Thinker Quotes
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Every thinker puts some portion of an apparently stable world in peril and no one can wholly predict what will emerge in its place.
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More Thinker Quotes
When obstacles or difficulties arise, the positive thinker takes them as creative opportunities. He welcomes the challenge of a tough problem and looks for ways to turn it to advantage.
norman vincent peale— Have a Great Day (1986), p. 2
The greatest challenge to any thinker is stating the problem in a way that will allow a solution.
— Bertrand Russell, as quoted in Crainer's The Ultimate Book of Business Quotations (1997), p. 258.
An original thinker and able teacher very soon attracts a large class and vice versa.
— Lord Watson, Caird v. Sime (1887), 57 L. J. P. C. 9.
Jurgen Habermas is widely considered as the most influential thinker in Germany over the past decade. As a philosopher and sociologist he has mastered and creatively articulated an extraordinary range of specialized literature in the social sciences, social theory and the history of ideas in the development of a comprehensive and provocative critical theory of knowledge and human interests. His roots are in the tradition of German thought from Kant to Marx , and he has been associated with the Frankfurt School of critical theorists which pioneered in the study of the relationship of the ideas of Marx and Freud .
— Jack Mezirow (1981). "A critical theory of adult learning and education". in: Adult Education. Vol 32, nr. 1, p.3
I wouldn't say I was a born writer; I'm a born thinker.
John Lennon— p. 9 (The Beatles Anthology (2000))
In poetry there are two giants, rough Homer and fine Shakespere. In music likewise we have two giants, Beethoven, the thinker, and the superthinker Berlioz.
modest mussorgsky— Letter to Vladimir Stassov, October 18, 1872; Oskar von Riesemann (trans. Paul England) Moussorgsky (1929) p. 107.
'They can ta'k our lives but they can never ta'k our freedom!' Now there's a battle cry not designed by a clear thinker...
terry pratchett— Referring to a statement in the movie Braveheart, at alt.fan.pratchett (11 January 1999)
After Bruno's death, during the first half of the seventeenth century, Descartes seemed about to take the leadership of human thought... in promoting an evolution doctrine as regards the mechanical formation of the solar system... but his constant dread of persecution, both from Catholics and Protestants, led him steadily to veil his thoughts and even to suppress them. ...Since Roger Bacon, perhaps, no great thinker had been so completely abased and thwarted by theological oppression.
roger bacon— Andrew Dickson White, A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom Ch.1, p. 57 (1896)
One thinker no less brilliant than the heresiarch himself, but in the orthodox tradition, advanced a most daring hypothesis. This felicitous supposition declared that there is only one Individual, and that this indivisible Individual is every one of the separate beings in the universe, and that these beings are the instruments and masks of divinity itself.
jorge luis borges— Variant: This happy conjecture affirmed that there is only one subject, that this indivisible subject is every being in the universe and that these beings are the organs and masks of the divinity.
Ownership of thought depends on the thinker not subordinating himself to a ‘ruling thought’. This is particularly difficult, argues Stirner, … for language itself is a network of ‘fixed ideas’. Truths emerge only when language is reworked and possessed individually.
john carroll— p. 107 (Break-Out from the Crystal Palace (1974))
Foucault was often lumped with Derrida. That's very unfair to Foucault. He was a different caliber of thinker altogether.
Michel Foucault— John Searle,
Is there a thinker apart from thought?
jiddu krishnamurti— 12th Public Talk, London, UK (28 May 1961)
One cannot demand of a scholar that he show himself a scholar everywhere in society, but the whole tenor of his behavior must none the less betray the thinker, he must always be instructive, his way of judging a thing must even in the smallest matters be such that people can see what it will amount to when, quietly and self-collected, he puts this power to scholarly use.
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg— J 85 (Notebook J (1789))
One is rarely an impulsive innovator after the age of sixty, but one can still be a very fine orderly and inventive thinker. One rarely procreates children at that age, but one is all the more skilled at educating those who have already been procreated, and education is procreation of another kind.
