summary and Interpretation of Socialist Principles • John Spargo

... and a German, working side by side on the Mississippi, and they present the same characteristic differences as the Germans and Kelts described by Tacitus and Caesar. The German loves liberty, the Kelt equality; the one hates the tyrant, the other the aristocrat; the one is a serious thinker, the other a quick and vivid thinker; the one is a Protestant in religion, the other a Catholic. Ammianus Marcellinus, living in Gaul in the fourth century, describes the Kelts thus (see whether it does not apply to the ...
— Ten Great Religions - An Essay in Comparative Theology • James Freeman Clarke

... industry of official duties. But there are great compensations. Without the youthful period of hopes deferred, Hawthorne, as we have seen, would not have been the unique force, the high, untrammelled thinker that be became through that fortunate isolation; wanting the uncongenial contact of his terms at Boston and Salem and Liverpool, it may be that he could not have developed his genius with such ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop

... 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 ...
— Nature Mysticism • J. Edward Mercer

... indeed, 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 ...
— Night and Morning, Volume 4 • Edward Bulwer Lytton

... his arm round her 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 souls, with right of will and desire equal to his own, and was too proud to accept the ...
— Six Women • Victoria Cross

... own. His reveries, his sadnesses, his exhilarations, are all ours, too. Like us he cries, "I wish I were unflinching and emphatic, and had big bushy eyebrows and a Message for the Age. I wish I were a deep Thinker, or a great Ventriloquist." Like us he has only a ghost, a thin, unreal phantom in a world of bank cashiers and duchesses and prosperous merchants and other Real Persons. Like us he fights a losing battle against the platitudes and moral generalizations that hem us round. "I can hardly post ...
— Shandygaff • Christopher Morley

... earnest man and serious thinker, believed that marriages should be contracted on probation—say for five years, with the right on both sides ...
— Editorials from the Hearst Newspapers • Arthur Brisbane

... up, you're dreaming!" laughed Shirley, the quiet, sensible girl. Never in the world would Shirley have dreamed or let her imagination run wild. She was a practical, well-balanced girl, a clear thinker and not given to ...
— The Merriweather Girls in Quest of Treasure • Lizette M. Edholm

... of playwriting—a vulgar, useful term—that kept Browning or Tennyson from success on the stage. No one ever had such a prodigious "knack" as Ibsen, and Rosmersholm is the most amazing tour de force of craftmanship. Yet despite his influence upon modern drama, Ibsen—a great poet, a great thinker, a great observer, and the greatest of craftsmen—has been unpopular as ...
— Our Stage and Its Critics • "E.F.S." of "The Westminster Gazette"

... titles as heaven is in its stars: "Melmoth Reconcilie," "Jesus-Christ en Flandres," "Le Revers d'un Grand Homme," "La Cousine Bette." I read somewhere not very long ago, that Balzac was the greatest thinker that had appeared in France since Pascal. Of Pascal's claim to be a great thinker I confess I cannot judge. No man is greater than the age he lives in, and, therefore, to talk to us, the legitimate children of the nineteenth ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore

... almost 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 of her former wild impulse to run ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield

... love with that young lady—and am in love with this little creature of fifteen and a half, who has passed me every morning and evening, going to school. Going to school! there it is! I, the great political thinker, the originator of ideas, the student, the philosopher, the cynic—I am in love with a school-girl! Well, I am not aware that the fact of acquiring a knowledge of geography and numbers, music, and other things, has the effect of making ...
— The Youth of Jefferson - A Chronicle of College Scrapes at Williamsburg, in Virginia, A.D. 1764 • Anonymous

... in the patiently marching Una to be a creative thinker, yet she did hunger for self-mastery, and ardently was she following the erratic gibes at civilization with which young Walter showed his delight in having an audience, when the brown, homely ...
— The Job - An American Novel • Sinclair Lewis

