Theory Quotes

All lives are difficult; what makes some of them fulfilled as well is the manner in which pains have been met. Every pain is an indistinct signal that something is wrong, which may engender either a good or bad result depending on the sagacity and strength of mind of the sufferer. Anxiety may precipitate panic, or an accurate analysis of what is amiss. A sense of injustice may lead to murder, or to a ground-breaking work of economic theory. Envy may lead to bitterness, or to a decision to compete with a rival and the production of a masterpiece. As ~ Alain De Botton

It is foolish, generally speaking, for a philosopher to set fire to another philosopher in Smithfield Market because they do not agree in their theory of the universe. That was done very frequently in the last decadence of the Middle Ages, and it failed altogether in its object. But there is one thing that is infinitely more absurd and unpractical than burning a man for his philosophy. This is the habit of saying that his philosophy does not matter, and this is done universally in the twentieth century, in the decadence of the great revolutionary period. ~ G.K. Chesterton

It is a fearful mistake for us to neglect the study of the Bible to investigate theories that are misleading, diverting minds from the words of Christ to fallacies of human production. ~ Ellen G. White

Given everything we know about the universe it would seem utterly impossible for any sane person to believe that the ultimate truth about the universe and human existence is the story of Israeli, German or Russian nationalism – or indeed of nationalism in general. A story that ignores almost the whole of time, the whole of space, the Big Bang, quantum physics and the evolution of life is at most just a tiny part of the truth. Yet people somehow manage not to see beyond it.
Indeed, billions of people throughout history have believed that for their lives to have meaning, they don't even need to be absorbed into a nation or a great ideological movement. It is enough if they just 'leave something behind', thereby ensuring that their personal story continues beyond their death. The 'something' I leave behind is ideally my soul or my personal essence. If I am reborn in a new body after the death of my present body, then death is not the end. It is merely the space between two chapters, and the plot

"that began in one chapter will carry on into the next. Many people have at least a vague faith in such a theory, even if they do not base it on any specific theology. They don't need an elaborate dogma – they just need the reassuring feeling that their story continues beyond the horizon of death. ~ Yuval Noah Harari

Sometimes women's attraction to true crime is dismissed as trashy and voyeuristic (because women are vapid!). Sometimes it is unquestioningly celebrated as feminist (because if women like something, then it must be feminist!). And some argue that women read about serial killers to avoid becoming victims. This is the most flattering theory - and also, it seemed to me, the most incomplete. By presuming that women's dark thoughts were merely pragmatic, those thoughts are drained of their menace. True crime wasn't something we women at CrimeCon were consuming begrudgingly, for our own good. We found pleasure in these bleak accounts of kidnappings and assaults and torture chambers, and you could tell by how often we fell back on the language of appetite, of bingeing, of obsession. A different, more alarming hypothesis was the one I tended to prefer: perhaps we liked creepy stories because something creepy was in us. ~ Rachel Monroe

Anarchism, the great leaven of thought, is today permeating every phase of human endeavor ... It is the philosophy of the sovereignty of the individual. It is the theory of social harmony. It is the great, surging, living truth that is reconstructing the world, and that will usher in the Dawn. ~ Emma Goldman

The theory of evolution by cumulative natural selection is the only theory we know of that is in principle capable of explaining the existence of organized complexity. ~ Richard Dawkins

Always happens with men. They promise friendship. They promise to treat you as an equal. In the end, all they want is to possess you. ~ Rick Riordan

I was talking to Jesus, and I said, Jesus, I feel like no one will ever accept me. And Jesus looked at me and said, You know what my theory is? Accept me or go to hell. ~ Gilbert Gottfried

