Speculative Quotes

The point is that market returns are determined by both investment factors - the fundamentals of the initial dividend yield on stocks plus the rate at which their earnings grow - and by speculative factors - the change in the price that investors will pay for each $1 of corporate earnings. ~ John C. Bogle

This truth may be handled either sinfully or profitably; sinfully as when it is treated on only to satisfy curiosity, and to keep up a mere barren speculative dispute ... This point of election ... is not to be agitated in a verbal and contentious way, but in a saving way, to make us tremble and to set us upon a more diligent and close striving with God in prayer, and all other duties. ~ Anthony Burgess

…it is far too simplistic to claim that the specter of this self-engendering monster pursuing its ends regardless of any human or environmental concern is an ideological abstraction, and to insist that one should never forget that, behind this abstraction, lie real people and natural objects on whose productive capacities and resources capital's circulation is based and on which it feeds like a gigantic parasite. (…) the fate of whole swathes of society and sometimes of whole countries can be decided by the speculative dance of Capital, which pursues its goal of profitability with a blessed indifference to how its movements will affect social reality. Therein resides the fundamental systemic violence of capitalism, (…) its violence is no longer attributable to concrete individuals with their "evil" intentions, but is purely "objective", systemic, anonymous - quite literally a conceptual violence, the violence of a Concept whose self-deployment rules and regulates social reality. ~ Slavoj Zizek

The risks are far greater to your child of not getting immunized than any kind of speculative potential relationship between the vaccine and the development of autism. ~ Irwin Redlener

Good fantasy fiction: ... explores real human conditions through fantastic metaphors which universalize the characters' individual experiences to speak personally to us all. ~ Laura Resnick

Now, as it happens, theology is actually a pitilessly demanding discipline concerning an immense, profoundly sophisticated legacy of hermeneutics, dialectics, and logic; it deals in minute detail with a vast variety of concrete historical data; over the centuries, it has incubated speculative systems of extraordinary rigor and intricacy, many of whose questions and methods continue to inform contemporary philosophy; and it does, when all is said and done, constitute the single intellectual, moral, spiritual, and cultural tradition uniting the classical, medieval, and early modern worlds. ~ David Bentley Hart

You believe in the God who plays dice, and I in complete law and order in a world that objectively exists, and which I, in a wildly speculative way, am trying to capture ... Even the great initial success of the quantum theory does not make me believe in the fundamental dice-game, although I am well aware that our younger colleagues interpret this as a consequence of senility. No doubt the day will come when we will see whose instinctive attitude was the correct one. ~ Albert Einstein

People often seem surprised that I choose to write science fiction and fantasy - I think they expect a history professor to write historical fiction, or literary fiction, associating academia with the kinds of novels that academic lit critics prefer. But I feel that speculative fiction, especially science fiction and fantasy, is a lot more like the pre-modern literature I spend most of my time studying than most modern literature is. Ursula Le Guin has described speculative fiction authors as "realists of a larger reality" because we imagine other ways of being, alternatives to how people live now, different worlds, and raise questions about hope and change and possibilities that different worlds contain.

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Writing for a more distant audience, authors tended to be speculative, using exotic perspectives, fantastic creatures, imaginary lands, allegories, prophecies, stories within stories, techniques which, like science fiction and fantasy, use alternatives rather than one reality in order to ask questions, not about the way things are, but about plural ways things have been and could be. Such works have an empathy across time, expecting and welcoming an audience as alien as the other worlds that they describe. When I read Voltaire responding to Francis Bacon, responding to Petrarch, responding to Boethius, responding to Seneca, responding to Plutarch, I want to respond to them too, to pass it on. So it makes sense to me to answer in the genre people ha ~ Ada Palmer

Konstantin Tsiolkovsky in Russia, Hermann Olberth in Germany, and Robert Goddard in the United States all came up with an eerily similar concept for using liquid fuel to power rockets for human spaceflight. I've seen this pointed out as an odd coincidence, one of those moments when an idea inexplicably emerges in multiple places at once. But when I read through each of these three men's biographies I discovered why they all had the same idea: all three of them were obsessed with Jules Verne's 1865 novel "De la terre a la lune (From the Earth to the Moon)." The novel details the strange adventures of three space explorers who travel to the moon together. What sets Verne's book apart from the other speculative fiction of the time was his careful attention to the physics involved in space travel -- his characters take pains to explain to each other exactly how and why each concept would work. All three real-life scientists -- the Russian, the German, and the American -- were following what they had learned from a French science fiction writer. ~ Margaret Lazarus Dean

