Thinker Quotes - Page 5

• Even today, in retirement, I find it very distracting if there is conversation during a run. I work out as much for my head as I do for my body. I'm a thinker. A lot of my ideas come to me more easily when I am running. That is why I like to run in the morning.

  Grete Waitz

  Inspirational, Running, Morning

  "On The Run: Exercise and Fitness for Busy People".

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• The chimpanzee and the human share about 99.5 percent of their evolutionary history, yet most human thinkers regard the chimp as a malformed, irrelevant oddity, while seeing themselves as stepping stones to the Almighty.

  Robert Trivers

  Oddities, Atheism, Stones

  7 Copy quote

• I believe that pity is a law like justice, and that kindness is a duty like uprightness. That which is weak has a right to the kindness and pity of that which is strong. In the relations of man with the animals...there is a great ethic, scarcely perceived as yet, which will at length break through into the light, and which will be the corollary and the complement to humans ethics. Are there not here unsounded depths for the thinker? Is one to think oneself mad because one has the sentiment of universal pity in one's heart?

  Victor Hugo

  Strong, Kindness, Believe

  9 Copy quote

• I think you must remember that a writer is a simple-minded person to begin with and go on that basis. He's not a great mind, he's not a great thinker, he's not a great philosopher, he's a story-teller.

  Erskine Caldwell

  Writing, Thinking, Simple

  Erskine Caldwell (1988). “Conversations with Erskine Caldwell”, p.51, Univ. Press of Mississippi

  17 Copy quote

  Show source

• I will spark a generation of thinkers who will question traditional thought until they find the absolute truth.

  Kanye West

  Conceited, Generations, Sparks

  "Kanye West Sounds Off About Himself (Again) In E-mail To Media" by Shaheem Reid, www.mtv.com. January 29, 2009.

  11 Copy quote

  Show source

• Reincarnation contains a most comforting explanation of reality by means of which Indian thought surmounts difficulties which baffle the thinkers of Europe.

  Albert Schweitzer

  Mean, Reality, Europe

  9 Copy quote

• The doctrine of transmigration… was a means of constructing a plausible vindication of the ways of the cosmos to man; … none but very hasty thinkers will reject it on the grounds of inherent absurdity.

  Thomas Huxley

  Mean, Men, Way

  6 Copy quote

• Almost all rich veins of original and striking speculation have been opened by systematic half-thinkers.

  John Stuart Mill

  Intellectual, Intelligence, Veins

  John Stuart Mill (2008). “Utilitarianism and On Liberty: Including 'Essay on Bentham' and Selections from the Writings of Jeremy Bentham and John Austin”, p.67, John Wiley & Sons

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• [T]he influence of the German school is most obvious in relation to the contract theory of the origin of the state and the idea of the function of the state. The theory that the state originates in an agreement between men was assailed by the German thinkers and the historical, organic, evolutionary idea substituted for it.

  Charles Edward Merriam

  School, Men, Ideas

  4 Copy quote

• The world's greatest thinkers have often been amateurs; for high thinking is the outcome of fine and independent living, and for that a professional chair offers no special opportunities.

  Havelock Ellis

  Independent, Opportunity, Thinking

  4 Copy quote

• Since my first discussions of ecological problems with Professor John Day around 1950 and since reading Konrad Lorenz's "King Solomon's Ring," I have become increasingly interested in the study of animals for what they might teach us about man, and the study of man as an animal. I have become increasingly disenchanted with what the thinkers of the so-called Age of Enlightenment tell us about the nature of man, and with what the formal religions and doctrinaire political theorists tell us about the same subject.

  Allan McLeod Cormack

  Kings, Reading, Science

  52 Copy quote

• All of the people in my life whom I consider to be close friends or colleagues are good thinkers.

  John C. Maxwell

  Leadership, People, Close Friends

  John C. Maxwell (2009). “How Successful People Think: Change Your Thinking, Change Your Life”, p.8, Hachette UK

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Every great thinker is someone else's moron.

