"Thinker" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... 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
... thinker was now in his grave. The bold enthusiast whom he defeated in 1851 had now no opponent that was his match. No great personality resisted the fiery advocates from Alabama and Mississippi. Their advice was ...
— The Day of the Confederacy - A Chronicle of the Embattled South, Volume 30 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Nathaniel W. Stephenson
... 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 |