I like the idea of a big caesura between the narratives, a space which readers can fill in with their own speculative history. ~ Jonathan Coe

Speculative truth begins to appear but a shadow of individual minds, agreement between intellects seems unattainable, and we turn to the truth of feeling as the only universal bond of union. ~ George Eliot

Fusion power is speculative and experimental. I think it is reckless to assume that the fusion problem will be cracked, but I'm happy to estimate how much power fusion could deliver, if the problems are cracked. ~ David J. C. MacKay

I glanced at Radu. "What, exactly is Louis-Cesare's problem?'. [..]
Suddenly a speculative gleam lit his eyes. It made me nervous. 'He tends to be very protective of women,"he said thoughtfully. "You're a woman Dory."
"Thank you for pointing that out. But I didn't think dhampirs qualified."
Radu smirked. "It appears you've been upgraded. ~ Karen Chance

I think one has to understand, not as a theory, not as a speculative, entertaining concept, but rather as an actual fact - that we are the world and the world is us. The world is each one of us; to feel that, to be really committed to it and to nothing else, brings about a feeling of great responsibility and an action that must not be fragmentary, but whole. ~ Jiddu Krishnamurti

By the end of Barber's talk, this event she's celebrating sounds like a product of the imagination of some master of speculative fiction like Philip K. Dick or Ray Bradbury - a mad dystopia in which feminist dreams have led to a forest full of separate clearings in which more and more women keep to smaller and smaller groups for fear of encountering difference. ~ Bruce Bawer

Concentrating wealth in the hands of the few and deregulating financial institutions and practices lead to speculative bubbles that eventually burst - and that brings the whole country down. ~ Jennifer Granholm

People won't change until the pain of not changing is greater than the pain changing brings. ~ Just B. Jordan

Soon we were downloading ourselves
into laptops, phones or pads, freer
than we had hoped,

floating centrifugally across the Internet
to swim alongside forgotten
selfies, spam emails and porn ~ Cyril Wong

As a writer of fiction who deals with technology, I necessarily deal with the history of technology and the history of technologically induced social change. I roam up and down it in a kind of special way because I roam down it into history, which is invariably itself a speculative affair. ~ William Gibson

Faith is not a blind thing; for faith begins with knowledge. It is not a speculative thing; for faith believes facts of which it is sure. It is not an unpractical, dreamy thing; for faith trusts, and stakes its destiny upon the truth of revelation. ~ Charles Haddon Spurgeon

Thus I live in the world rather as a Spectator of mankind, than as one of the species, by which means I have made myself a speculative statesman, soldier, merchant, and artisan, without ever meddling with any practical part of life. ~ Joseph Addison

The story, like all the best stories, split like an amoeba, forming an endless series of new stories and opinion pieces and speculative articles, each spawning its own counter chorus. ~ Robert Galbraith

Like much of the identitarian Left, feminists want to replace old etiquette rules with a new system of politically-driven language policing, controlled by them and predicated on nebulous hurt feelings and speculative "harm." Having long overturned the hectoring, socially-conservative establishment, they now want to assume its place. ~ Milo Yiannopoulos

The causes which have been specified produced at first only unequal and disproportionate degrees of compliance with the requisitions of the Union. The greater deficiencies of some States furnished the pretext of example and the temptation of interest to the complying, or to the least delinquent States. Why should we do more in proportion than those who are embarked with us in the same political voyage? Why should we consent to bear more than our proper share of the common burden? These were suggestions which human selfishness could not withstand, and which even speculative men, who looked forward to remote consequences, could not, without hesitation, combat. Each State, yielding to the persuasive voice of immediate interest or convenience, has successively withdrawn its support, till the frail and tottering edifice seems ready to fall upon our heads, and to crush us beneath its ruins. ~ Alexander Hamilton

The function of the well-intentioned individual, acting in isolation, is to formulate or disseminate theoretical truths. The function of the well-intentioned individuals in association is to live in accordance with those truths, to demonstrate what happens when theory is translated into practice, to create small-scale working models of the better form of society to which the speculative idealist looks forward. ~ Aldous Huxley