  Umberto Eco

  Insult, Moron, Great Thinkers

  Umberto Eco (2007). “Foucault's Pendulum”, p.76, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  45 Copy quote

  Show source

• If you want a convincing account of just how deep the shift in our new axial age is and must be, look no further than this brilliant book by Charles Eisenstein, one of the deepest integrative thinkers active today.

  Michel Bauwens

  Book, Age, Looks

  7 Copy quote

• Through books you will meet poets and novelists whose creations will fire your imagination. You will meet the great thinkers who will share with you their philosophies, their concepts of the world, of humanity and of creation. You will learn about events that have shaped our history, of deeds both noble and ignoble. All of this knowledge is yours for the taking… Your library is a storehouse for mind and spirit. Use it well.

  Neil Armstrong

  Philosophy, Book, Fire

  Neil Armstrong's letter to the children of Troy, Michigan on the opening of its Public Library (1971), as quoted in "Why Libraries Matter: Letters to the Children of Troy, Michigan (From 1971)" by Lucas Reilly on Mental Floss, July 3, 2012.

  67 Copy quote

  Show source

• Correct thinkers think that 'baseball trivia' is an oxymoron: nothing about baseball is trivial.

  George Will

  Baseball, Thinking, Trivia

  George F. Will (1999). “Bunts”, p.132, Simon and Schuster

  13 Copy quote

  Show source

• Atheists tend to read only each other’s books and not the work of the religious thinkers they are supposedly refuting.

  Edward Feser

  Religious, Atheist, Book

  20 Copy quote

• Those of you who have spent time with Australians know that we are not given to overstatement. By nature we are laconic speakers and by conviction we are realistic thinkers.

  Julia Gillard

  Realistic, Conviction, Given

  Biography/Personal Quotes, www.imdb.com.

  17 Copy quote

  Show source

• As a thinker I keep discovering that beauty itself is as much a fact, and a mystery...I consider nature's facts -- its beautiful and grotesque forms and events -- in terms of the import to thought and their impetus to the spirit. In nature I find grace tangled in a rapture with violence; I find an intricate landscape whose forms are fringed in death; I find mystery, newness, and a kind of exuberant, spendthrift energy.

  Annie Dillard

  Beautiful, Tangled, Grace

  10 Copy quote

• There is always room for a man of force and he makes room for many. Society is a troop of thinkers and the best heads among them take the best places.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Inspirational, Men, Rooms

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1983). “Essays and Lectures”, p.974, Library of America

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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.

  Uta Hagen

  Ideas, Language, Interpretation

  Uta Hagen (1991). “Challenge For The Actor”, p.46, Simon and Schuster

  10 Copy quote

  Show source

• Kropp on the other hand is a thinker. He proposes that a declaration of war should be a kind of popular festival with entrance-tickets and bands, like a bull fight. Then in the arena the ministers and generals of the two countries, dressed in bathing-drawers and armed with clubs, can have it out on themselves. Whoever survives the country wins. That would be much simpler and more than just this arrangement, where the wrong people do the fighting

  Erich Maria Remarque

  Country, War, Fighting

  Erich Maria Remarque (2013). “All Quiet on the Western Front: A Novel”, p.32, Random House

  5 Copy quote

  Show source

• And when you look at the twentieth-century experiment with collectivism-that Ayn Rand, more than anybody else, did such a good job of articulating the pitfalls of statism and collectivism-you can't find another thinker or writer who did a better job of describing and laying out the moral case for capitalism than Ayn Rand.

  Paul Ryan

  Jobs, Pitfalls, Looks

  "Paul Ryan and Ayn Rand's ideas: in the hot seat again". Speech at a 2005 Atlas Society event, atlassociety.org. April 30, 2012.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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

  Thinking, Affinity, Form

  Lydia Davis (2014). “Almost No Memory: Stories”, p.192, Farrar, Straus and Giroux

  5 Copy quote

  Show source

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

  Leonardo da Vinci

  Experience, Reasoning

  Leonardo da Vinci (2014). “Delphi Complete Works of Leonardo da Vinci (Illustrated)”, p.969, Delphi Classics

  15 Copy quote

  Show source