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg— K 51 (Notebook K (1789-1793))
It is only the inferior thinker who hastens to explain the singular and the complex by the primitive shortcut of supernaturalism.
h. p. lovecraft— "The Temple" - Written 1920; first published in Weird Tales, 6 No. 3 (September 1925)
Marx's third volume [of Capital ] contradicts the first. The theory of the average rate of profit and of the prices of production cannot be reconciled with the theory of value. This is the impression which must, I believe, be received by every logical thinker.
karl marx— Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk (1896) Karl Marx and the Close of His System
The man of genius whether as artist or thinker requires a mass of accidental variations to select from and a rigidly selective process of attention.
boris sidis— p. 98 (The Foundations of Normal and Abnormal Psychology (1914))
Herbert Spencer is little read now. Philosophers do not regard him as a major thinker. Social Darwinism has long been in disrepute.
peter singer— Chapter 3, From Evolution To Ethics?, p. 61
The ploughman knows how many acres he shall upturn from dawn to sunset: but the thinker knows not what a day may bring forth.
john lancaster spalding— p. 136 (Aphorisms and Reflections (1901))
But Zarathustra made it clear in which direction the answer lay; it is towards the artist-psychologist, the intuitional thinker. There are very few such men in the world's literature; the great artists are not thinkers, the great thinkers are seldom artists.
colin wilson— p. 158 (The Outsider (1956))
It is also naïve empiricism to provide, in support of some argument, series of eloquent confirmatory quotes by dead authorities. By searching, you can always find someone who made a well-sounding statement that confirms your point of view and, on every topic, it is possible to find another dead thinker who said the exact opposite.
nassim nicholas taleb— Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan (2007), p. xxvii, footnote
I am utterly amazed, utterly enchanted! I have a precursor, and what a precursor! I hardly knew Spinoza : that I should have turned to him just now, was inspired by "instinct." Not only is his overtendency like mine namely to make all knowledge the most powerful affect but in five main points of his doctrine I recognize myself; this most unusual and loneliest thinker is closest to me precisely in these matters: he denies the freedom of the will, teleology, the moral world-order, the unegoistic, and evil.
— Friedrich Nietzsche, Postcard to Franz Overbeck, Sils-Maria (30 July 1881) as translated by Walter Kaufmann in The Portable Nietzsche (1954).
More than any other Hellenic thinker, Julian insisted on the virtue of paradox and on the importance of the search for religious truth.
— Gedaliahu A. G. Stroumsa, in Hidden Wisdom: Esoteric Traditions and the Roots of Christian Mysticism (2005)
To know yourself as the Being underneath the thinker , the stillness underneath the mental noise , the love and joy underneath the pain , is freedom , salvation, enlightenment .
— Eckhart Tolle, in Practicing the Power of Now: Essential Teachings, Meditations, and Exercises, (3 September 2010)], p.90
Truly, if at one time it was difficult to become a Christian, I believe now it becomes more difficult year by year, because it has now become so easy to become one; there is a bit of competition only in becoming a speculative thinker. … The thesis that God has existed in human form, was born, grew up; is certainly the paradox in the strictest sense, the absolute paradox.
— Søren Kierkegaard, in Concluding Unscientific Postscript to the Philosophical Fragments (1846), Part One – The Objective Issue Of The Truth Of Christianity
The dreamer whose dreams are non- utilitarian has no place in this world . In this world the poet is anathema, the thinker a fool , the artist an escapist , the man of vision a criminal .
— Henry Miller, in Quotes by Miller Henry, p.2
The Case for the Ephemeral. It is incomprehensible to me that any thinker can calmly call himself a modernist ; he might as well call himself a Thursdayite.
— G. K. Chesterton, in All Things Considered, p.1
He has no native Passion, because he is not a thinker & has probably weakened his Intellect by the haunting Fear of becoming extravagant.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge— Letter to William Sotheby (10 September 1802).
Whatever the thinker thinks, the Prover will prove. And if the thinker thinks passionately enough, the Prover will prove the thought so conclusively that you will never talk a person out of such a belief, even if it is something as remarkable as the notion that there is a gaseous vertebrate of astronomical heft (" GOD ") who will spend all eternity torturing people who do not believe in his religion.
robert anton wilson— Ch. 1 : The Thinker & The Prover, p. 28
