Thinker Quotes

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

Somewhere along the line, I conditioned myself to be a quick thinker. I take a step back and try to assess the situation, then make the best decision possible at the moment. ~ Jonathan Sadowski

When, despite considerable intelligence, a thinker cannot think straight, it becomes very likely that he cannot face his thoughts. ~ J. Budziszewski

If you allow the life to happen, by connecting with your inner world, then you don't have to worry about the changes with your perception or the change in the outside world. All you have to do is to follow your inner truth, to reach to your destination. ~ Roshan Sharma

The books that help you most are those which make you think the most. A great book that comes from a great thinker is a ship of thought, deep freighted with truth and beauty.
1810-1860, Minister ~ Theodore Parker

Now that you're an adult, you might still feel a pang of guilt when you decline a dinner invitation in favor of a good book. Or maybe you like to eat alone in restaurants and could do without the pitying looks from fellow diners. Or you're told that you're "in your head too much", a phrase that's often deployed against the quiet and cerebral.
Or maybe there's another word for such people: thinkers. ~ Susan Cain

Throughout history, independent minds have carried mankind forward. Whether they identified how to make fire or manufacture tools, develop rational philosophy or create man-glorifying art, pioneer scientific knowledge or invent the electric light, independent thinkers have created the goods on which human life and prosperity depend. ~ Andrew Bernstein

If you want to become a positive thinker, don't think lack, think abundance, for you and for everyone. Dream big; as bigger as the blue ocean. Become aware of your thoughts and you will be aware of yourself. ~ Israelmore Ayivor

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

We can applaud the state lottery as a public subsidy of intelligence, for it yields public income that is calculated to lighten the tax burden of us prudent abstainers at the expense of the benighted masses of wishful thinkers. ~ Willard Van Orman Quine

Rubens discovered a peculiar thing: memory does not make films, it makes photographs. What he recalled from any of the women were at most a few mental photographs. He didn't recall their coherent motions; he visualized even their short gestures not in all their fluent fullness, but only in the rigidity of a single second. His erotic memory provided him with a small album of pornographic pictures but no pornographic film. And when I say an album of pictures, that is an exaggeration, for all he had was some seven or eight photographs. These photos were beautiful, they fascinated him, but their number was after all depressingly limited: seven, eight fragments of less than a second each, that's what remained in his memory of his entire erotic life, to which he had once decided to devote all his strength and talent. I see Rubens sitting at a table with his head supported on the palm of his hand, looking like Rodin's Thinker. What is he thinking about? If he has made peace with the idea that his life has narrowed down to sexual experiences and these again to only seven still pictures, seven photographs, he would at least like to hope that in some corner of his memory there may be concealed some eighth, ninth, or tenth photograph. That's why he is sitting with his head leaning on the palm of his hand. He is once again trying to evoke individual women and find some forgotten photograph for each one of them. ~ Milan Kundera

Boom Boom, for instance, was an excellent outside-the-box thinker. Asa thought Boom Boom was a great strategist, and brilliant. The problem with Boom Boom is that he's kind of a creep. He had attracted the Academy's scouts when he built a bomb and blew up a bank. The feat had required certain mental abilities, but it also showed a deficit in others. Anyone who commits an act like that has issues with mentally putting themselves in other people's shoes. Boom Boom had also killed his childhood dog. Knowing these things made Asa uncomfortable around his former teammate. ~ Chad Leito

Attitude is the first quality that marks the successful man. If he has a positive attitude and is a positive thinker, who likes challenges and difficult situations, then he has half his success achieved. ~ John C. Maxwell

See who is the doubter, who is the thinker. It is the ego. Hold it; the other thoughts will die away - the ego will be left pure. See the source from where the ego arises and abide in it. That is pure consciousness. ~ Ramana Maharshi

The fact is, every thinker, every philosopher, the moment he is forced to abandon his one-sided intellectual occupation by practical necessity, immediately returns to the general point of view of mankind. ~ Ernst Mach

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' ~ Seth MacFarlane

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

Great thinkers think inductively, that is, they create solution and then seek out the problems that solution might solve; most companies think deductively, that is, defining a problem and then investigating different solutions. ~ Joey Reiman

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

What makes revolutionary thought unique is its clarity and dignity, and its clear grasp of freedom and justice: simple, clear words that are understood without the need for any help from elite writers or thinkers. ~ Nawal El Saadawi

Be an independent thinker at all times, and ignore anyone who attempts to define you in a limiting way. ~ Sherry Argov