Quote from "Unexpected Tales from the Ends of the Earth":
"The only one everlasting love is the unrealized one. The love to this thing that you'd never had. Behind it is hidden the love to your own ego and feelings". ~ Alexandar Tomov

I no longer trusted the sun. I kept half an eye on it, night and day. I told myself that the sun would not go full rogue on us and send a pulse to suck our atmosphere away, but I had a hard time believing it.... ~ Brenda Marie Smith

We are not to consider ourselves, while here, as at church or school, to listen to the harangues of speculative piety; we are here to talk of the political interests committed to our charge. ~ Fisher Ames

It was civilization itself which inflicted this wound upon modern man. Once the increase of empirical knowledge, and more exact modes of thought, made sharper divisions between the sciences inevitable, and once the increasingly complex machinery of State necessitated a more rigorous separation of ranks and occupations, then the inner unity of human nature was severed too, and a disastrous conflict set its harmonious powers at variance. The intuitive and the speculative understanding now withdrew in hostility to take up positions in their respective fields, whose frontiers they now began to guard with jealous mistrust; and with this confining of our activity to a particular sphere we have given ourselves a master within, who not infrequently ends by suppressing the rest of our potentialities. While in one a riotous imagination ravages the hard-won fruits of the intellect, in another the spirit of abstraction stifles the fire at which the heart should have warmed itself and the imagination been kindled. ~ Friedrich Schiller

Hmph. Even the animals deserted me.
I'd have deserted me, too, a different inner voice inserted dryly. The way I
banged around in here wanting to kill something - anything - if only it would bring Aislinn back to me. Fionn understood at a level beyond reckoning that if he ever laid eyes on Travis again, the Hunter would be dead before he saw what hit him. ~ Ann Gimpel

On the far side of the bay was the command station that controlled the door, which was currently semi-open. Rather than the normal closed maw of steel, there was a network of pulsing gold veins crisscrossing the gaping mouth of black - a nitrogen membrane keeping the molecular air contained and pressurized while allowing aircraft to pass through. ~ April Adams

it might seem advisable to prove that the haunt of the walrus was known to the ancient chinese writers who have furnished accounts of america, but it is unnecessary to do this, seeing that the phenomenon of the ten suns, which is only visible at the arctic circle, is referred to in the ancient books. ~ Alexander McAllan

In practical matters the end is not mere speculative knowledge of what is to be done, but rather the doing of it. It is not enough to know about Virtue, then, but we must endeavor to possess it, and to use it, or to take any other steps that may make. ~ Aristotle.

I was utterly free of speculative prejudices. The bear side doesn't appeal to me any more than the bull side, or vice versa. My one steadfast prejudice is against being wrong. ~ Jesse Lauriston Livermore

Science usually operates in sort of three modes, things that are well established, we know what we're talking about, more highly confident. There are competing explanations, we have a pretty good idea, but we're not sure. And then things are speculative. ~ Stephen Schneider

Scottish operative lodges began in the seventeenth century to admit non-operative members as accepted or gentleman masons and that by the early eighteenth century in some lodges the accepted or gentleman masons had gained the ascendancy: those lodges became, in turn speculative lodges, whilst others continued their purely operative nature. The speculative lodges eventually combined to form the Grand Lodge of Scotland in 1736. ~ John Hamill

At long as a stock is acting right, and the market is right, do not be in a hurry to take profits. One should never permit speculative ventures to run into investments. ~ Jesse Lauriston Livermore

For instance, in one corner of the Eastern Galactic Arm lies the large forest planet Oglaroon, the entire "intelligent" population of which lives permanently in one fairly small and crowded nut tree. In which tree they are born, live, fall in love, carve tiny speculative articles in the bark on the meaning of life, the futility of death and the importance of birth control, fight a few extremely minor wars and eventually die strapped to the underside of some of the less accessible outer branches. In ~ Douglas Adams

One of their last days in unbroken country, the wind was blowing in the high Indian grass, and her father said, "There's your gold, Dahlia, the real article." As usual, she threw him a speculative look, knowing by then roughly what an alchemist was, and that none of that shifty crew ever spoke straight - their words always meant something else, sometimes even because the "something else" really was beyond words, maybe in the way departed souls are beyond the world. She watched the invisible force at work among the million stalks tall as a horse and rider, flowing for miles under the autumn suns, greater than breath, than tidal lullabies, the necessary rhythms of a sea hidden far from any who would seek it. They ~ Thomas Pynchon

