Top 100 The Thinker Quotes
#1. The mathematician who is without value to mathematicians, the thinker who is obscure or meaningless to thinkers, the dramatist who fails to move the pit, may be wise, may be eminent, but as an author he has failed.
George Henry Lewes
#2. 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
#3. The thinker requires exactly the same light as the painter, clear, without direct sunshine, or blinding reflection, and, where possible, from above.
August Wilhelm Von Schlegel
#4. The thinker as reader reads what has been written.
He wears the words he reads to look upon
Within his being ...
Wallace Stevens
#5. To know yourself as the Being underneath the thinker, the stillness underneath the mental noise, the love and joy underneath the pain, is freedom, salvation, enlightenment.
Eckhart Tolle
#7. The most original sin is not the thinker's but the poet's.
Jose Bergamin
#8. You are to have implicit confidence in your own ability, knowing that it is the nature of thought to externalize itself in your health and affairs, knowing that you are the thinker.
Ernest Holmes
#10. It is one of the poignant anxieties of the thinker that he sees the shadow resting on the human soul, and that he gropes in darkness without being able to awaken that slumbering Progress.
Victor Hugo
#11. For the thinker the world is a thought; for the wit, an image; for the enthusiast, a dream; for the inquirer, truth.
Ludwig Buchner
#12. The doer and the thinker, no allowances for the other, as the failing light illuminates the mercenaries creed.
Jethro Tull
#13. All power is indeed weak compared with that of the thinker. He sits upon the throne of his Empire of Thought, mightier far than they who wield material sceptres.
Christian Nestell Bovee
#14. I discovered that the study of past philosophers is of little use unless our own reality enters into it. Our reality alone allows the thinker's questions to become comprehensible.
Karl Jaspers
#15. By thinking mostly about everything that has gone wrong, is going wrong, and can possibly go wrong, the thinker is bound to end up in a lousy mental and emotional state.
Gudjon Bergmann
#16. 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
#18. The shrewd guess, the fertile hypothesis, the courageous leap to a tentative conclusion - these are the most valuable coins of the thinker at work. But in most schools guessing is heavily penalized and is associated somehow with laziness.
Jerome Bruner
#20. The thinker dies, but his thoughts are beyond the reach of destruction. Men are mortal; but ideas are immortal.
Richard Adams
#21. God secludes Himself; but the thinker listens at the door.
Victor Hugo
#23. 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
#24. One must not think slightingly of the paradoxical ... for the paradox is the source of the thinker's passion, and the thinker without a paradox is like a lover without feeling: a paltry mediocrity.
Soren Kierkegaard
#25. Out of damp and gloomy days, out of solitude, out of loveless words directed at us, conclusions grow up in us like fungus: one morning they are there, we know not how, and they gaze upon us, morose and gray. Woe to the thinker who is not the gardener but only the soil of the plants that grow in him.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#26. Quinn was used to Lucan's quiet ways. He'd always been the thinker of them, the one who waited and watched and formulated a plan, the one with a steady head, a cool temper. It stood to reason that he would be the one to keep them together as well as master the god inside him.
Donna Grant
#27. On the heights it is warmer than people in the valley suppose, especially in winter. The thinker recognizes the full import of this simile.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#28. Life is a mirror and will reflect back to the thinker what he thinks into it
Ernest Holmes
#29. The worker must work for the glory of his handiwork, not simply for pay; the thinker must think for truth, not for fame.
W.E.B. Du Bois
#30. The thinker without a paradox is like a lover without a feeling: a paltry mediocrity.
Soren Kierkegaard
#31. The dignity of man is vindicated as much by the thinker and poet as by the statesman and soldier.
James Bryant Conant
#32. All thinking (is) an effort to make thought escape from the thinker's mind past all obstacles as completely as possible: all society is an attempt to seise and influence and coerce each thought as it appears and force it to yield to another.
Virginia Woolf
#33. 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.
Anthony Trollope
#34. But one must not think ill of the paradox, for the paradox is the passion of thought, and the thinker without the paradox is like the lover without passion: a mediocre fellow.
Soren Kierkegaard
#35. 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
#36. [Emerson] was interested not in the bookworm, not even in the thinker, only in Man Thinking.
Robert D. Richardson
#37. The thinker who should turn aside from slang would resemble a surgeon who should avert his face from an ulcer or a wart. He would be like a philologist refusing to examine a fact in language, a philosopher hesitating to scrutinize a fact in humanity.