God is the one great employer, thinker, planner, supervisor. ~ Henry Ward Beecher

This conversation revealed to Odo a third conception of the religious idea. In Piedmont religion imposed itself as a military discipline, the enforced duty of the Christian citizen to the heavenly state; to the Duke it was a means of purchasing spiritual immunity from the consequences of bodily weakness; to the Bishop, it replaced the panem et circenses of ancient Rome. Where, in all this, was the share of those whom Christ had come to save? Where was Saint Francis's devotion to his heavenly bride, the Lady Poverty? Though here and there a good parish priest like Crescenti ministered to the temporal wants of the peasantry, it was only the free-thinker and the atheist who, at the risk of life and fortune, laboured for their moral liberation. Odo listened with a saddened heart, thinking, as he followed his host through the perfumed shade of the gardens, and down ~ Edith Wharton

We are always in these days endeavoring to separate intellect and manual labor; we want one man to be always thinking, and another to be always working, and we call one a gentleman, and the other an operative; whereas the workman ought often to be thinking, and the thinker often to be working, and both should be gentlemen in the best sense. ~ John Ruskin

Hayek, in my view, is the leading economic thinker of the 20th century. ~ Vernon L. Smith

Clearly, Enlightenment thinkers were seeking a God substitute. ~ Nancy Pearcey

My paper has to be very long and complex," I said. "I shall cite all the great thinkers - Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud." "What about Adolf Hitler?" "Oh, him. He's not a thinker. He's just a ranter and raver." "There may come a time," said Pepi, "when people cannot tell the difference." "Impossible," I solemnly predicted. "I have read Hitler's book Mein Kampf and also some works by his colleague Herr Alfred Rosenberg because I am a fair-minded, objective person and I believe one should always hear out all sides before making a decision, and so I can tell you from firsthand knowledge that these men are idiots. Their ideas about how the Jews have poisoned their so-called superior Aryan race and caused all of Germany's troubles are utter nonsense. No intelligent person could possibly believe them. Hitler is laughable. He will soon disappear." "Just like all your old boyfriends," Pepi said with his sly smile. ~ Edith Hahn Beer

The herd instinct among forecasters makes sheep look like independent thinkers. ~ Edgar Fiedler

My weakness has always been to prefer the large intention of an unskilful artist to the trivial intention of an accomplished one: in other words, I am more interested in the high ideas of a feeble executant than in the high execution of a feeble thinker. ~ Thomas Hardy

The Logos was both that which thought, and the thing which it thought: thinker and thought together. The universe, then, is thinker and thought, and since we are part of it, we as humans are, in the final analysis, thoughts of and thinkers of those thoughts. ~ Philip K. Dick

Theism is a philosophy of non-thinker. ~ Debasish Mridha

Secret thinker sometimes listening aloud. ~ David Bowie

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

Michael Freeman was thirty-five years old – a former Special Forces soldier turned policeman. He was a tall and slim black man, with grey-flecked hair and dark almond-shaped eyes. His smile was tight-lipped – half knowing and half strategic. It hid a mouthful of craggy teeth. A childhood in Detroit's East Side with an aggressive, alcoholic father had taught him to play things close to his chest, to look and listen. His colleagues knew him as a patient thinker, sedulous, missing nothing given time. Intellectually savvy and emotionally guarded, he exuded certitude. In Afghanistan, in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, he spent several weeks as a mounted outlier with the Northern Alliance in the Alma Tak Mountains, beyond the range of reinforcement or rescue – drinking filtered ditchwater and eating nuts scavenged from corpses – and calling down massive airstrikes on Taliban positions. He gained a certain reputation. Word spread the length of the Darya Suf River valley, through the Tiangi Gap to the stronghold at Mazar-i-Sharif that there was a monster loose in the mountains and the Taliban called him 'bor-buka', which seemed to mean black or devil or whirlwind, and, at times, all of these things. ~ Simon Conway

A thinker will die, but his profound ideas have wings that fly forever. ~ Debasish Mridha

He is an emancipated thinker who is not afraid to write foolish things. ~ Anton Chekhov

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 Petrovich Mussorgsky

The most fluent talkers or most plausible reasoners are not always the justest thinkers. ~ William Hazlitt

I believe that our very survival depends upon us becoming better systems thinkers. ~ Margaret J. Wheatley

What matters is that she becomes an engaged lifelong learner and an adaptable thinker who can thrive in any environment and is comfortable dealing with other cultures. ~ Ben Green