Other animals are exceptionally good at identifying and reacting to predators, rivals and friends. They never act as if they believe that rivers or trees are inhabited by spirits who are watching. In all these ways, other animals continually demonstrate their working knowledge that they live in a world brimming with other minds as well as their knowledge of those minds' boundaries. their understanding seems more acute, pragmatic, and frankly, better than ours at distinguishing real from fake. So, I wonder, do humans really have a better developed Theory of Mind than other animals? ...Children talk to dolls for years, half believing or firmly believing that the doll hears and feels and is a worthy confidante. Many adults pray to statues, fervently believing that they're listening. ...All of this indicates a common human inability to distinguish conscious minds from inanimate objects, and evidence from nonsense. Children often talk to a fully imaginary friends whom they believe listens and has thoughts. Monotheism might be the adult version. ...In the world's most technologically advanced, most informed societies, a majority people take it for granted that disembodied spirits are watching, judging, and acting on them. Most leaders of modern nations trust that a Sky-God can be asked to protect their nation during disasters and conflicts with other nations. All of this is theory of mind gone wild, like an unguided fire hose spraying the whole universe with presumed consciousness. ~ Carl Safina

I think voting for the lesser of two evils in game theory always leads to more evil. ~ Penn Jillette

It is sometimes said that we should never believe a scientific theory until it is verified by experiment. But a famous astronomer has also stated that we should never believe an observation until it is confirmed by a theory. ~ Joao Magueijo

I became interested in this question of whether you can build wormholes for interstellar travel. I realized that if you had a wormhole, the theory of general relativity by itself would permit you to go backward in time. ~ Kip Thorne

From personal experience, Kenzo knew about the state of racial equality in America. It was sound in theory, but not in practice. It was a glorious dream, but just a dream. It would never work. It had never worked
not anywhere, not anytime in history
and the US was the only country foolish and hypocritical enough to try. ~ Don Lee

We had all opted to take City's financial reporting course work, which, in theory, meant we wanted to write about stock prices and corporate takeovers. That, of course, was a joke. No one still in their twenties, and broke, goes into journalism to write about money - a subject in which they still have zero practical experience. ~ Chris Ayres

To quote Albert Einstein,' said Sherman, "You stink and so do your relatives."
"Einstein never said that," argued Garfield.
"Did too," Insisted Sherman. "It's in his theory of relativity. ~ Jim Kraft

Ultimately, when you come up with a classification scheme that is collectively exhaustive and mutually exclusive, then the theory can become what Kuhn called a paradigm. ~ Clayton Christensen

I heartedly approve, in theory," said Ibelius, "but in practice I believe I shall ... absent myself. ~ Scott Lynch

Hitler's one genuine obsession was the underground currents. He believed in the theory of the hollow earth, Hohlweltlehre. ~ Umberto Eco

Democracy functions insofar as individuals can participate meaningfully in the public arena, meanwhile running their own affairs, individually and collectively, without illegitimate interference by concentrations of power. Functioning democracy presupposes relative equality in access to resources - material, informational, and other - a truism as old as Aristotle. In theory, governments are instituted to serve their "domestic constituencies" and are to be subject to their will. A measure of functioning democracy, then, is the extent to which the theory approximates reality, and the "domestic constituencies" genuinely approximate the population. ~ Noam Chomsky

I'm working on several theories," I said. "But I'm currently favoring the hypothesis that the moon has a seemingly arbitrary effect on magic because it likes to piss me off." "That's a theory with a high degree of applicability to other spheres of life," he said. "Yes it is," I said, and we spontaneously fist ~ Ben Aaronovitch

Just as I wouldn't expect a gynecologist to have a debate with somebody who believes in the Stork-theory of reproduction, I won't do debates with Young Earth creationists. ~ Richard Dawkins

The last I knew you were going to a party. just a few friends at the McEvoys' you told me. The science club, you told me. What happened? You got into a fight about the theory of relativity? Did creationists crash the party and start a rumble? ~ Tami Hoag

I have a little theory about that, too. It's clearly envy. It's bringing people down to your size. It's a narcissistic impulse that didn't used to exist, but we've become increasingly narcissistic as a society, and envy is one of those outcomes. ~ Drew Pinsky

There's far more truth in the Book of Genesis than in the quantum theory. ~ Malcolm Muggeridge

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

I think having musical training as a child was really, really important. I studied piano as a child. Piano is a great instrument to understand musical theory on. I think I have that in my brain somewhere. ~ Corin Tucker

Kaluza also gave an answer as to where the fifth dimension was. Since we see no evidence of a fifth dimension, it must have "curled up" so small that it cannot be observed. (Imagine taking a two-dimensional sheet of paper and rolling it up tightly into a cylinder. From a distance, the cylinder looks like a one-dimensional line. In this way, a two-dimensional object has been turned into a one-dimensional object by curling it up.)