For it seemed to me that much more truth could be found in the reasonings which a man makes concerning matters that concern him than in those which some scholar makes in his study about speculative matters. For the consequences of the former will soon punish the man if he judges wrongly, whereas the latter have no practical consequences and no importance for the scholar except that perhaps the further they are from common sense the more pride he will take in them, since he will have had to use so much more skill and ingenuity in trying to render them plausible. ~ Rene Descartes

House prices have risen by nearly 25 percent over the past two years. Although speculative activity has increased in some areas, at a national level these price increases largely reflect strong economic fundamentals. ~ Ben Bernanke

It's also interesting to notice that most of the best Finnish speculative writers are women. ~ Toni Jerrman

Even in forgetting there is an aspect of recollection, a faded few moments of wispy consciousness clung like webs in high-vaulted chambers, moving ever so lightly with the draft. ~ Jeffrey Panzer

Yes, Kālāmas, it is proper that your have doubt, that you have perplexity, for a doubt has arisen in a matter which is doubtful. Now, look you Kālāmas, do not be led by reports, or traditions, or hearsay. Be not led by the authority of religious texts, not by the delight in speculative opinions, nor by seeming possibilities, not by the idea: 'this is our teacher'. But, O Kālāmas, when you know for yourself that certain things are unwholesome, and wrong, and bad, then give them up... And when you know for yourself that certain things are wholesome and good, then accept them and follow them. ~ Gautama Buddha

Seriously man, what are you waiting for? Get in there - or I will. - Marek Montvene ~ J.C. Morrows

The new day is almost here, but the old one is still dragging its heavy skirts. Just as ocean water and river water struggle against each other at a river mouth, the old time and the new time clash and blend. ~ Haruki Murakami

There were two qualities about the mutual funds of the 1920s that made them extremely speculative. One was that they were heavily leveraged. Two, mutual funds were allowed to invest in other mutual funds. ~ Ron Chernow

Scientific research is compounded of ... empirical procedures, general speculative ideas, and mathematical or abstract reasoning. ~ James Bryant Conant

An early fascination with higher mathematics at the university level blossomed into speculative thinking that could provide a basis for dealing with economic issues. ~ Lawrence R. Klein

It had the strangest effect on my internal visualizations." She stared at the hypospray with speculative respect. "I may try it on purpose someday." I want to be there if you do. Miles had a sudden exciting vision of using the drug to augment his own insights - instant brains! - then remembered to his extreme disappointment that fast-penta didn't work like that on him. Riva ~ Lois McMaster Bujold

When I stand on my special-issue "Intelligent Investor" ladder and peer out over the frenzied crowd, I see very few others doing the same. Many stocks remain overvalued, and speculative excess - both on the upside and on the downside - is embedded in the frenzy around stocks of all stripes. And yes, I am talking about March 2001, not March 2000. ~ Michael Burry

In a hurry to escape he let himself out of the house and walked to the truck. Before he could climb inside Marilee raced down the steps.
Breathless,she came to a sudden halt in front of him.
At the dark look in his eyes she swallowed. "Please don't go,Wyatt. I've been such a fool."
"You aren't the only one." He studied her with a look that had her heart stuttering.A look so intense, she couldn't look away. "I've been neating myself up for days,because I wanted things to go my way or no way."
"There's no need.You're not the only one." Her voice was soft,throaty. "You've always respected my need to be independent.But I guess I fought the battle so long,I forgot how to stop fighting even after I'd won the war."
"You can fight me all you want. You know Superman is indestructable." Again that long,speculative look. "I know I caught you off guard with that proposal. It won't happen again. Even when I understood your fear of commitment, I had to push to have things my way.And even though I still want more, I'm willing to settle for what you're willing to give,as long as we can be together."
She gave a deep sigh. "You mean it?"
"I do."
"Oh,Wyatt.I was so afraid I'd driven you away forever."
He continued studying her. "Does this mean you're suffering another change of heart?"
"My heart doesn't need to change. In my heart,I've always known how very special you are.It's my head that can't seem to catch up." She gave a shake of her head,a ~ R.C. Ryan