Victor Hugo
#38. Ownership of thought depends on the thinker not subordinating himself to a 'ruling thought'. This is particularly difficult, argues Stirner, ... for language itself is a network of 'fixed ideas'. Truths emerge only when language is reworked and possessed individually.
John Carroll
#39. The stranger's way of looking at things, the eye of a man who does not recognize, who is beyond this world, the eye as frontier between being & non-being - belongs to the thinker. It is also the eye of a dying man, a man losing recognition.
Paul Valery
#40. Those who cannot attack the thought, instead attack the thinker.
Paul Valery
#41. I'm not my thoughts, I'm the thinker who has those thoughts.
Deepak Chopra
#42. A thought may be very commendable as a thought, but I value it chiefly as a window through which I can obtain insight on the thinker.
Alexander Smith
#43. You cannot see That which is the Seer of seeing; you cannot hear That which is the Hearer of hearing; you cannot think of That which is the Thinker of thought; you cannot know That which is the Knower of knowledge. This is your Self, that is within all; everything else but This is perishable.
Anonymous
#44. Be the silent watcher of your thoughts and behavior. You are beneath the thinker. You are the stillness beneath the mental noise. You are the love and joy beneath the pain.
Eckhart Tolle
#45. The art of thinking is the greatest art of all, for 'as a man thinketh in his heart, so is he.' The thinker knows he is today where his thoughts have taken him and that he is building his future by the quality of the thoughts he thinks.
Wilferd Peterson
#46. The thinker philosophizes as the lover loves. Even were the consequences not only useless but harmful, he must obey his impulse.
William James
#47. When the mind goes beyond the thought of 'the me,' the experiencer, the observer, the thinker, then there is a possibility of a happiness that is incorruptible.
Jiddu Krishnamurti
#48. I don't know who that guy was in the famous statue called The Thinker, but he was so deep in thought, he forgot to put on a pair of pants.
R.J. Silver
#49. You are not who you think.
You're not even the thinker.
You are the one conscious of the thought.
Kamand Kojouri
#50. The thinker makes a great mistake when he asks after cause and effect. They both together make up the indivisible phenomenon.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
#51. The realm of consciousness is much vaster than thought can grasp. When you no longer believe everything you think, you step out of thought and see clearly that the thinker is not who you are.
Eckhart Tolle
#53. I've always been a deep thinker. Since I was a kid I was delving into the very depths of why we existed, often driving my parents crazy with unanswerable questions.
Missy Higgins
#54. 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
#55. I spent 22 years in the United States military, so I'm a pretty strategic level thinker.
Allen West
#56. The survival of poor opinions can make a thinker feel as though he is failing humanity.
Criss Jami
#57. Those who put their heart and soul into something bigger than themselves, never die from the psyche of humanity.
Abhijit Naskar
#58. One is rarely an impulsive innovator after the age of sixty, but one can still be a very fine orderly and inventive thinker. One rarely procreates children at that age, but one is all the more skilled at educating those who have already been procreated, and education is procreation of another kind.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
#59. He [Professor Moriarty] is the Napoleon of crime, Watson. He is the organizer of half that is evil and of nearly all that is undetected in this great city. He is a genius, a philosopher, an abstract thinker. He has a brain of the first order.
Arthur Conan Doyle
#60. 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
#61. You are a devious woman, Blackthorn,' she said.
'I prefer the term strategic thinker.
Juliet Marillier
#62. When the sufferers learn to think, then the thinkers will learn to suffer.
Karl Marx
#63. A philosopher is a deep thinker and a meticulous observer of nature and events that reveal the beauty, truth, and meaning of existence.
Debasish Mridha
#64. A possibility thinker notices a problem just long enough to get excited about the solution.
Alan Cohen
#66. 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
#67. Hayek, in my view, is the leading economic thinker of the 20th century.
Vernon L. Smith
#68. A critical thinker is able to release their emotions and follow only the information, the facts.
Ava Young
#69. 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
#70. I'm a very positive thinker, and I think that is what helps me the most in difficult moments.
Roger Federer
#71. Books are health food for your brain and dessert for your soul. Books are one of the few proven sources of mental exercise known to man. Reading is a workout for your mind. If your body needs thirty minutes of exercise a day, so does your thinker.
Pat Williams
#72. Since the time of St. Jerome, it was mandatory for any kind of scholar or thinker to spend time out in the desert in solitude. It's no coincidence that the desert has been a major part of the visionary or mystical experience from the beginning of time.