Kaluza's paper initially created a sensation. But in the coming years, objections were found to his theory. What was the size of this new fifth dimension? How did it curl up? No answers could be found.

For decades Einstein would work on this theory in fits and starts. After he passed away in 1955, the theory was soon forgotten, becoming just a strange footnote to the evolution of physics. ~ Michio Kaku

One way to figure out a great theory is to look at what's working in the real world and figure out what the various successes have in common. With ~ Seth Godin

I have read various articles on the fourth dimension, the relativity theory of Einstein, and other psychological speculation on the constitution of the universe; and after reading them I feel as Senator Brandegee felt after a celebrated dinner in Washington. "I feel," he said, "as if I had been wandering with Alice in Wonderland and had tea with the Mad Hatter." ~ Charles Lane Poor

Music escapes ideological characterization. Just as there are some social scientists who believe that what cannot be measured does not truly exist, and some psychologists used to believe that consciousness does not exist because it cannot be observed by instruments, so ideologists find anything that escapes their conceptual framework threatening - because ideologists want a simple principle, or a few simple principles, by which all things may be judged. When I was a student, I lived with a hard-line dialectical materialist who said that Schubert was a typical petit bourgeois pessimist, whose music would die out once objective causes for pessimism ceased to exist. But I suspect that even he was not entirely happy with this formulation. ~ Theodore Dalrymple

when you speak about feminism
they like to hit you with things
i call 'what about's–
what about women in the middle east
what about women in third world countries
what about focusing on them and not the problems here

and this all sounds good in theory
yes
we need to help them
yes
we need to help young girls
trapped in child marriages
yes
we need to help women
marred by acid attacks
yes
we need to help victims
of human trafficking
yes
we need to help women
who wil be imprisioned
beaten
killed
for speaking out about their sexual assault
for getting an abortion
for leaving an abusive husband

yes
we need to help them
of couse we do
it is our job as decent humans
to help them

but we can help them
and help ourselves at the same time

we can help young girls
in child marriages

and we can fight to end
the objectification of young girls
here

we can help women
marred by acid attacks

and we can work harder
to arrest abusers and assailants
here

we can help victims
of human trafficking

and we can stop stigma and violence
against sex workers
here

we can help women
who will be
imprisioned for speaking out about their sexual assault
beaten for getting an abortion
killed for lea ~ Catarine Hancock

We must keep ourselves in touch, not with theories, but with people, and never get out of touch with human beings, if we are going to use the word of God skilfully amongst them. ~ Oswald Chambers

Follow the loglo outward, to where the growth is enfolded into the valleys and the canyons, and you find the land of the refugees. They have fled from the true America, the America of atomic bombs, scalpings, hip-hop, chaos theory, cement overshoes, snake handlers, spree killers, space walks, buffalo jumps, drive-bys, cruise missiles; Sherman's March, gridlock, motorcycle gangs, and bungee jumping. They have parallel-parked their bimbo boxes in identical computer-designed Burbclave street patterns and secreted themselves in symmetrical sheetrock shitholes with vinyl floors and ill-fitting woodwork and no sidewalks, vast house farms out in the loglo wilderness, a culture medium for a medium culture. ~ Neal Stephenson

If you start any large theory, such as quantum mechanics, plate tectonics, evolution, it takes about 40 years for mainstream science to come around. Gaia has been going for only 30 years or so. ~ James Lovelock

All high mathematics serves to do is to beget higher mathematics. ~ Ashim Shanker

Now the truth of the matter is that there are a lot of things people don't understand. Take the Einstein theory. Take taxes. Take love. Do you understand them? Neither do I. But they exist. They happen. ~ Dalton Trumbo