... the name of Coningsby is a territorial exemplification and perpetuation of this adage. In the language once spoken in these parts, {218} the conning, cunning man and the king were one and the same; the king was king because he was the conner, the thinker, and so overtopped his fellows in cunning. He embodied in his own person the moral of every age of progress, that brute force must yield the palm to skill and judgment. Mob-rule may for a while snatch at, and hold, the mastery; but ’tis the man who has the cunning to bide his ...
— Records of Woodhall Spa and Neighbourhood - Historical, Anecdotal, Physiographical, and Archaeological, with Other Matter • J. Conway Walter

... were employed in doing the world's work. I have read in books vehement denials of such a one's existence. He himself, in citing Ruskin, seemed to be sceptical of any one man becoming a passionate thinker and a manual worker. But I have often heard him in close converse with some old shopmate, passing hour after hour in technical reminiscences and descriptions; then, upon the entrance of some artist or litterateur, ...
— An Ocean Tramp • William McFee

... black pipe, grinned and aimed, shot and reloaded, sang his quaint song, and joked with his comrades, all in the same cool, quiet way. If he knew that the shadow of death hung over the train, he did not show it. He was not a thinker. Casey was a man of action. Only once he yelled, and that was when he killed the Indian on ...
— The U.P. Trail • Zane Grey

... in ages to come, 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 ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli

... be a pseudo philosophy—at least it is an entertaining one—which cannot be said about all serious attempts at moulding the universe into a tiresome system, that is uprooted generally by the next thinker. The book opens with a very strong gale that ends with the arrival at a boarding house of a man who can stand on his head and has the name of Innocent Smith. He is somewhat like the person in the 'Passing of the Third Floor Back,' in that he revolutionizes ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke

... false friend, false woman, deceived so perfectly that she left no indication of 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 ...
— The Mississippi Bubble • Emerson Hough

... young, smile so young, and speak so youthfully to each other, not be a married couple before the cuckoo sings again next year? See—that is what I should like to know! and the smile played around the thinker's mouth, but she did not speak her thoughts. The straws were separated—consequently the bachelor and the old maid also. "It may, however, happen nevertheless," she certainly thought: it was apparent in the smile; it ...
— Pictures of Sweden • Hans Christian Andersen

... 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." ...
— West Wind Drift • George Barr McCutcheon

... 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

... by the casual thinker, be considered as limited to dreams of the hunt and chase. Yet I have found at my disposal a score of amusements. When the dusk has just settled down, and the little bats fill every glade in the forest, a box of beetles or grasshoppers—or even bits of chopped meat—offers the possibility of a new ...
— Edge of the Jungle • William Beebe

... 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 gorgeous ...
— The Possessed - or, The Devils • Fyodor Dostoyevsky

... the insolent whole. It was this mixture of deep love and profound respect for the eternal PEOPLE, and of calm, passionless disdain for that capricious charlatan, the momentary PUBLIC, which made Ernest Maltravers an original and solitary thinker; and an actor, in reality modest and benevolent, in appearance arrogant and unsocial. "Pauperism, in contradistinction to poverty," he was wont to say, "is the dependence upon other people for existence, not on our own exertions; there ...
— Ernest Maltravers, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... understand to have been the style of Robert Hall's pulpit speech. It is a rare gift to be a speaker of this sort. The speaker must be a thinker as well as a speaker. The speech is, in truth, a process of thinking aloud—thinking accelerated, exhilarated, by the vocal exercise accompanying, and then, too, by the blindfold sense of a listening audience near. This is the ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller

... leaving the family penniless. His uncle, a shoemaker and preacher, was educated though poor. In the picturesque little village of Llanystumdwy on the coast of Wales, Lloyd George grew up,—a leader among his mates, not only in his studies but in mischief as well. He was a good thinker and liked to debate with his uncle, and to be in his uncle's shop in the evening when the men of the village gathered to talk over questions of business and politics. As he grew older, he took part in their conversation ...
— Winning a Cause - World War Stories • John Gilbert Thompson and Inez Bigwood