Stock market corrections, although painful at the time, are actually a very healthy part of the whole mechanism, because there are always speculative excesses that develop, particularly during the long bull market. ~ Ron Chernow

A striking feature of financial service activities during the past few decades is that the financial transactions essential to the operation of the 'real' economy has become increasingly dwarfed by speculative activity. ~ Peter Dicken

Surely not without reason, when pirates, highwaymen, and other varieties of the extensive genus Marauder, are the only beau ideal of the active, as splenetic and railing misanthropy is of the speculative energy. ~ Thomas Love Peacock

Regardless of religion (or lack thereof), lovers of speculative fiction will swallow up these provocative stories. - Erin O'Riordan, ~ Tim Lieder

All because I fell in love with a madman. ~ Carrie Butler

The whole world's a ghost factory. We all fade like the paint on these buildings, sometimes from too much sun, sometimes from too little. We blur and blend to the murky shades left behind when something vivid dies. ~ Will Ludwigsen

There are no chains of houses; there are no crowds of men. The colossal diagram of streets and houses is an illusion, the opium dream of a speculative builder. Each of these men is supremely solitary and supremely important to himself. Each of these houses stands in the centre of the world. There is no single house of all those millions which has not seemed to someone at some time the heart of all things and the end of travel. ~ G.K. Chesterton

It does not answer the aim which God had in this institution, merely for men to have good commentaries and expositions on the Scripture, and other good books of divinity; because, although these may tend, as well as preaching, to give a good doctrinal or speculative understanding of the word of God, yet they have not an equal tendency to impress them on men's hearts and affections. God hath appointed a particular and lively application of his word, in the preaching of it, as a fit means to affect sinners with the importance of religion, their own misery, the necessity of a remedy, and the glory and sufficiency of a remedy provided; to stir up the pure minds of the saints, quicken their affections by often bringing the great things of religion in their remembrance, and setting them in their proper colours, though they know them, and have been fully instructed in them already. ~ Jonathan Edwards

Some of the History Channel's documentaries involve docudrama segments and are highly speculative - but there seems, on the part of the producers, to be a real determination to get at the history behind our past - not the sex, which is left to drama shows and entertainment channels. ~ Nigel Hamilton

What's poor Richard ever done to you except get himself born first?"

The blue eyes were speculative. "Ill-calculated," he agreed. "But not necessarily final. ~ Dorothy Dunnett

The truth is that good fantasies carefully limit the magic that's possible. In fact, the magic has to be defined, at least in the author's mind, as a whole new set of natural laws that cannot be violated during the course of the story. That is, if at the beginning of the story you have established that your hero can make only three wishes, you better not have him come up with a fourth wish to save his neck right at the end. That's cheating, and your reader will be quite correct to throw your book across the room and carefully avoid anything you ever write in the future. All speculative fiction stories have to create a strange world and introduce the reader to it - but good fantasy must also establish a whole new set of natural laws, explain them right up front, and then faithfully abide by them throughout. ~ Orson Scott Card

The successful development of science requires a proper balance to be maintained between the method of building up from observations and the method of deducing by pure reasoning from speculative assumptions. ~ Paul A.M. Dirac

My target is a comprehensive, speculative world picture that is reached by extrapolation from some of the discoveries of biology, chemistry, and physics
a particular naturalistic Weltanschauung that postulates a hierarchical relation among the subjects of those sciences, and the completeness in principle of an explanation of everything in the universe through their unification. Such a world view is not a necessary condition of the practice of any of those sciences, and its acceptance or nonacceptance would have no effect on most scientific research. ~ Thomas Nagel

This is one of the most important lines of cleavage between Wall Street practice and the canons of ordinary business. Because the speculative public is clearly wrong in its attitude on this point, it would seem that its errors should afford profitable opportunities to the more logically minded to buy common stocks at the low prices occasioned by temporarily reduced earnings and to sell them at inflated levels created by abnormal prosperity ~ Anonymous

Poetic and speculative photographs can result if one works carefully and accurately, yet letting chance relationships have full play. ~ Frederick Sommer

The history of this paper suggests that highly speculative investigations, especially by an unknown author, are best brought before the world through some other channel than a scientific society, which naturally hesitates to admit into its printed records matters of uncertain value. Perhaps one may go further and say that a young author who believes himself capable of great things would usually do well to secure the favourable recognition of the scientific world by work whose scope is limited and whose value is easily judged, before embarking upon higher flights. ~ John William Strutt

