Thinker Quotes

I wouldn't say I was a born writer; I'm a born thinker.

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

Thinkers are not a welcome addition to most social situations.

He was a 'how' thinker, not an 'if' thinker.

The man of action has the present, but the thinker controls the future.

Politicians cannot create jobs or wealth. Such is axiomatic to straight thinkers.

Negative thinkers always have a negative vision.

The vertical thinker says: 'I know what I am looking for.' The lateral thinker says: 'I am looking but I won't know what I am looking for until I have found it.'

If you are a thinker, you will change the language. You will not use words the way others do.

Most thinkers write badly, because they communicate not only their thoughts, but also the thinking of them.

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.

Thinkers are as scarce as gold.

The talkers are rising above the thinkers.

Some thinkers would feel sorely hampered if at liberty to use no forms but such as existed in nature, or to invent nothing save in accordance with the laws of the world of the senses; but it must not therefore be imagined that they desire escape from the region of law.

I think that my work is easy to understand because I am not a thinker, I am not a... How can I put it? I write the way I perceive, I guess.

I am a very linear thinker, so I write beginning to end. I write hundreds of pages per book that never make it into print

Thinking should be like musical meditation. Has any philosopher pursued a thought to its limits the way Bach or Beethoven develop and exhaust a musical theme? Even after having read the most profound thinkers, one still feels the need to begin anew. Only music gives definitive answers.

If the history of resistance to Darwinian thinking is a good measure, we can expect that long into the future, long after every triumph of human thought has been matched or surpassed by 'mere machines,' there will still be thinkers who insist that the human mind works in mysterious ways that no science can comprehend.

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

You can't be a good writer without being a good thinker.

Avoid the precepts of those thinkers whose reasoning is not confirmed by experience.

I think it's true that for existentialist thinkers, appreciation of what we are - free, makers of meaning, 'issues' for ourselves, and so on - is at the same time a recognition of how we should try to live.

Writers read essays and serious thinkers and serious readers... that is a small population.

Racial history is therefore natural history and the mysticism of the soul at one and the same time; but the history of the religion of the blood, conversely, is the great world story of the rise and downfall of peoples, their heroes and thinkers, their inventors and artists.

But whenever one meets modern thinkers (as one often does) progressing toward a madhouse, one always finds, on inquiry, that they have just had a splendid escape from another madhouse. Thus, hundreds of people become Socialists, not because they have tried Socialism and found it nice, but because they have tried Individualism and found it particularly nasty.

Two-factor economics makes it clear that our economic problem is not what one-factor (labor-centric) thinkers assert: an inequitable distribution of income. It is an inequitable distribution of productive power, from which an unworkable distribution of income results.

It is characteristic of fundamental discoveries, of great achievements of the intellect, that they retain an undiminished power upon the imagination of the thinker. The memorable experiment of Faraday with a disc rotating between two poles of a magnet, which has borne such magnificent fruit, has long passed into every-day experience; yet there are certain features about this embryo of the present dynamos and motors which even today appear to us striking, and are worthy of the most careful study.

Make a list of your friends and determine who is the most positive thinker among them and deliberately cultivate his society.

To neglect the wise sayings of great thinkers is to deny ourselves the truest education.

Since Khomeini's death, the popular appeal of an Islamic state - and of fundamentalism - has surely dimmed. Thinkers still debate and warriors kill, but no country seems prepared to emulate Iran. Perhaps revolutions happen only under majestic leaders, and no one like Khomeini has since appeared.

There is a tendency among many shallow thinkers of our day to teach that every human act is a reflex, over which we do not exercise human control. They would rate a generous deed as no more praiseworthy than a wink, a crime as no more voluntary than a sneeze. . . Such a philosophy undercuts all human dignity. . . All of us have the power of choice in action at every moment of our lives.

[John] Calvin is revered as a thinker of immense importance in Reformed thought, Jonathan Edwards could say in his preface to his treatise on Freedom of the Will that he had derived none of his views from the work of Calvin, though he was willing to be called a "Calvinist" for the sake of convention.

For the individual, as I can testify, a brief grounding in semantics, besides making philosophy unreadable, makes unreadable most political speeches, classical economic theory, after-dinner oratory, diplomatic notes, newspaper editorials, treatises on pedagogics and education, expert financial comment, dissertations on money and credit, accounts of debates, and Great Thoughts from Great Thinkers in general. You would be surprised at the amount of time this saves.

Why is it that many contemporary male thinkers, especially men of color, repudiate the imperialist legacy of Columbus but affirm dimensions of that legacy by their refusal to repudiate patriarchy?

I had a friend in college who loved to say: 'If you can dream it, you can do it.' It became my mantra. I assumed it was a pearl of wisdom from some great thinker, a philosopher perhaps, like Descartes. It turned out to be Walt Disney, which in no way diminishes the wisdom of the advice. Anyone who can build a Magic Kingdom deserves to be listened to.

It must be noted that it is often the colleague or direct disciple of a new thinker who gets stuck in literal interpretations of the work, tending to freeze the new ideas and language into an inflexible, static condition.

The greatest challenge to any thinker is stating the problem in a way that will allow a solution.

The thinker makes a great mistake when he asks after cause and effect. They both together make up the indivisible phenomenon.

Zig Ziglar may be the master motivator, Mark Victor Hansen and Jack Canfield of Chicken Soup for the Soul, the master story tellers; Anthony Robbins may be the guru of personal development, but Bob Proctor is a master thinker. When it comes to systemizing life, no one can touch him.

We learn that many great thinkers were convinced that the Bible contained the Ancient Mysteries, but not in the literal words—that the words on the pages were codes, and that the Bible is comprised of heavy-handed and useless story covering up something much more important and interesting. I get the feeling that [Dan Brown] is trying to tell me something, but I am not biting, reader.

Bottom up thinkers try to start from experience and move from experience to understanding. They don't start with certain general principles they think beforehand are likely to be true; they just hope to find out what reality is like.

The mind of the thinker and the student is driven to admit, though it be awe-struck by apparent injustice, that this inequality is the work of God. Make all men equal to-day, and God has so created them that they shall be all unequal to-morrow.

Many highly intelligent people are poor thinkers. Many people of average intelligence are skilled thinkers. The power of a car is separate from the way the car is driven.

I feel that I've often pointed out that there are countless aspects of life and nature that scientists and scientific thinkers cannot explain. Why the universe is accelerating in its expansion and what came before the Big Bang serve as compelling examples. The process of science provides a way to seek answers to those questions.

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.

The doer and the thinker, no allowances for the other, as the failing light illuminates the mercenaries creed.

God be thanked for the thinkers of good and noble thoughts! It wakes up all the best in ourselves, to come into close contact with others greater and better in every way than we are.

Never hide things from hardcore thinkers. They get more aggravated, more provoked by confusion than the most painful truths.

It seemed perfectly possible that, in spite of my certainty of my own genius, I might die of some illness, or perhaps even in a street accident, before I had ever glimpsed the meaning of life. My moods of happiness and self-confidence convinced me that I had a "destiny" to become a famous writer, and to be remembered as one of the most important thinkers of the century.

I do not believe in God. I'm an atheist. I consider myself a critical thinker, and it fascinates me that in the 21st century most people still believe in, as George Carlin puts it, 'the invisible man living in the sky'