I suggest that we need a generation or two not of theory but of an attempt to discover the real phenomena of eros. ~ Allan Bloom

As an American I am of course fundamentally opposed to democracy and to anyone advocating or defending democracy, which in theory and practice is the basis of socialism. ~ Rose Wilder Lane

Some vampires wouldn't react if you shoved a rosary down their pants, though I wouldn't recommend testing the theory. ~ Molly Harper

a controversial theory," Claire said, "that proposes that dark matter, which we know is invisible in our universe, is ordinary matter from another universe. There's also a theory that our Big Bang resulted from a collision between two parallel universes and that this was only one in perhaps an infinite number of Big Bangs to occur in the multiverse. So maybe the two theories are compatible. Maybe dark matter, like the dark matter in the Grail, came to us from another bubble. ~ Glenn Cooper

People tend to be clueless about prices. Contrary to economic theory, we don't really decide between A and B by consulting our invisible price tags and purchasing the one that yields the higher utility, he says. We make do with guesstimates and a vague recollection of what things are "supposed to cost." ~ William Poundstone

One of the great weaknesses of standard libertarian theory is that it tends to push too hard by elevating presumptions into absolutes. ~ Richard Allen Epstein

There is no real person whose embodiment plays no role in meaning, whose meaning is purely objective and defined by the external world, and whose language can fit the external world with no significant role played by mind, brain, or body. Because our conceptual systems grow out of our bodies, meaning is grounded in and through our bodies. Because a vast range of our concepts are metaphorical, meaning is not entirely literal and the classical correspondence theory of truth is false. ~ George Lakoff

There are many levels of consciousness, but atomic consciousness or universal consciousness is the basis of all other levels of consciousness. A tree is very much conscious even though in our point of view they are not conscious. ~ Debasish Mridha

The trick, he supposed, was never to lose sight of the theoretical possibility while not for a moment taking the idea remotely seriously. ~ Iain M. Banks

I've only read a few chapters of this book, Trumpet Blast Warning but it's amazing. All of his statements are backed up by original quotes & references from top politicians, the media, etc, so you can check for yourselves & discover this is not a conspiracy theory about world government, it's all backed by facts! All Christians, especially pastors & prayer groups really should read this book. Many thanks to Jason Carter for sending me a copy! ~ Jason Carter

Schizophrenia
its nature, etiology, and the kind of therapy to use for it
remains one of the most puzzling of the mental illnesses. The theory of schizophrenia presented here is based on communications analysis, and specifically on the Theory of Logical Types. From this theory and from observations of schizophrenic patients is derived a description, and the necessary conditions for, a situation called the "double bind"
a situation in which no matter what a person does, he "can't win." It is hypothesized that a person caught in the double bind may develop schizophrenic symptoms ~ Gregory Bateson

There is no public record of Barack Obama's (or Stanley Ann Dunham's) being in the CIA. Perhaps he was, perhaps he wasn't. The reader may consider the information and, based on background, life experiences, and ability to keep an open mind, may come to either conclusion.
But any explanation of why Barack Obama would not have mentioned a word of his Most Excellent Pakistani Adventure in either of his two autobiographies requires a conspiracy theory that might cast doubt on either the sanity or the sincerity fothe person proposing it. ~ Mondo Frazier

Let us fashion together a new world order. ~ Henry A. Kissinger

His months of teaching experience were now a lost age of youth and innocence. He could no longer sit in his office at Fort McNair, look out over the elm trees and the golf course, and encompass the world within "neat, geometric patterns" that fit within equally precise lectures. Policy planning was a very different responsibility, but explaining just how was "like trying to describe the mysteries of love to a person who has never experienced it."