One person's actions can alter the course of history, and a political or military mischance can touch off a catastrophic reaction that has repercussions over centuries. ~ Timothy Venning

I don't want what I am saying to sound like a prophecy or anything like an analysis of modern society ... these are only feelings I have, and I am the least speculative man on earth. ~ Michelangelo Antonioni

The largest mistake would be to start to move away from petroleum, a proven and economic energy source, to more speculative and expensive sources ... The world will eventually leave the age of oil, but there is no geologic reason for this to happen until near the end of the 21st century. ~ David Deming

The service of philosophy, of speculative culture, towards the human spirit, is to rouse, to startle it to a life of constant and eager observation. ~ Walter Pater

Evolution is a bankrupt speculative philosophy, not a scientific fact. Only a spiritually bankrupt society could ever believe it. Only atheists could accept this Satanic theory. ~ Jimmy Swaggart

A great Iranian mystic of the fourteenth century, fAlll'uddawla Semnlini, was to speak in similar terms of the "invisible master," the "Gabriel of your being." His esoteric exegesis, his ta'wll, carries the figures of Koranic revelation to a sevenfold depth; to attain to the "Gabriel of your being"

is to pass successively through the seven esoteric levels and to be reunited with the Spirit which guides and initiates the "seven prophets of your being." This striving is also designated as jacob's contest with the Angel, which was so interpreted in the symbolic exegesis of the jewish mystic joseph ben Judah: the intellective soul struggling to be united with the Angel, with the active Intelligence, until the rising of the light ( ishraq), at which time the soul emerges, delivered, from the darkness that imprisoned it.10 Thus no doubt we should speak not of a combat with, that is against, the Angel, but of a combat for the Angel, for the Angel in tum needs the response of a soul if his being is to become what it has to be. A whole series of jewish speculative mystics found the same symbolism in the Song of Songs, where the Beloved plays the role of the active Intelligence, while the heroine is the thinking human soul. ~ Abul Barkat

There are three phrases that make possible the world of writing about the world of not-yet (you can call it science fiction or speculative fiction; you can call it anything you wish) and they are simple phrases: What if . . . ? If only . . . If this goes on ~ Ray Bradbury

Of all the Winter Service Industries, the Winter Consul was the most dangerous. Few who joined expected to last out the decade, yet recruitment was never much of a problem. You didn't find the job, they said, it found you. No-one ever who entered the Winter voluntarily wasn't trying to leave something behind. ~ Jasper Fforde

We invest in undervalued companies that exhibit strong fundamentals, above-market dividend yields and historic earnings growth, which our analysis indicates will persist. Our strategy is to own strong, fundamentally sound companies and to avoid speculative stocks or potential bankruptcies. ~ David Dreman

I mean, I've always loved her, we've been best mates for years. When I started this thing, I thought that maybe, maybe there was something else – the germ of something else that could happen between us. But I don't think I was entirely serious. It was speculative, you know. But, bloody hell, it's bitten me in the arse. And now I love her. I think about her all the time. When I'm not with her, I'm just waiting for the next time I can be, and when I am, I'm just really happy. She's funny, and smart, and.. gorgeous. I love her. Never felt like this before. Want-to-marry-her-and-be-with-her-all-the-rest-of-my-life kind of love her. ~ Elizabeth Noble

He turned left, therefore, in the hope of finding better fortune in that direction, but after a while lost his nerve and turned a speculative right, and then chanced another exploratory left, and after a few more such maneuvers was thoroughly lost. ~ Douglas Adams

For many of us, trying to outguess the market is a game that is much too much fun to give up. Even if you were convinced you would not do any better than average, I'm sure that most of you with speculative temperaments would still want to keep on playing the game of selecting individual stocks with at least some portion of the money you invest. ~ Burton G. Malkiel

It is easy to see that a greater self-reliance must work a revolution in all the offices and relations of men; in their religion; in their education; in their pursuits; their modes of living; their association; in their property; in their speculative views. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Books appear to be the most immediate instruments of speculative delight. ~ Richard De Bury

