Thinker Quotes - Page 26

• Great innovators and original thinkers and artists attract the wrath of mediocrities as lightning rods draw the flashes.

  Theodor Reik

  Creativity, Artist, Wrath

  Theodor Reik (1963). “The Need to be Loved”

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• Giorgio Agamben is possibly the most delicate and probing thinker since Walter Benjamin.

  Avital Ronell

  Delicate, Probing

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• Every morning you have a choice. Are you going to be a positive thinker or a negative thinker? Positive thinking will energize you.

  Jon Gordon

  Morning, Positive Thinking, Choices

  Jon Gordon (2015). “The Energy Bus: 10 Rules to Fuel Your Life, Work, and Team with Positive Energy”, p.8, John Wiley & Sons

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• I wish to fill in the gaps which have so far always remained unanswered in the souls of men as burning questions, and which never leave any serious thinker in peace, if he honestly seeks the Truth.

  Abd-ru-shin

  Men, Soul, Wish

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• Thinkers are not a welcome addition to most social situations.

  Terence McKenna

  Thinking, Welcome, Social

  Interview with Tom Hodgkinson (1993) as quoted in Tom Hodgkinson "How to be idle", 2004.

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• 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

  Views, Opposites, Support

  Nassim Nicholas Taleb (2010). “The Black Swan: Second Edition: The Impact of the Highly ImprobableFragility"”, p.32, Random House

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• 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

  Believe, Thinking, People

  "Prometheus Rising" by Robert Anton Wilson, Ch. 1, (p. 28), 1983.

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• From Gadamer I learned that to understand a given thinker requires one to presuppose that he is right.

  Hans-Georg Gadamer

  Given

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• Only in the Roman Empire and in Spain under Arab domination has culture been a potent factor. Under the Arab, the standard attained was wholly admirable; to Spain flocked the greatest scientists, thinkers, astronomers, and mathematicians of the world, and side by side there flourished a spirit of sweet human tolerance and a sense of purist chivalry. Then with the advent of Christianity, came the barbarians.

  Adolf Hitler

  Sweet, Tolerance, World

  "Hitler's secret Conversations". Book by H R Trevor-Roper, p. 542, 1953.

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• I don't believe that we are what we do although many thinkers argue otherwise. I believe that what we do is, very often, a poor approximation of what we are -- an imperfect manifestation of a much better totality. Even the best of us sometimes bite off, as it were, less than we can chew.

  Donald Barthelme

  Believe, Arguing, Action

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• His [Turgot's] first important literary and scholastic effort was a treatise On the Existence of God. Few fragments of it remain, but we are helped to understand him when we learn that he asserted, and to the end of his life maintained, his belief in an Almighty Creator and Upholder of the Universe. It did, indeed, at a later period suit the purposes of his enemies, exasperated by his tolerant spirit and his reforming plans, to proclaim him an atheist; but that sort of charge has been the commonest of missiles against troublesome thinkers in all times.

  Andrew Dickson White

  Atheist, Effort, Enemy

  "Seven Great Statesmen in the Warfare of Humanity with Unreason". Book by Andrew Dickson White, pp. 167-168, 1915.

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• 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

  Sunset, May, Dawn

  John Lancaster Spalding (1901). “Aphorisms and Reflections: Conduct, Culture and Religion”

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• Continental thinkers have been obsessed with bourgeois man as representing the worst and most contemptible failure of modernity, which must at all costs be overcome. Nihilism in its most palpable sense means that the bourgeois has won, that the future, all foreseeable futures, belong to him, that all heights above him and all depths beneath him are illusory and that life is not worth living on these terms.

  Allan Bloom

  Mean, Men, Nihilism

  "The Closing of the American Mind". Book by Allan Bloom, pp. 157-158, 1987.

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• Herbert Spencer is little read now. Philosophers do not regard him as a major thinker. Social Darwinism has long been in disrepute.

  Peter Singer

  Long, Littles, Philosopher

  Peter Singer (2011). “The Expanding Circle: Ethics, Evolution, and Moral Progress”, p.61, Princeton University Press

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• Men of learning are those who have read the contents of books. Thinkers, geniuses, and those who have enlightened the world and furthered the race of men, are those who have made direct use
  of the book of the world.

  Arthur Schopenhauer

  Book, Men, Race

  Arthur Schopenhauer (2015). “Essays of Schopenhauer”, p.83, Sheba Blake Publishing

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• I'm not a writer because I want to make money. I'm a writer because I'm a very slow thinker, but I do care about thinking, and the only way I know how to think with any kind of finesse is by telling stories.

  Gregory Maguire

  Thinking, Stories, Care

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• The consciousness of the seer, is a greater power for knowledge than the consciousness of the thinker. The perceptual power of the inner sight is greater and more direct than the perceptual power of thought.

  Sri Aurobindo

  Sight, Consciousness, Power Of Thought

  Sri Aurobindo (1990). “The Life Divine”, p.897, Lotus Press

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• Every philosophical thinker hails it [The Origin of Species] as a veritable Whitworth gun in the armoury of liberalism.

  Thomas Huxley

  Philosophical, Gun, Philosopher

  "Lay Sermons, Addresses, and Reviews".

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• Historically the most striking result of Kant's labors was the rapid separation of the thinkers of his own nation and, though less completely, of the world, into two parties;-the philosophers and the scientists.

  Lawrence Joseph Henderson

  Party, Science, Two

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• The dignity of man is vindicated as much by the thinker and poet as by the statesman and soldier.

  James Bryant Conant

  Men, Soldier, Dignity

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• Leonardo da Vinci, one of the greatest creative thinkers of all time, strongly recommended the habit of meditation in the dark. He wrote: "For I have found in my own experience that it is of no small benefit, when you lie in bed in the dark, to recall in imagination, one after another, the outlines of the form you have been studying." He often awoke to find his problems solved. Da Vinci would often stand silent and motionless before a painting for hours, without using his brush, as though waiting for spiritual guidance.

  Wilferd Peterson

  Spiritual, Lying, Dark

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• Positive thinkers think and talk continually about solutions, and negative thinkers continually talk and think about problems. Keep your mind solution-focuse d rather than problem- focused.

  Brian Tracy

  Thinking, Mind, Negative

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• I'm not afraid of facts, I welcome facts but a congeries of facts is not equivalent to an idea. This is the essential fallacy of the so-called "scientific" mind. People who mistake facts for ideas are incomplete thinkers; they are gossips.

  Cynthia Ozick

  Mistake, Ideas, People

  Quoted in Francis Klagsbrun's TheFirst Ms. Reader We are the Crazy Lady and Other Feisty Feminist Fables (p. 67)

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• The most fluent talkers or most plausible reasoners are not always the justest thinkers.

  William Hazlitt

  Talkers, Fluent, Plausible

  William Hazlitt (1839). “Sketches and Essays by W. H. Now first collected [and edited] by his son”, p.95

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• In this distribution of functions, the scholar is the delegated intellect. In the right state, he is, Man Thinking. In the degenerate state, when the victim of society, he tends to become a mere thinker, or, still worse, the parrot of other men's thinking.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Thinking, Men, Degenerates

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1866). “The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson: Comprising His Essays, Lectures, Poems, and Orations”, p.175

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