There was, however, an analogy that might help. "I have a largish farm in Pennsylvania."...it had 235 acres, on each of which things were happening. Weekends, in theory, were days of rest. But farms defied theory:

Here a bridge is collapsing. No sooner do you start to repair it than a neighbor comes to complain about a hedge row which you haven't kept up half a mile away on the other side of the farm. At that very moment your daughter arrives to tell you that someone left the gate to the hog pasture open and the hogs are out. On the way to the hog pasture, you discover that the beagle hound is happily liquidating one of the children's pet kittens. In burying the kitten you look up and notice a whole section of the barn roof has been blown off and needs instant repair. Somebody shouts from the bathroom window that the pump has stopped working, and there's no water in the house. At that moment, a truck arrives with five tons of stone for the lane. And as you stand there hopelessly, wondering which of these crises ~ John Lewis Gaddis

Scientists do not collect data randomly and utterly comprehensively. The data they collect are only those that they consider *relevant* to some hypothesis or theory. ~ J. David Lewis-Williams

Psychoanalysis is essentially a theory of unconscious strivings, of resistance, of falsification of reality according to one's subjective needs and expectations. ~ Erich Fromm

Having said that, I must now admit that I was still afraid of human beings, and before I could meet even the customers in the bar I had to fortify myself by gulping down a glass of liquor. The desire to see frightening things - that was what drew me every night to the bar where, like the child who squeezes his pet all the harder when he actually fears it a little, I proclaimed to the customers standing at the bar my drunken, bungling theories of art. ~ Osamu Dazai

It is ironic that Keynesianism originated as a weapon to combat depression, but became universally accepted and "successful" only during (and because of!) the postwar expansion. At the first sign of renewed world recession, Keynesian theory has proved itself to be a snare and a delusion that has gone into immediate bankruptcy. The resulting "post-Keynesian synthesis" is also the theoretical reason for the reactionary exhumation of the simplistic, neoclassical, and monetarist economic theory of the 1920s. This revival of old theory is highlighted by the award of Nobel prizes in economics to Friedrich von Hayek, whose theoretical work was done before the Great Depression, and Milton Friedman, whose lone voice echoed in the wilderness until the new world economic crisis put his unpopular and antipopulist theories on the agenda of business board rooms and government cabinet rooms in one capitalist country after another. The real reason for the recent interest in fifty-year-old theories is that capital now wants them to legitimize its attack on the welfare state and "unproductive" expenditures on social services, which capital claims to need for "productive" investment in industry, including armaments. ~ Andre Gunder Frank

I sometimes ask myself how it came about that I was the one to develop the theory of relativity. The reason, I think, is that a normal adult never stops to think about problems of space and time. These are things which he has thought about as a child. Bu t my intellectual development was retarded,as a result of which I began to wonder about space and time only when I had already grown up. ~ Albert Einstein

Even at the very dawn of Christianity, there was a commonly-accepted theory known as the Blood Libel, which stated matter-of-factly that Jewish people regularly sacrificed non-Jewish babies and used the blood of those babies in Judaic rituals. Later, in medieval times, plagues and other diseases were commonly blamed on Jews, resulting in the enforcement of Apartheid-like conditions, separating Jewish communities from the rest of the population throughout Europe. For example, in the Papal States – territories in the Italian Peninsula that existed throughout the middle ages and medieval times that were governed directly by the Pope – Jews were only allowed to reside in neighborhoods called ghettos. They were regularly forced to convert to Christianity in various barbaric ways such as involuntary baptisms. The stealing of Jewish babies from their parents by Church officials was also not uncommon and the children would often then be brought up as Catholic orphans never knowing of their Jewish heritage. ~ James Morcan

Oh, I'm developing a beautiful character! It droops a bit under cold and frost, but it does grow fast when the sun shines.
That's the way with everybody. I don't agree with the theory that adversity and sorrow and disappointment develop moral strength. The happy people are the ones who are bubbling over with kindliness. ~ Jean Webster

The expressions of those moving about a picture gallery show ill-concealed disappointment that they only find pictures there. ~ Walter Benjamin

No one, especially not Birkhoff himself, would claim that the intricacies of aesthetic pleasure could be reduced entirely to a mere formula. However, in Birkhoff's words, "In the inevitable analytic accompaniment of the creative process, the theory of aesthetic measure is capable of performing a double service: it gives a simple, unified account of the aesthetic experience, and it provides means for the systematic analysis of typical aesthetic fields. ~ Mario Livio

