Thinker Quotes - Page 15

• Behind the October Revolution there are more influential personalities than the thinkers and executors of Marxism.

  Vladimir Lenin

  October Revolution, Personality, Influential

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• Each state of the human mind has some parable in the physical creation by which it is shadowed forth; nor is it only artists and poets, but even the most abstract thinkers that have drawn from this source. Lively activity we name fire; time is a stream that rolls on, sweeping all before it; eternity is a circle; a mystery is hid in midnight gloom, and truth dwells in the sun. Nay, I begin to believe that even the future destiny of the human race is prefigured in the dark oracular utterances of bodily creation.

  Friedrich Schiller

  Believe, Dark, Destiny

  Friedrich Schiller (1884). “Works”

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• To the thinker, the most trifling external object often suggests ideas, which, like Homer's chain, extend, link after link, from earth to heaven.

  Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

  Ideas, Heaven, Links

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• Just look at life with more playful eyes. Don't be serious. Seriousness becomes like a blindness. Don't pretend to be a thinker, a philosopher. Just simply be a human being. The whole world is showering its joy on you in so many ways, but if you are too serious, you cannot open your heart.

  Rajneesh

  Life, Heart, Eye

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• But the disappearance of the effort to let go is precisely the disappearance of the separate thinker, of the ego trying to watch the mind without interfering.

  Alan Watts

  Letting Go, Effort, Ego

  Alan Watts (1973). “This is It, and Other Essays on Zen and Spiritual Experience”, Vintage

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• Early Chinese thinkers had taken variety at face value. They had favored diversification and collected anomalies instead of trying to explain them away.

  Paul Feyerabend

  Taken, Chinese, Trying

  "Conquest of Abundance: A Tale of Abstraction Versus the Richness of Richness". Book by Paul Feyerabend, 1999.

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• The most agreeable of all companions is a simple, frank man, without any high pretensions to an oppressive greatness; one who loves life, and understands the use of it; obliging alike at all hours; above all, of a golden temper and steadfast as an anchor. For such an one we gladly exchange the greatest genius, the most brilliant wit, the profoundest thinker.

  Gotthold Ephraim Lessing

  Love Life, Simple, Greatness

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• As thinkers, mankind has ever divided into two sects, Materialists and Idealists; the first class founding on experience, the second on consciousness; the first class beginning to think from the data of the senses, the second class perceive that the senses are not final and say, The senses give us representations of things, but what are the things themselves, they cannot tell. The materialist insists on facts, on history, on the force of circumstances and the animal wants of man; the idealists on the power of Thought and Will, on inspiration, on miracle, on individual culture.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Inspiration, Men, Thinking

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Illustrated)”, p.4265, Delphi Classics

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• You can have a team of unconventional thinkers, as well as conventional thinkers. If you don't have the support of others you cannot achieve anything altogether on your own. It's like a cry in the wilderness. In each instance there were others who could see the same thing, and there were others who could not. It's an obvious difference we see in those who you might say have a bird's eye view, and those who have a worm's eye view. I've come to realize that we all have a different mind set, we all see things differently, and that's what the human condition is really all about.

  Jonas Salk

  Team, Eye, Differences

  "Congressional Gold Medal". The Academy of Achievement interview, www.achievement.org. May 16, 1991.

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• What a dissimilarity we see in walking, swimming, and flying. And yet it is one and the same motion: it is just that the load- bearing capacity of the earth differs from that of the water, and that that of the water differs from that of the air! Thus we should also learn to fly as thinkers--and not imagine that we are thereby becoming idle dreamers!

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Swimming, Air, Water

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• How can anyone become a thinker unless he spends at least a third of every day away from passions, people, and books?

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Book, Passion, People

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• ... if we take the universe of 'fitting,' countless coats 'fit' backs, and countless boots 'fit' feet, on which they are not practically fitted; countless stones 'fit' gaps in walls into which no one seeks to fit them actually. In the same way countless opinions 'fit' realities, and countless truths are valid, tho no thinker ever thinks them.

  William James

  Wall, Truth, Reality

  William James (2015). “The Meaning of Truth: Human Understanding”, p.77, 谷月社

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• Sinclair Lewis is the perfect example of the false sense of time of the newspaper world.... [ellipsis in source] He was always dominated by an artificial time when he wrote Main Street.... He did not create actual human beings at any time. That is what makes it newspaper. Sinclair Lewis is the typical newspaperman and everything he says is newspaper. The difference between a thinker and a newspaperman is that a thinker enters right into things, a newspaperman is superficial.