Mr. Bush has squandered the hard-built paternity of 40 years. But so has the party, and so have its leaders. If they had pushed away for serious reasons, they could have separated the party's fortunes from the president's. This would have left a painfully broken party, but they wouldn't be left with a ruined brand,- as they all say, speaking the language of marketing. And they speak that language because they are marketers, not thinkers. Not serious about policy. Not serious about ideas. And not serious about leadership, only followership. ~ Peggy Noonan

Be an individual, let out the self that hides away at the expense of others approval. ~ Nikki Rowe

Sometimes you need to move away before you can see where you are ~ Benny Bellamacina

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. ~ Doug Wead

If Hegel had written the whole of his Logic and in the Preface disclosed the fact that it was only a thought-experiment (in which however at many points he had steered clear of many things), he would have been the greatest thinker who ever lived. As it is, he is merely comic. ~ Soren Kierkegaard

Lorenz was the charismatic, flamboyant thinker - he didn't conduct a single statistical analysis in his life - while Tinbergen did the nitty-gritty of actual data collection. ~ Frans De Waal

Look at things not as they are, but as they can be. Visualization adds value to everything. A big thinker always visualizes what can be done in the future. He isn't stuck with the present ~ David J. Schwartz

We feel an affinity with a certain thinker because we agree with him; or because he shows us what we were already thinking; or because he shows us in a more articulate form what we were already thinking; or because he shows us what we were on the point of thinking; or what we would sooner or later have thought; or what we would have thought much later if we hadn't read it now; or what we would have been likely to think but never would have thought if we hadn't read it now; or what we would have liked to think but never would have thought if we hadn't read it now. ~ Lydia Davis

It is a serious mistake to think that irrationalism opposes anything but thought to reason - whether it be the rights of the given, of the heart, of feeling, caprice or passion. In irrationalism we are concerned only
with thought, only with thinking. What is opposed to reason is thought itself; what is opposed to the reasonable being is the thinker
himself. ~ Gilles Deleuze

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. ~ John Polkinghorne

Give serious thought to why your company should care about your strategy. Specifically, find problems that the board wants to be solved. What are senior managers scared of? Part of becoming a credible strategic thinker is learning effective approaches to selling ideas for your situation. You'll know that you're getting better at selling (or pitching) strategy when managers start coming to you when there is strategic thinking to be done. ~ Max McKeown

The average person wastes his life. He has a great deal of energy but he wastes it. The life of an average person seems at the end utterly meaningless…without significance. When he looks back…what has he done?


MIND

The mind creates routine for its own safety and convenience. Tradition becomes our security. But when the mind is secure it is in decay. We all want to be famous people…and the moment we want to be something…we are no longer free.

Intelligence is the capacity to perceive the essential…the what is. It is only when the mind is free from the old that it meets everything new…and in that there's joy. To awaken this capacity in oneself and in others is real education.

SOCIETY

It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society. Nature is busy creating absolutely unique individuals…whereas culture has invented a single mold to which we must conform. A consistent thinker is a thoughtless person because he conforms to a pattern. He repeats phrases and thinks in a groove. What happens to your heart and your mind when you are merely imitative, naturally they wither, do they not?

The great enemy of mankind is superstition and belief which is the same thing. When you separate yourself by belief tradition by nationally it breeds violence. Despots are only the spokesmen for the attitude of domination and craving for power which is in the heart of almost everyone. Until the source is ~ Jiddu Krishnamurti

It was not by accident that the greatest thinkers of all ages were deeply religious souls. ~ Max Planck

He is the organiser of half that is evil and of nearly all that is undetected in [London]. He is a genius, a philosopher, an abstract thinker. He has a brain of the first order. Sherlock Holmes in 'The Final Problem ~ Anonymous

I strive to find materials that will engage students, expand their capacities as critical readers and thinkers, and feel immediately relevant to their daily lives and future work in court and social service systems. ~ Dean Spade

Narziss was dark and thin of face, and Goldmund open and radiant as a flower. Narziss was a thinker and anatomiser, Goldmund a dreamer and a child. Yet things common to both could bridge these differences. Both were knightly and delicate; both set apart by visible signs from their fellows, since both had received the particular admonishment of fate. ~ Hermann Hesse

A scientist is not to teach humans, but to serve humans A philosopher is not to teach humans, but to serve humans. A preacher is not to preach humans, but to serve humans. Any individual who possesses higher intellect than the general population, is meant to be at the forefront of service to humanity. ~ Abhijit Naskar

No movement for social change has ever succeeded without 'the militarism component' ... Thinkers may prepare revolutions, but bandits must carry them out ~ Ingrid Newkirk

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

First, he must hold rational values, and to do this he must be a thinker. ~ Andrew Bernstein

If you turn to a branch of those sciences that try to give a solution to the questions of life--to physiology, psychology, biology, sociology--there you will find an astounding poverty of thought, a very great lack of clarity, completely unjustified claims to answer questions that lie outside their subject and never-ending contradictions between one thinker and others, and even within himself.