The inquisition of public opinion overwhelms in practice the freedom asserted by the laws in theory. ~ Thomas Jefferson

The whole [scientific] process resembles biological evolution. A problem is like an ecological niche, and a theory is like a gene or a species which is being tested for viability in that niche. ~ David Deutsch

Bowlby uses the notion of faulty internal working models to describe different patterns of neurotic attachment. He sees the basic problem of 'anxious attachment" as that of maintaining attachment with a care-giver who is unpredictable or rejecting. Here the internal working model will be based not on accurate representation of the self and others, but on coping, in which the care-giver must be accommodated to. The two basic strategies here are those of avoidance or adherence, which lead to avoidant or ambivalent attachment. ~ Jeremy Holmes

I was shocked to find that there were actually climate scientists who wouldn't share the raw data, but would only share their conclusions in summary graphs that were used to prove their various theories about planet warming. In fact I began to smell something really bad, and the worse that smell got, the deeper I looked. ~ Burt Rutan

One theory is that those who think positively are less affected by stress, but another possibility is that those who think positively tend to live a healthier, longer life in general because they exercise more, follow a better diet, and avoid unhealthy addictions like alcohol and drugs. ~ Katelyn Williams

I share your feeling that such behavior is, in some sense, unwise or erroneous, but this does not mean that it does not occur,' Amos wrote to an American economist who complained about the description of human nature implied by 'Value Theory.' 'A theory of vision cannot be faulted for predicting optical illusions. Similarly, a descriptive theory of choice cannot be rejected on the grounds that it predicts 'irrational behavior' if the behavior in question is in fact observed. ~ Michael Lewis

And I shall be misunderstord if understood to give an unconditional sinequam to the heroicised furibouts of the Nolanus theory, ~ James Joyce

They have fled from the true America, the America of atomic bombs, scalpings, hip-hop, chaos theory, cement overshoes, snake handlers, spree killers, space walks, buffalo jumps, drive-bys, cruise missiles; Sherman's March, gridlock, motorcycle gangs, and bungee jumping. ~ Neal Stephenson

But my prevailing theory at the moment was this fucking booth. ~ Sierra Simone

But this does not detract from the wisdom of his faith in the people and his constant insistence that they be left to manage their own affairs. His opposition to bureaucracy will bear careful analysis, and the country could stand a great deal more of its application. The trouble with us is that we talk about Jefferson but do not follow him. In his theory that the people should manage their government, and not be managed by it, he was everlastingly right. ~ Calvin Coolidge

A theory must be tempered with reality. ~ Jawaharlal Nehru

Einstein, in the special theory of relativity, proved that different observers, in different states of motion, see different realities. ~ Leonard Susskind

To talk about communication theory without communicating its real mathematical content would be like endlessly telling a man about a wonderful composer, yet never letting him hear an example of the composer's music. ~ John R. Pierce

Based loosely on NASA monkey research, Soviet paranormal studies, chaos theory and the lost experimental writings of Thorstein Veblen, the Faking Smart! Six-Week Program is one of the most advanced six-week programs of its kind. ~ Martin Fossum

All the books were beginning to turn against me. Indeed, I must have been blind as a bat not to have seen it long before, the ludicrous contradiction between my theory of life and my actual experiences as a reader. George MacDonald had done more to me than any other writer; of course it was a pity that he had that bee in his bonnet about Christianity. He was good in spite of it. Chesterton has more sense than all the other moderns put together; bating, of course, his Christianity. Johnson was one of the few authors whom I felt I could trust utterly; curiously enough, he had the same kink. Spenser and Milton by a strange coincidence had it too. Even among ancient authors the same paradox was to be found. The most religious (Plato, Aeschylus, Virgil) were clearly those on whom I could really feed. On the other hand, those writers who did not suffer from religion and with whom in theory my sympathy ought to have been complete -- Shaw and Wells and Mill and Gibbon and Voltaire -- all seemed a little thin; what as boys we called "tinny". It wasn't that I didn't like them. They were all (especially Gibbon) entertaining; but hardly more. There seemed to be no depth in them. They were too simple. The roughness and density of life did not appear in their books. ~ C.S. Lewis