... both visible and tangible in man, and that man is in his brain, and, therefore, the brain is man. Medical science, however, shows that the brain no more thinks than the hand and foot do, but is simply the instrument of the invisible thinker. The proof of this is that we have two brains, just as we have two eyes and two ears, but that only one of our two brain hemispheres is the instrument for talking, thinking, or knowing. Which one of the two hemispheres will be the mental ...
— Stories from Everybody's Magazine • 1910 issues of Everybody's Magazine

... hands of Watts. Again Millais 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 ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore

... affectation, but merely indicate the natural furnishing of the mind of the educated Renaissance gentleman. The essays, it should be added, were evidently suggested and more or less influenced by those of the great French thinker, Montaigne, an earlier contemporary of Bacon. The hold of medieval scholarly tradition, it is further interesting to note, was still so strong that in order to insure their permanent preservation Bacon translated them into Latin—he took for granted that the English in which he first ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher

... human nature and events, a traveler, a thinker, a student of the drama of all ages. He had been a reporter and an editorial writer. His plays were written by a watchful, sympathetic, and artistic military ...
— The Autobiography of a Play - Papers on Play-Making, II • Bronson Howard

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

... ourselves to the higher circles of society: we care not to disown it—the Pall Mall Gazette is written by gentlemen for gentlemen; its conductors speak to the classes in which they live and were born. The field-preacher has his journal, the radical free-thinker has his journal: why should the Gentlemen of England ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray

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

... Susan and Ernestine were in Philadelphia at a national woman's rights convention, and when Ernestine was proposed for president, Susan had her first opportunity to champion her new friend. A foreigner and a free-thinker, Ernestine encountered a great deal of prejudice even among liberal reformers, and Susan was surprised at the strength of feeling against her. Impressed during their trip to Washington by Ernestine's essentially fine qualities and her value to the cause, Susan fought for her behind ...
— Susan B. Anthony - Rebel, Crusader, Humanitarian • Alma Lutz

... of which a pair of bright black eyes shone benevolently but with keen vivacity. His large cheek-bones were much too prominent; the lower part of his face was small, ugly and, as it were, compressed, while his high broad forehead crowned the whole and stamped it as that of a thinker, as a fine cupola may crown ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers

... be lost sight of when judging Mr. Rhodes that he had been living for the best part of his life among people with whom he could not have anything in common except the desire to make money in the shortest time possible. He was by nature a thinker, a philosopher, a reader, a man who belonged to the best class of students, those who understand that one's mind wants continually improving and that it is apt to rust when not kept active. His companions in those first years which followed upon his arrival in South Africa would certainly ...
— Cecil Rhodes - Man and Empire-Maker • Princess Catherine Radziwill

... courage? All of us love companionship and sympathy; some of us may love them too much. All of us are more or less imaginative in our theology. Some of us may find the aid of material symbols a comfort, if not a necessity. The boldest thinker may have his moments of languor and discouragement, when he feels as if he could willingly exchange faiths with the old beldame crossing herself at the cathedral-door,—nay, that, if he could drop all coherent thought, and lie in the flowery meadow ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various

... figure of Buddha in meditation, seated cross-legged and motionless, with vacant introspective eyes, oblivious of the outer world, is a type of the separation of thought from act that seems natural to India or to the Indian mind, type also of the independence of each thinker. The thinker secludes himself; "the mind is its own place." To become a thinker signifies to become an ascetic recluse; even modern enlightenment often removes an Indian ...
— New Ideas in India During the Nineteenth Century - A Study of Social, Political, and Religious Developments • John Morrison

... is felt. It was in another sphere, however, that Puritanism in New England was to reach its height, intellectually and spiritually alike, in the brilliant personality of Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758), its last great product. He was free of affairs, and bred essentially the private life of a thinker. He displayed in youth extraordinary precocity and varied intellectual curiosity, and showed at the same early time a temperament of spiritual sensitiveness and religious ideality which suggests the youth of a poet rather than of a logician. It was not without a struggle that he embraced ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia

