Top 1200 Great Thinkers Quotes & Sayings

The great creators - the thinkers, the artists, the scientists, the inventors - stood alone against the men of their time. Every great new thought was opposed. Every great new invention was denounced. The first motor was considered foolish. The airplane was considered impossible... But the men of unborrowed vision went ahead. They fought, they suffered and they paid. But they won.

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

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

Advertising is full of great thinkers. This is a powerful industry and does a lot more than we take credit for.

I think it's fairly unique to define the end goal of K-12 schooling as helping students become better thinkers, more creative thinkers, and to organize the whole school around creative and critical thinking.

Uncommon thinkers reuse what common thinkers refuse

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

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.

The judges of England have rarely been original thinkers or great jurists. Many have been craftsmen rather than creators.

Health care is a design problem. Dependence on foreign oil is a design problem. To some extent, poverty is a design problem. We need design thinkers to solve those problems, and most people who are in positions of political power are not design thinkers, to put it mildly.

It interests me when I hear people quoting great thinkers, because it's like, OK, but does that make you any brighter?

Our economy is built upon convergent thinkers, people that execute things, get them done. But artists and designers are divergent thinkers: they expand the horizon of possibilities.

The success of great scholars and thinkers is commonly a courtier-like success, not kingly, not manly.

Just as the line of astronomical thinkers from Copernicus to Newton had destroyed the old astronomy, in which the earth was the center, and the Almighty sitting above the firmament the agent in moving the heavenly bodies about it with his own hands, so now a race of biological thinkers had destroyed the old idea of a Creator minutely contriving and fashioning all animals to suit the needs and purposes of man.

One of the great things about cartoons is that they're not real - you're not watching real people and it engages your imagination. One of the cornerstones of America is that we are creative thinkers. We're innovators.

Bill Clinton was a very, very good speaker. But like many people who are great speakers and great thinkers and have a lot of energy and ambition, he talked too much.

First doubt, then inquire, then discover. This has been the process with all our great thinkers.

If only our great thinkers could learn to talk, and our great talkers could learn to think.

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.

All great thinkers are initially ridiculed - and eventually revered.

A great thinker once described innovative thinkers this way: "Some men see things as they are and say, 'Why?' I dream of things that never were and say, 'Why not?'" Innovative thinkers are constantly asking questions such as these. How can we improve recruiting, hiring and training. How can be add greater value to our products and services by making them even better? How can we do more to nourish the personal as well as professional development of our people? What more can we do as a good citizen where we do business?

Little by little, not without astonishment, I rediscovered the great names of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, who had been the master thinkers of my grandfather and other Mexican liberals. They did no offer me a doctrine or a catechism: they were and they are a source, an inspiration.

All of us are linear thinkers. We evolved in a world that was local and linear. You know, back 100,000, 200,000, millions of years ago, when we were evolving as a human species, nothing changed. You know, the life of your great-grandparents, you, your kids - it was the same. And so we are local and linear thinkers.

Autism is a big continuum, going from someone who remains nonverbal, all the way up to geniuses on Silicon Valley. And some kids are visual thinkers like me. Other kids are pattern thinkers - your mathematicians, your programmers. And there are others, they are word thinkers. Uneven skills. You need to take the thing that they're good at and you need to work on developing it.

All great artists and thinkers are great workers.

Through books you can start today where the great thinkers of yesterday left off, because books have immortalized man's knowledge. Thinkers, dead a thousand years, are as alive in their books today as when they walked the earth.

Some of the most patriarchal thinkers I know are women. Some of the most feminist thinkers are men.

We are not taught to be thinkers, but reflectors of our culture. Let's teach our children to be thinkers.

I lived in Scotland a long time, and I became aware of Mogwai really from the beginning. They seemed to be fusing hard music structure and sort of raw sonics. They're just very creative thinkers, musical thinkers.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, there's a paradox here! Kierkegaard's own indirect communication proposes that we start with the experience of those who don't believe and meet them on their own ground. His success in doing this is evidenced by the fact that, at least for some periods of the 20th century, aspects of his work became a major focus for radical thinkers of various kinds, including the non-religious and, interestingly, a significant number of Jewish thinkers (Buber, Rosenzweig, Taubes, and others).

Considering yourself selflessly selfish is a principle of all great thinkers

I say, 'Get me some poets as managers.' Poets are our original systems thinkers. They contemplate the world in which we live and feel obligated to interpret, and give expression to it in a way that makes the reader understand how that world runs. Poets, those unheralded systems thinkers, are our true digital thinkers. It is from their midst that I believe we will draw tomorrow's new business leaders." --Sidney Harman, CEO Multimillionaire of a stereo components company

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.