Then if it is denied that the unity at that level is the interconnection of the plurality or dissimilarity of religions as of parts constituting a whole, rather that every one of the religions at the level of ordinary existence is not part of a whole, but is a whole in itself-then the 'unity' that is meant is 'oneness' or 'sameness' not really of religions, but of the God of religions at the level of transcendence (i.e. esoteric), implying thereby that at the level of ordinary existence (i.e. exoteric), and despite the plurality and diversity of religions, each religion is adequate and valid in its own limited way, each authentic and conveying limited though equal truth. The notion of a plurality of truth of equal validity in the plurality and diversity of religion is perhaps aligned to the statements and general conclusions of modern philosophy and science arising from the discovery of a pluraity and diversity of laws governing the universe having equal validity each in its own cosmological system. The trend to align modern scientific discovery concerning the systems of the universe with corresponding statements applied to human society, cultural traditions,and values is one of the characteristic features of modernity.

The position of those who advocate the theory of the transcendent unity of religions is based upon the assumption that all religions, or the major religions of mankind, are revealed religions. They assume that the universality and transcendence of e ~ Syed Muhammad Naquib Al-Attas

With a few exceptions, the critics of children's books are remarkably lenient souls ... Most of us assume there is something goodin every child; the critics go from this to assume there is something good in every book written for a child. It is not a sound theory. ~ Katharine Sergeant Angell White

Something must be
very wrong,' it said,
and I agreed,
although it turned out
the author meant that 'no theory
of physics should produce
infinities with impunity.'
I'd point out that every theory
of the heart
produces infinities
with impunity
if I were the kind of jerk
who uses the heart
to mean the human
tendency to make
others suffer
just because we
hate to suffer
alone. I'm sorry
I brought a fitted sheet
to the beach. I'm sorry
I'm selfish and determined
to make the worst
of everything. I'm
sorry language is a ship
that goes down
while you're building it.
The Hesychasts of Byzantium
stripped their prayers
of words. It's been tried
with poems too. But insofar
as I am a disappointment
to myself and others, it seems fitting
to set up shop in almost
and not quite and that's not
what I meant. I draw the line at the heart,
though, with its
infinities. ~ Michael Robbins

As for biblical or religious theory, I don't ever want to fight about the details of the story, I want to live the reality of the message. ~ Steve Maraboli

Conspiracy theory is the ultimate refuge of the powerless. If you cannot change your own life, it must be that some greater force controls the world. ~ Roger Cohen

Even today, I am in total awe of the following wondrous chain of ideas and interconnections. Guided throughout by principles of symmetry, Einstein first showed that acceleration and gravity are really two sides of the same coin. He then expanded the concept to demonstrate that gravity merely reflects the geometry of spacetime. The instruments he used to develop the theory were Riemann's non-Euclidean geometries-precisely the same geometries used by Felix Klein to show that geometry is in fact a manifestation of group theory (because every geometry is defined by its symmetries-the objects it leaves unchanged). Isn't this amazing? ~ Mario Livio

People ignore facts which contradict the theory in the mind of the investor. Dis-confirming evidence must be seeked out to beat this theory. ~ Manoj Arora

I am using the word theory as a scientist means it: a set of ideas so well established by observations and physical models that it is essentially indistinguishable from fact. That is different from the colloquial use that means "guess." To a scientist, you can bet your life on a theory. Remember, gravity is "just a theory" too. ~ Philip Plait

The question of the acceptance of theories should, I propose, be demoted to the status of a minor problem. For science may be regarded as a growing system of problems, rather than as a system of beliefs. And for a system of problems, the tentative acceptance of a theory or a conjecture means hardly more than that it is considered worthy of further criticism. ~ Karl R. Popper