... for solace and she was lover to the immeasurable love. Like all aristocrats she hated mediocrity, and like all first rate jewels, she had no rift to hide. She was not a maker of poetry, she was a thinker of poetry. She was not a conjurer of words so much as a magician in sensibility. She has only to see and feel and hear to be in touch with all things with a name or with things that must be forever nameless. If ...
— Adventures in the Arts - Informal Chapters on Painters, Vaudeville, and Poets • Marsden Hartley

... said above, I believe, too, that it is very bad for any man not to have a fixed occupation; however great his natural energy may be, it either relaxes with time, or expends itself uselessly. The mere thinker often ends by hovering on the confines ...
— The Wings of Icarus - Being the Life of one Emilia Fletcher • Laurence Alma Tadema

... more, Life at wound-pause lifts ear to woundless mind; Backward the ages their slow clew unwind, And step by step, and star by star, lead o'er The trail again, where eyeless passion tore Its red way to a soul. Mist-bound and blind No more, the thinker waits, and God grown kind Flashes a foot-print where He ...
— Path Flower and Other Verses • Olive T. Dargan

... that which appears to be the most transcendent in the mental constitution of Burke. And so truly is this the case, that both among his contemporaries, as well as among his successors, this predominance of imagination has caused his just claims as a philosophic thinker and statesman to be partially overlooked. The union of ideal theory and practical realisation, of imaginative creation with logical induction, is indeed so rare, we cannot be surprised at the injustice which the genius of Burke has had to endure in this ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke

... about it from that angle at all, Mart.... You're still the ground-and-lofty thinker of the outfit, ain't you? Now that you mention it, though, we may find that the Last of the Mohicans ain't entirely toothless, at that. But say, Mart, how come I'm as wild and cock-eyed as I ever was? Rovol's a slow and thoughtful ...
— Skylark Three • Edward Elmer Smith

... you!" and as he turned away it seemed to me that he was more nearly moved by the softer human emotions than I had ever seen him. A moment later he was the cold and practical thinker once more. "Put the pearl in the safe, Watson," said he, "and get out the papers of the Conk-Singleton forgery case. Good-bye, Lestrade. If any little problem comes your way I shall be happy, if I can, to give you a hint or two as to ...
— The Return of Sherlock Holmes - Magazine Edition • Arthur Conan Doyle

... by a singular chance the true nature of the man was to emerge triumphant in the end. If Newman had died at the age of sixty, today he would have been already forgotten, save by a few ecclesiastical historians; but he lived to write his Apologia, and to reach immortality, neither as a thinker nor as a theologian, but as an artist who has embalmed the poignant history of an intensely human spirit in the magical spices ...
— Eminent Victorians • Lytton Strachey

... natural cannot and does not exist. Have you, then, measured Nature? He was a great thinker, one of deep knowledge, who compared Man to a child wandering on the shore of a vast ocean and picking up a pebble here ...
— The Thing from the Lake • Eleanor M. Ingram

... reveals Dr. Fairbairn as a clear and vigorous thinker, who knows how to be bold without ...
— The Whence and the Whither of Man • John Mason Tyler

... any means for the first time—felt regret that Canon Wrottesley's influence upon his wife had not made her a more orthodox thinker. A woman who criticized the Prayer Book was surely not fitted to be the wife of a clergyman. Miss Abingdon liked to lean on a spiritual guide, and she thought that this was the graceful and becoming attitude ...
— Peter and Jane - or The Missing Heir • S. (Sarah) Macnaughtan

... occasion he drew a distinction between two writers, with neither of whom he sympathized. "Don't mistake me. One is a thinker and man of letters, the other is only a literary man. Erasmus was a man of letters; Gigadibs a literary man. A.B. is the incarnation of Gigadibs. I should ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley - A Character Sketch • Leonard Huxley