  Gertrude Stein

  Thoughtful, Thinking, Differences

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• Apart from letters, it is the vulgar custom of the moment to deride the thinkers of the Victorian and Edwardian eras; yet there has not been, in all history, another agewhen so much sheer mental energy was directed toward creating a fairer social order.

  Ellen Glasgow

  Thoughtful, Thinking, Order

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• Tragedy is always a mistake; and the loneliness of the deepest thinker, the widest lover, ceases to be pathetic to us so soon as the sun is high enough above the mountains.

  Margaret Fuller

  Mistake, Loneliness, Mountain

  Margaret Fuller, Arthur Buckminster Fuller (1874). “Memoirs, [ed.] by R.W. Emerson, W.H. Channing, and J.F. Clarke”, p.173

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• If we allow ourselves to dwell on negatives, on hurts, on mistreatments, we will be negative thinkers. So be open to positive thinking, THINK BIG!

  Benjamin Carson

  Hurt, Positive Thinking, Negative

  "Think Big: Unleashing Your Potential for Excellence". Book by Ben Carson and Cecil Murphey, 1996.

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• One might feel that, at my age, I should look on life with more gravity. After all, I've been privileged to listen, firsthand, tosome of the most profound thinkers of my daywho were all beset by gloom over the condition the world had gotten into. Then why can't I view it with anything but amusement?

  Anita Loos

  Funny, Thoughtful, Thinking

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• It would much conduce to the public benefit, if, instead of discouraging free-thinking, there was erected in the midst of this free country a dianoetic academy, or seminary for free-thinkers, provided with retired chambers, and galleries, and shady walks and groves, where, after seven years spent in silence and meditation, a man might commence a genuine free-thinker, and from that time forward, have license to think what he pleased, and a badge to distinguish him from counterfeits.

  George Berkeley

  Country, Men, Thinking

  George Berkeley (1732). “Alciphron: Or, The Minute Philosopher. In Seven Dialogues. Containing an Apology for the Christian Religion Against Those who are Called Free-thinkers ...”, p.216

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• If only the sun-drenched celebrities are being noticed and worshiped, then our children are going to have a tough time seeing the value in the shadows, where the thinkers, probers and scientists are keeping society together.

  Rita Dove

  Children, Tough Times, Shadow

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• Missionaries, whether of philosophy or religion, rarely make rapid way, unless their preachings fall in with the prepossessions ofthe multitude of shallow thinkers, or can be made to serve as a stalking-horse for the promotion of the practical aims of the still larger multitude, who do not profess to think much, but are quite certain they want a great deal.

  Thomas Huxley

  Horse, Philosophy, Fall

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• You have to give credit where credit's due. Steve [Jobs] has been probably the single hardware/software forward-looking thinker and executor in our lifetime as an individual. He's quite a brilliant innovator.

  Christopher Galvin

  Jobs, Giving, Credit

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• Deep thinkers who look everywhere for the mysterious causes of poverty, ignorance, crime and war need look no further than their own mirrors. We are all born into this world poor and ignorant, and with thoroughly selfish and barbaric impulses. Those of us who turn out any other way do so largely through the efforts of others, who civilized us before we got big enough to do too much damage to the world or ourselves.

  Thomas Sowell

  War, Selfish, Ignorance

  Thomas Sowell (1987). “Compassion Versus Guilt and Other Essays”, William Morrow

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• A crowd of grade-three thinkers, all shouting the same thing, all warming their hands at the fire of their own prejudices, will not thank you for pointing out the contradictions in their beliefs. Man is a gregarious animal, and enjoys agreement as cows will graze all the same way on the side of a hill.

  William Golding

  Animal, Men, Fire

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• The scientists from Franklin to Morse were clear thinkers and did not produce erroneous theories. The scientists of today think deeply instead of clearly. One must be sane to think clearly, but one can think deeply and be quite insane. Today's scientists have substituted mathematics for experiments, and they wander off through equation after equation, and eventually build a structure which has no relation to reality.

  Nikola Tesla

  Reality, Thinking, Insane

  "Radio Power Will Revolutionize the World". Modern Mechanics and Inventions, July 1934.

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• Once we have found ourselves, we must understand how from time to time to lose--and then to find--ourselves once again: assuming,that is, that we are thinkers. For a thinker it is a drawback to be bound to a single person all the time.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Time, Personality, Assuming

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