If you turn to a branch of the sciences that is not concerned with solving the questions of life but answers its own scientific, specialized questions, then you are captivated by the power of human intellect but you know in advance that there are no answers to the questions of life.

These sciences directly ignore the questions of life.

They say, "We have no answers to 'What are you?' and 'Why do you live?' and are not concerned with this; but if you need to know the laws of light, of chemical compounds, the laws of the development of organisms, if you need to know the laws of bodies and their forms and the relation of numbers and quantities, if you need to know the laws of your own mind, to all that we have clear, precise, and unquestionable answers. ~ Leo Tolstoy

Many people have thought of me as a thinker, as a philosopher, or even as a mystic. Well the truth is that though I have found reality perplexing enough - in fact, I find it gets more perplexing all the time - I never think of myself as a thinker. ~ Jorge Luis Borges

Slow thinkers are part of the game too. Some of these slow thinkers can hit a ball a long way. ~ Alvin Dark

Creatures 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 James

I want to tell you something today, something that I have known for a long while, and you know it too; but perhaps you have never said it to yourself. I am going to tell you now what it is that I know about you and me and our fate. You, Harry, have been an artist and a thinker, a man full of joy and faith, always on the track of what is great and eternal, never content with the trivial and petty. But the more life has awakened you and brought you back to yourself, the greater has you need been and the deeper the sufferings and dread and despair that have overtaken you, till you were up to your neck in them. And all that you once knew and loved and revered as beautiful and sacred, all the belief you once had in mankind and our high destiny, has been of no avail and has lost its worth and gone to pieces. Your faith found no more air to breathe. And suffocation is a hard death. Is that true, Harry? Is that your fate? ~ Hermann Hesse

The great artist and thinker are the simplifiers. ~ Henri Frederic Amiel

A great thinker does not necessary have to discover a master idea but has to rediscover and to affirm a true but forgotten, ignored or misunderstood master idea and interpret it in all the diverse aspect of thought not previously done, in a powerful and consistent way, despite surrounding ignorance and opposition. ~ Wan Mohd Nor Wan Daud

For most people there is a fascinating inconsistency in the position of St. Francis. He expressed in loftier and bolder language than any earthly thinker the conception that laughter is as divine as tears. He called his monks the mountebanks of God. He never forgot to take pleasure in a bird as it flashed past him, or a drop of water as it fell from his finger; he was perhaps the happiest of the sons of men. Yet this man undoubtedly founded his whole polity on the negation of what we think of the most imperious necessities; in his three vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience he denied to himself, and those he loved most, property, love, and liberty. Why was it that the most large-hearted and poetic spirits in that age found their most congenial atmosphere in these awful renunciations? Why did he who loved where all men were blind, seek to blind himself where all men loved? Why was he a monk and not a troubadour? We have a suspicion that if these questions were answered we should suddenly find that much of the enigma of this sullen time of ours was answered also. ~ G.K. Chesterton

When a great war has cut off the young men of a nation it never can be told thereafter what losses of scholars, poets, thinkers and great designers the country and the world have suffered. ~ James Vila Blake

I've spent most of my life trying to think my way to happiness, and my failure to achieve that goal only proves, in my mind, that I am not a good enough thinker. It never occurred to me that the source of my unhappiness is not flawed thinking but thinking itself. ~ Eric Weiner

I am neither a philosopher nor a thinker, but simply follower of my own thoughts. ~ M.F. Moonzajer

Many a serious thinker has been produced in prisons, where we have nothing to do but think. ~ Robert Greene

We forget that we create the situations, then we give our power away by blaming the other person for our frustration. No person, no place, and no thing has any power over us, for "we" are the only thinkers in our mind. We create our experiences, our reality, and everyone in it. When we create peace and harmony and balance in our mind, we will find it in our lives. ~ Louise Hay