How glorious, then, is the prospect, the reverse of all the past, which is now opening upon us, and upon the world. Government, we may now expect to see, not only in theory and in books but in actual practice, calculated for the general good, and taking no more upon it than the general good requires, leaving all men the enjoyment of as many of their natural rights as possible, and no more interfering with matters of religion, with men's notions concerning God, and a future state, than with philosophy, or medicine. ~ Joseph Priestley

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

Good general theory does not search for the maximum generality, but for the right generality. ~ Saunders Mac Lane

It is the theory that decides what can be observed. ~ Albert Einstein

It is probably safe to say that all the changes of factual knowledge which have led to the relativity theory, resulting in a very great theoretical development, are completely trivial from any point of view except their relevance to the structure of a theoretical system. ~ Talcott Parsons

Everyone wants to fall in love. But I think more people are in love with the theory of love. If you're looking in from the outside, it looks so beautiful. On the inside, it's scary because it can take over your life. It's the strongest emotion but also the darkest. It can put you on a high for days, but it can wrap an anchor around your feet and drown you in less than a minute. If everyone knew the truth no one would really ask for love. But when it drops into your life, you can only hope that you have enough strength to hang on. ~ Calia Read

Journalism only tells us what men are doing; it is fiction that tells us what they are thinking, and still more what they are feeling. If a new scientific theory finds the soul of a man in his dreams, at least it ought not to leave out his day-dreams. And all fiction is only a diary of day-dreams instead of days. And this profound preoccupation of men's minds with certain things always eventually has an effect even on the external expression of the age. ~ Gilbert K. Chesterton

Throughout these lectures I have delighted in showing you that the price of gaining such an accurate theory has been the erosion of our common sense. We must accept some very bizarre behavior: the amplification and suppression of probabilities, light reflecting from all parts of a mirror, light travelling in paths other than a straight line, photons going faster or slower than the conventional speed of light, electrons going backwards in time, photons suddenly disintegrating into a positron-electron pair, and so on. That we must do, in order to appreciate what Nature is really doing underneath nearly all the phenomena we see in the world. ~ Richard Feynman

I work in the field of art, and you know how during a period of Marxist ideology, fewer people are inclined to believe in the power of the culture as a whole: they believe in the revolutionary potential of economics, class struggle theory ... Therefore it's time to show that art means the power of creativity, and it's time to define art in a larger way, to include science and religion too..(1973 ~ Joseph Beuys

Science ignores the spiritual realm because it is not amenable to scientific analysis. As importantly, the predictive success of Newtonian theory, emphasizing the primacy of a physical Universe, made the existence of spirit and God an extraneous hypothesis that offered no explanatory principles needed by science. ~ Bruce Lipton

Dynamic equivalence is a central concept in the translation theory, developed by Eugene A. Nida, which has been widely adopted by the United Bible Societies...Purporting to be an academically linguistic concept, it is in fact a sociocultural concept of communication. Its definition is essentially behavourist: determined by external forces, such as society--with strong pragmatist overtones--focusing on the reader rather than the writer. [M]ost twentieth-century American philosophical endeavours are predominantly pragmatist, dwelling in the shadows cast by William James and John Dewey. ~ J. Cammenga

The individualism of current economic theory is manifest in the purely self-interested behavior it generally assumes. It has no real place for fairness, malevolence, and benevolence, nor for the preservation of human life or any other moral concern. ~ Herman E. Daly

We can summarize electricity, magnetism and gravity into equations one inch long, and that's the power of field theory. And so I said to myself: I will create a field theory of strings. And when I did it one day, it was incredible, realizing that on a sheet of paper I can write down an equation which summarized almost all physical knowledge. ~ Michio Kaku

Experience has shown repeatedly that a mathematical theory with a rich internal structure generally turns out to have significant implications for the understanding of the real world, often in ways no one could have envisioned before the theory was developed. ~ William Thurston

Archaeology is the study of humanity itself, and unless that attitude towards the subject is kept in mind archaeology will be overwhelmed by impossible theories or a welter of flint chips. ~ Margaret Murray

I have a tendency to often share the point of view of the conspiracy theory. ~ Marion Cotillard