Young earth creationists try to force modern science into a literal reading of Genesis 1. Day-age theorists try to fit Genesis 1 into modern science. Proponents of the restoration view try to have their cake and eat it too by inserting a speculative gap between verses 1 and 2 of this chapter. All three views are fundamentally misguided and are rooted in contradictory opinions about the meaning and significance of various words and phrases in Genesis 1 (e.g., "day," "formless void"). None of them have seriously considered the more fundamental question concerning the kind of literature we are dealing with in Genesis 1. More ~ Gregory A. Boyd

Philosophy needs vision and argument… there is something disappointing about a philosophical work that contains arguments, however good, which are not inspired by some genuine vision, and something disappointing about a philosophical work that contains a vision, however inspiring, which is unsupported by arguments…Speculation about how things hang together requires… the ability to draw out conceptual distinctions and connections, and the ability to argue… But speculative views, however interesting or well supported by arguments or insightful, are not all we need. We also need what [the philosopher Myles] Burnyeat called 'vision' – and I take that to mean vision as to how to live our lives, and how to order our societies. ~ Hilary Putnam

Unearth marvels as you walk the path,
Stand in awe,
Therein is the joy of life. ~ Barbara Neville

When religion ceases to be speculative and becomes factual and "true", it will become science. Science can be used to prove or disprove opinions, beliefs and accusations. Until any religion crosses that line, who is anyone to use their religion to judge others? ~ Christina Engela

The question of the origin of life is essentially speculative. We have to construct, by straightforward thinking on the basis of very few factual observations, a plausible and self-consistent picture of a process which must have occurred before any of the forms which are known to us in the fossil record could have existed. ~ John Desmond Bernal

His grandfather was scathing about "speculative faith," which is the kind you get from worrying about the possibility that God exists and may be cross with you. Daniel Spork observed that God, if there is one, is well aware of the interior dialogue, and most likely unimpressed by it. Much better, he said, to get on with being the man you are, and hope like buggery that God thinks you did as well as could be expected. Hence all the lessons and strictures concealed in everyday objects. _Learn the shape of the world, know the mind of God._ ~ Nick Harkaway

You sit beside the sorcerer, your love, and unzip your ribs. Tucked under your heart is a small oak box, plain and unvarnished. You offer it to the sorcerer. 'I brought this for you. ~ A. Merc Rustad

Will posterity believe that, while the Press has swarmed with inflammatory productions that tend to prove the blessing of theoretical confusion and speculative licentiousness, not one writer of talent has been employed to refute and confound the fashionable doctrines, nor the least care taken to disseminate works of another complexion. ~ Arthur Young

But even the tough, capable centurions gave Marcus speculative glances, as if seeking out his thoughts on their predicament. Marcus returned the glances with nothing but crisp salutes, letting them see the First Spear proceeding with business as usual. ~ Jim Butcher

The whole interest of my reason, whether speculative or practical, is concentrated in the three following questions: What can I know? What should I do? What may I hope? (Critique of Pure Reason ~ Immanuel Kant

Thus the same object may supply a practical perception to one person and a speculative one to another, or the same person may perceive it partly practically and partly speculatively. ~ Samuel Alexander

The determination of the average man is not merely a matter of speculative curiosity; it may be of the most important service to the science of man and the social system. It ought necessarily to precede every other inquiry into social physics, since it is, as it were, the basis. The average man, indeed, is in a nation what the centre of gravity is in a body; it is by having that central point in view that we arrive at the apprehension of all the phenomena of equilibrium and motion. ~ Adolphe Quetelet

Speculative stock movements are carried too far in both directions, frequently in the general market and at all times in at least some of the individual issues. ~ Benjamin Graham

My hopes for pie died on the sidewalk. There went my grin. ~ Carrie Butler

My writing objective is to remove the stage and sing, dance, laugh and cry with the audience as one spirit. ~ Cathie Wright-Lewis

Henry rubbed his balding head and yawned. "Why do I think this is worth the risk?…Because I think Betty knew this would one day happen...One time she even said she believed our own government would conspire with other nations to exterminate God's people. ~ T.C. Avey

I liked painting and drawing, and I liked humanities mainly - poetry, literature - this speculative attitude toward life. ~ Rafael Moneo

All the interests of my reason, speculative as well as practical, combine in the three following questions: 1. What can I know? 2. What ought I to do? 3. What may I hope? ~ Immanuel Kant