I'm not my thoughts, I'm the thinker who has those thoughts. ~ Deepak Chopra

In the last century the Arab thinker Jamal al-Afghani wrote: 'Every Muslim is sick and his only remedy is in the Koran.' Unfortunately the sickness gets worse the more the remedy is taken. ~ Conor Cruise O'Brien

Every great thinker is someone else's moron. ~ Umberto Eco

Z is for Zany! Master the Zany habit of thinking backwards. it will help you become a really great thinker! ~ Lucas Remmerswaal

And the final product of our training must be neither a psychologist nor a brick mason, but a man. And to make men, we must have ideals, broad, pure, and inspiring ends of living, not sordid money-getting ... The worker must work for the glory of his handiwork, not simply for pay; the thinker must think for truth, not fame. ~ W.E.B. Du Bois

The biggest thinker that's influenced my feminism is definitely Bell Hooks, who's a feminist cultural critic, because of her accessibility but also just because she's a genius. ~ Jessica Valenti

At no time am I a quick thinker or writer: whatever I have done in science has solely been by long pondering, patience and industry. ~ Charles Darwin

It is largely because the free-thinkers, as a school, have hardly made up their minds whether they want to be more optimist or more pessimist than Christianity that their small but sincere movement has failed. ~ G.K. Chesterton

You can't put a leash on me. I'm unleashable! ~ Tiffany Winfree

When you recognize that there is a voice in your head that pretends to be you and never stops speaking, you are awakening out of your unconscious identification with the stream of thinking. When you notice that voice, you realize that who you are is not the voice - the thinker - but the one who is aware of it. ~ Eckhart Tolle

Silence is downright noisy when you're a loud thinker like I am. Alone and quiet, it's like a networking event in my mind all the time. ~ Jarod Kintz

Almost all rich veins of original and striking speculation have been opened by systematic half-thinkers. ~ John Stuart Mill

The world is a strange place for humans like me, we don't really belong anywhere but we fit everywhere. We carry a depth, thay most get high to reach - we're busy creating magic whilst half the world is building wars. ~ Nikki Rowe

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

The time for thinkers has come. ~ Mary Baker Eddy

Freedom of speech is detestable only to those who have no desire to think for themselves. ~ Criss Jami

For the thinker, as for the artist, what counts in life is not the number of rare and exciting adventures he encounters, but the inner depth in that life, by which something great may be made out of even the paltriest and most banal of occurrences. ~ William Barrett

He wasn't a hero, or an original thinker. His beliefs were their beliefs, their way of talking was his way of talking. He was on their side. He was one of them. If he stumbled over a phrase or a name, he would grin and try again, and they would smile with ~ David McCullough

When God lets loose a great thinker on this planet, then all things are at risk. There is not a piece of science but its flank may be turned to-morrow; nor any literary reputation or the so-called eternal names of fame that many not be refused and condemned. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

A charlatan makes obscure what is clear; a thinker makes clear what is obscure. ~ Hugh Kingsmill

If you're an over thinker or try to anticipate every barrier-before beginning, ask yourself, if I had to accomplish this project in three steps or less, what would they be? ~ Lisa A. Mininni

You see, the future is a kind of stew, a soup, a vichyssoise of the present and the past. That's how you get the future: You mix up everything you did today with everything you did yesterday and all the days before and everything everyone you ever met did and anyone they ever met, too. And salt and lizard and pearl and umbrellas and typewriters and a lot of other things I'm not at liberty to tell you, because I took vows, and a witch's vows have teeth. Magic is funny like that. It's not a linear thinker. The point is if you mash it all up together and you have a big enough pot and you're very good at witchcraft, you can wind up with a cauldron full of tomorrow. ~ Catherynne M Valente

I'm a very organised and rational and linear thinker, and you have to stop all that to write a novel. ~ Hilary Mantel

Our century is a brutal thinker. ~ Pierre-Jean De Beranger

The thinker dies, but his thoughts are beyond the reach of destruction. Men are mortal; but ideas are immortal. ~ Richard Adams

He will long be remembered as one of the great Christian thinkers of our century, with a childlike faith and a profound compassion toward others. It can rarely be said of an individual that his life touched many others and affected them for the better; it will be said of Francis Schaeffer that his life touched millions of souls and brought them to the truth of their creator. ~ Ronald Reagan

In Henry Adams, I discovered not only the prototype of the modern thinker but also someone who is more interesting: a viper-toothed, puling, supercilious crank, thwarted in ambition, aging gracelessly, mad at the cosmos, and ashamed of his own jejune ideals. He is nevertheless very dear to me. ~ P. J. O'Rourke