Bill Viola
#73. Most thinkers write badly, because they communicate not only their thoughts, but also the thinking of them.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#74. 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
#75. Ross Perot came and visited Apple several times and visited the Macintosh factory. Ross was a systems thinker.
John Sculley
#76. 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
#77. As a thinker and planner the ant is the equal of any savage race of men; as a self-educated specialist in several arts she is the superior of any savage race of men; and in one or two high mental qualities she is above the reach of any man, savage or civilized!
Mark Twain
#78. 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
#79. It fills all Space, and what It fills, It is. What It thinks, that It utters; and what It utters, that It hears; and It itself is Thinker, Utterer, Hearer, Thought, Word, Audition; it is the One, and yet the All in All. Ah, the happiness, ah, the happiness of Being!
Edwin A. Abbott
#80. I'm not a fucking thinker, wisher, dancer, or whiner. I'm a fucking doer. Can't expect God to do it all now, can we? The man's got plenty to do already, I'm just doing my part and cleaning up my side of the room.
Lucian Bane
#81. Man, free thinker!
Do you imagine you alone think in this world where life is blazing forth in all things?
You are free to avail yourself of the forces you command, but the universe has gone missing from your prescriptions.
Gerard De Nerval
#82. When one says to the great Thinker:
"Here is one of thy thoughts: I am thinking it now!" that is a prayer
a word to the big heart from one of its own little hearts.
Look, there is another!
George MacDonald
#83. I just take the Bible for what it is, I guess, and recognize that I am not a scientist, not trained to be a scientist. I'm not a deep thinker on all of this. I wish I was. I wish I was more knowledgeable, but I'm not a scientist.
Michele Bachmann
#84. 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
#85. In the modern world of business, it is useless to be a creative, original thinker unless you can also sell what you create.
David Ogilvy
#86. I hate the idea of always having to interpret other people's ideas and thoughts and words, because I'm very independent and, I guess, a free thinker.
Elizabeth Taylor
#87. When a newspaper posed the question, "What's Wrong with the World?" the Catholic thinker G. K. Chesterton reputedly wrote a brief letter in response: "Dear Sirs: I am. Sincerely Yours, G. K. Chesterton." That is the attitude of someone who has grasped the message of Jesus.
Timothy Keller
#88. The how thinker gets problems solved effectively because he wastes no time with futile ifs but goes right to work on the creative how.
Norman Vincent Peale
#89. We need to understand that Jesus is a thinker, that this is not a dirty word but an essential work, and that his other attributes do not preclude thought, but only ensure that he is certainly the greatest thinker of the human race: "the most intelligent person who ever lived on earth"
Dallas Willard
#90. The host of men who stand between a great thinker and the average man are not automatic transmitters. They work on the ideas; perhaps that is why a genius usually hates his disciples.
Walter Lippmann
#91. In Hitler the rare union has taken place between the most acute logical thinker and truly profound philosopher, and the iron man of action ... I follow no leadership but that of Adolf Hitler and of God.
Hermann Goring
#92. "Work" does not exist in a nonliterate world. The primitive hunter or fisherman did no work, any more than does the poet, painter, or thinker of today. Where the whole man is involved there is no work.
Marshall McLuhan
#93. You are the only thinker in
your world and your thought
is creative. Whatever you think
about the other person, you are
also creating in your life.
Joseph Murphy
#94. If a thinker throws off too many unsystematic and rich insights, there is no place to grab onto his thought. The thing he is trying to illuminate seems as elusive as before.
Ernest Becker
#95. 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.
Sharon Olds
#96. The thinkers in their youth are almost always very lonely creatures. . . . The university most worthy of rational admiration is that one in which your lonely thinker can feel himself least lonely, most positively furthered and most richly fed. - WILLIAM JAMES1
Niall Ferguson
#97. No matter how sensible-seeming or wild an idea, the smart thinker asks: Does it work? When put to the test, can its predictions be confirmed? Subjected to such scrutiny, crazy-sounding ideas sometimes find support.
David G. Myers
#98. He looked personable enough, not exactly a great thinker, but definitely the kind of profile you wouldn't mind seeing on your small change.
Terry Pratchett
#99. Avoid the precepts of those thinkers whose reasoning is not confirmed by experience.
Leonardo Da Vinci
#100. Tennis is mostly mental. Of course, you must have a lot of physical skill, but you can't play tennis well and not be a good thinker. You win or lose the match before you even go out there.
Venus Williams