... the business world as a doer, maker, or as any other executive, his worth to the state as an incorruptible official, his worth to his family as a devoted husband and father, his worth to literature or art as a thinker or maker,—these values are imprinted upon his personality, howbeit ...
— The Etiquette of To-day • Edith B. Ordway

... 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 and controversies. John Fiske gave his strength to the writing of history, where, ...
— The Last Leaf - Observations, during Seventy-Five Years, of Men and Events in America - and Europe • James Kendall Hosmer

... clean-shaven, and his mouth, notwithstanding its thin lips, was well-shaped. Fraulein Anna took an interest in physiognomy, and she made Philip notice afterwards how finely shaped was his skull, and how weak was the lower part of his face. The head, she remarked, was the head of a thinker, but the jaw lacked character. Fraulein Anna, foredoomed to a spinster's life, with her high cheek-bones and large misshapen nose, laid great stress upon character. While they talked of him he stood a little apart from the others, watching the noisy party ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham

... who said "And put a stick in for a handle" was dubbed "the spoon-maker." At that time we were earning names for ourselves by suggestions; we started with Fair Hair, Curly Hair, Big Teeth, Long Legs, and arrived at Quick Runner, Climber, and even Thinker. ...
— The Child Under Eight • E.R. Murray and Henrietta Brown Smith

... which the soul is liable in virtue of the fact that it was not made to be alone, yea, I think, I hope, never can be alone; for that which could be fact could not be such horror. Essential horror springs from an idea repugnant to the nature of the thinker, and which therefore in ...
— Wilfrid Cumbermede • George MacDonald

... abilities; and the frequent concurrence of opinion between them sometimes (and especially with those not entirely acquainted with him) induced a belief that Hamilton formed his opinions, or, as Arnold once expressed it, was his thinker. Yet there were many occasions upon which they differed, and widely differed; and never did Washington surrender his own opinion and adopt that of Hamilton. I never thought the feelings of Washington toward him were more than respect for ...
— The Memories of Fifty Years • William H. Sparks

... resting, were of the true Minerva tint,—yellow-green. The encircling rings told of unsettled weather. While elf-locks and straggling whiskers marked the man careless of forms, the narrow, knotted brow suggested the thinker ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various

... theologians, 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 thwarted by ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White

... own work as the more important, because of the larger knowledge of life which had entered into its production. He was wrong in the first terms of his comparison: for he underrated the creative, hence spontaneous element in his own nature, while claiming primarily the position of an observant thinker; and he overrated the amount of creativeness implied by the poetry of his wife. He failed to see that, given her intellectual endowments, and the lyric gift, the characteristics of her genius were due to circumstances as much as those of his own. Actual life is not the only source of poetic inspiration, ...
— Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr

... by her own eager exploration in Europe. "My friend, the philosopher," he had said, "will not have it that we are really the individuals we think we are. You must talk to him—he is a very curious and subtle thinker. We are just thoughts in the Mind of the Race, he says, passing thoughts. We are—what does he call it?—Man on his Planet, taking ...
— The Secret Places of the Heart • H. G. Wells

... 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 held him helpless, an enslaved spirit, but around ...
— The Long Roll • Mary Johnston

... that he who would become a skilful trailer, must of necessity be an observer, as well as thinker; and remember, boys, that he who talks most, generally ...
— The Young Trail Hunters • Samuel Woodworth Cozzens

... thought, unless expressed, is the property of the thinker" (a pretty safe proposition, as, until expressed, it could hardly incur any serious risk of being appropriated); "when given to the world, it is as light, ...
— International Copyright - Considered in some of its Relations to Ethics and Political Economy • George Haven Putnam

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

... a moral life, when it actually exists in a being with hostile activities, is merely a hostile power. It is not hostile, however, in so far as it is moral, but only in so far as its morality represents a material organism, physically incompatible with what the thinker has at heart. ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana









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