An original thinker and able teacher very soon attracts a large class and vice versa.
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The greatest challenge to any thinker is stating the problem in a way that will allow a solution.
Every thinker puts some portion of an apparently stable world in peril and no one can wholly predict what will emerge in its place.
john deweyJurgen 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 .
I approach the presentation of Kierkegaard with some trepidation. Next to Nietzsche, or rather, prior to Nietzsche, I consider him to be the most important thinker of our post-Kantian age. With Goethe and Hegel, an epoch had reached its conclusion, and our prevalent way of thinking — that is, the positivistic, natural-scientific one — cannot really be considered as philosophy.
karl jaspersI wouldn't say I was a born writer; I'm a born thinker.
John LennonIn 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'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 pratchettAfter 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 baconOne 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 borgesOwnership 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 carrollCreatures extremely low in the intellectual scale may have conception. All that is required is that they should recognize the same experience again. A polyp would be a conceptual thinker if a feeling of 'Hello! thingumbob again!' ever flitted through its mind.
william jamesIs there a thinker apart from thought?
jiddu krishnamurtiOne 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 LichtenbergOne 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 LichtenbergIt is only the inferior thinker who hastens to explain the singular and the complex by the primitive shortcut of supernaturalism.
h. p. lovecraftThe 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 sidisHerbert Spencer is little read now. Philosophers do not regard him as a major thinker. Social Darwinism has long been in disrepute.
peter singerThe 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 spaldingBut 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 wilsonIt 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 talebI 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.
More than any other Hellenic thinker, Julian insisted on the virtue of paradox and on the importance of the search for religious truth.
Lao-tse may be regarded as the deepest thinker of Chinese antiquity.
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.
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 .
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.
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