The great creators-the thinkers, the artists, the scientists, the inventors-stood alone against the men of their time.

Thinkers think and doers do. But until the thinkers do and the doers think, progress will be just another word in the already overburdened vocabulary by sense.

Science will always raise philosophical questions like, is any scientific theory or model correct? How do we know? Are unobserved things real? etc. and it seems to me of great importance that these questions are not just left to scientists, but that there are thinkers who make it their business to think as clearly and slowly about these questions as it is possible to. Great scientists do not always make the best philosophers.

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.

So we recast the wisdom of the great thinkers in the shape of our illusions. They are shiny from their makeovers, they are fabulous and gorgeous, and they want us to know that we can have it all.

Except in the rare cases of great dynamic thinkers whose thoughts are as turning-points in the history of our race, it is by Style that writers gain distinction, by Style they secure their immortality.

I think sometimes younger people - not necessarily thinkers and intellectuals and the like, but people who are on social media and who are not as informed as journalists or professional thinkers - may get a bit, you know, impatient with the necessity of sustained thinking, sustained argumentation, sustained dialogue.

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.

Our Government is fostering economic growth in Kitchener, Cambridge and all of the Waterloo Region by investing in our innovative businesses. Today's announcement is a great example of how we are helping high-potential companies bring great ideas to market faster. Helping our entrepreneurs and original thinkers export their products and services to the rest of the world creates jobs, growth and economic prosperity here at home.

The success of great scholars and thinkers is commonly a courtier-like success, not kingly, not manly. They make shift to live merely by conformity, practically as their fathers did, and are in no sense the progenitors of a nobler race of men.

When you listen and read one thinker, you become a clone… two thinkers, you become confused… ten thinkers, you’ll begin developing your own voice… two or three hundred thinkers, you become wise and develop your voice.

Audiences of critical thinkers are my favorite kinds of audiences. There are jokes I tell in the show that don't get laughs unless I am in front of an audience of critical thinkers. Put me in front of a crowd of science teachers or astronauts! The guileless aren't our audience - it's the critical thinkers we love.

The greater part of mankind may be divided into two classes; that of shallow thinkers who fall short of the truth; and that of abstruse thinkers who go beyond it.

We may divide thinkers into those who think for themselves and those who think through others. The latter are the rule and the former the exception. The first are original thinkers in a double sense, and egotists in the noblest meaning of the word.

I just don't think we think about jurists as rock stars or great thinkers, particularly in the political world.

People who are great thinkers, in science or in art, people who are great performers, have to have that kind of capacity. Without that kind of capacity, it's extremely difficult to manage a high level of performance because you're going to get a lot of extraneous material chipping away at the finery of your thinking or the finery of your motor execution.

Secular thinkers have a separation between thinking and doing. They don't have a grasp of the balance sheet. The doers are selling us potted plants and pizzas while the thinkers are a little bit unworldly. Religions both think and do.

What I notice about people who are gifted in filmmaking is that they're great thinkers. They engage with big ideas and they engage with people.

In Austria, a rather authoritarian Catholic country, the role of the social admonisher traditionally fell to artists because there were no great political thinkers.

We tend to think of great thinkers and innovators as soloists, but the truth is that the greatest innovative thinking doesn't occur in a vacuum.

Great thinkers often learn, to their surprise, that new ideas are less than welcome.

The New York Times is filled with Ivy League graduates and so is the Washington Post. I mean, it's all the same club. They may be Ivy League educated, but they're not smart. Their minds are closed. They actually are mind-numbed robots. They have been programmed all their lives. They're not even thinkers. These are people who have been programmed to believe what they believe. They are committed believers, not thinkers.

But Zarathustra made it clear in which direction the answer lay; it is towards the artist-psychologist, the intuitional thinker. There are very few such men in the world's literature; the great artists are not thinkers, the great thinkers are seldom artists.

I've heard people say that the trouble with the world is that we haven't enough great leaders. I think we haven't enough great followers. I have stood side by side with great thinkers - surgeons, engineers, economists; people who deserve a great following - and have heard the crowd cheer me instead.

America's popular heroes have seldom been its great thinkers, and even less its scientists. The success of TV's 'Big Bang Theory,' which seems to give the lie to this claim, is more the exception that proves the rule.

It's a great honor to be selected as one of 'Foreign Policy''s Leading Global Thinkers for 2013.

Virtually every subject is most effectively learned directly from the greatest thinkers, historians, artists, philosophers, scientists, prophets and their original works. Great works inspire greatness. Mediocre or poor works inspire mediocre or poor learning. The great accomplishments of humanity are the key to quality education.