Best 629 quotes in «theory quotes» category

Fine. You don't like my theory. Got it." "I like it. But it's kind of boring." "Well. So are you." "Probably why I like your theory.

[F]or a social theorist ignorance is more excusable than vagueness. Other investigators can easily show I am wrong if I am sufficiently precise. They will have much more difficulty showing by investigation what, precisely, I mean if I am vague. I hope not to be forced to weasel out with 'But I didn’t really mean that.' Social theorists should prefer to be wrong rather than misunderstood. Being misunderstood shows sloppy theoretical work.

For starters, that’s a rather simple principle of Time Travel right there – and according to the pioneers of time travel, it’s one of the foundation stones of the Theory behind it. It’s something of a paradox – a mind-boggling annotation in the ever-puzzling and ever growing Anals of History. (Some readers may still be thinking that should be ‘Annals’ – however, the author of this work cannot be blamed for what you may think.)

From the dawn of civilization, human beings have tried to find out order in the chaotic world surrounding them. It has however never been easy to find a solution to explain a given system while being a part of that system. The best bet is to find out the most fundamental components within the system and building a theory round these. In other words, a theory that is able to describe the world in totality has to keep the number of basic postulates it depends upon to zero or near zero.

Gut?” “General Unified Theory.” Kohler quipped. “The theory of everything.

G. Stanley Hall, a creature of his times, believed strongly that adolescence was determined – a fixed feature of human development that could be explained and accounted for in scientific fashion. To make his case, he relied on Haeckel's faulty recapitulation idea, Lombroso's faulty phrenology-inspired theories of crime, a plethora of anecdotes and one-sided interpretations of data. Given the issues, theories, standards and data-handling methods of his day, he did a superb job. But when you take away the shoddy theories, put the anecdotes in their place, and look for alternate explanations of the data, the bronze statue tumbles hard. I have no doubt that many of the street teens of Hall's time were suffering or insufferable, but it's a serious mistake to develop a timeless, universal theory of human nature around the peculiarities of the people of one's own time and place.

Hence there is no free admission to the process of enlightenment - it is always paid at a psycho-traumatic cost. Only such individuals as always already bring along much more injury than could be caused by mere cognitive attacks on their narcissistic system have an apparently free backstage pass to it. Such candidates, like the highly talented of a special type, obtain their degree in wound studies free of charge. For them psychical sacrifices that only affect the cognitive immunity-shield appear to be forms of relief - for which reason they move about in the region of obscure theory like fish in water.

His entire presence was like gravity, impossible to forget, possible to believe in, a theory merged into a law.

I am apt, however, to entertain a Suspicion, that the World is still too young to fix any general stable Truths in Politics, which will remain true to the latest Posterity. We have not as yet had Experience of above three thousand Years; so that not only the Art of Reasoning is still defective in this Science, as well as in all others, but we even want sufficient Materials, upon which we can reason. 'Tis not sufficiently known, what Degrees of Refinement, either in Virtue or Vice, human Nature is susceptible of; nor what may be expected of Mankind from any great Revolution in their Education, Customs, or Principles.

Human potential is the ability of a person or humanity to put their theoretical abilities into practice

If there are infinite dimensions then there would be infinite alternate realities and if there are infinite alternate realities we would exist in almost all of them that would make all of us omnipresent...

I am now convinced that we have recently become possessed of experimental evidence of the discrete or grained nature of matter, which the atomic hypothesis sought in vain for hundreds and thousands of years. The isolation and counting of gaseous ions, on the one hand, which have crowned with success the long and brilliant researches of J.J. Thomson, and, on the other, agreement of the Brownian movement with the requirements of the kinetic hypothesis, established by many investigators and most conclusively by J. Perrin, justify the most cautious scientist in now speaking of the experimental proof of the atomic nature of matter, The atomic hypothesis is thus raised to the position of a scientifically well-founded theory, and can claim a place in a text-book intended for use as an introduction to the present state of our knowledge of General Chemistry.

I did think about a Ph.D. in computer science, but this is a time in industry where theory and practice are coming together in amazing ways. Yes, there's money, but what really interests me is that private-sector innovation happens faster. You can get more done and on a larger scale and have more impact. With all the start-ups out there, I think this is a time like the Renaissance. Not just one person doing great work, but so many feeding off one another. If you lived then, wouldn't you go out and paint?

If my nightmare is a culture inhabited by posthumans who regard their bodies as fashion accessories rather than the ground of being, my dream is a version of the posthuman that embraces the possibilities of information technologies without being seduced by fantasies of unlimited power and disembodied immortality, that recognizes and celebrates finitude as a condition of human being, and that understands human life is embedded in a material world of great complexity, one on which we depend for our continued survival.

I confess that Fermat's Theorem as an isolated proposition has very little interest for me, for a multitude of such theorems can easily be set up, which one could neither prove nor disprove. But I have been stimulated by it to bring our again several old ideas for a great extension of the theory of numbers. Of course, this theory belongs to the things where one cannot predict to what extent one will succeed in reaching obscurely hovering distant goals. A happy star must also rule, and my situation and so manifold distracting affairs of course do not permit me to pursue such meditations as in the happy years 1796-1798 when I created the principal topics of my Disquisitiones arithmeticae. But I am convinced that if good fortune should do more than I expect, and make me successful in some advances in that theory, even the Fermat theorem will appear in it only as one of the least interesting corollaries. {In reply to Olbers' attempt in 1816 to entice him to work on Fermat's Theorem. The hope Gauss expressed for his success was never realised.}

If I keep observing the uranium, which means a little more than keeping my eyes on the pot on my desk and involves something akin to surrounding it with a whole system of Geiger counters, I can freeze it in such a way that it stops emitting radiation. Although Turing first suggested the idea as a theoretical construct, it turns out that it is not just mathematical fiction. Experiments in the last decade have demonstrated the real possibility of using observation to inhibit the progress of a quantum system.

I know what theory... the possibility of impossibility.

I have a theory that movies operate on the level of dreams, where you dream yourself.

I know the strategy, I know the logic, I know the way but everything is on theory, but fuck me without action it's just a one peace which isn't assembled!

If you wish to learn from the theoretical physicist anything about the methods which he uses, I would give you the following piece of advice: Don't listen to his words, examine his achievements. For to the discoverer in that field, the constructions of his imagination appear so necessary and so natural that he is apt to treat them not as the creations of his thoughts but as given realities.

I have a theory that he’s not actually as stupid as he likes to act, because often he’ll play the stupidity card in a really smart way .

I imagine that the intelligent people are the ones so intelligent that they don't even need or want to look 'intelligent' anymore.

It dawned on me I'd never considered the possibility she didn't talk to people because she was weird as hell, but that was my new working theory.

In ‘A Scandal in Bohemia’, he said it was a capital mistake to theorize without data, because you ended up twisting facts to suit theories instead of the other way around.

In short, philosophical theories are largely the product of the hidden hand of the cognitive unconscious.

In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. But in practice, there is.

Imagination is the other end of Reality.

In ancient times people weren't just male or female, but one of three types: male/male, male/female, or female/female. In other words, each person was made out of the components of two people. Everyone was happy with this arrangement and never really gave it much thought. But then God took a knife and cut everybody in half, right down the middle. So after that the world was divided just into male and female, the upshot being that people spend their time running around trying to locate their missing other half.

Indeed ethnography and theory resemble nothing so much as the two arcs of a hyperbola, which cast their beams in opposite directions, lighting up the surfaces, respectively, of mind and world. They are back to back, and darkness reigns between them. But what if each arc were to reverse its orientation, so as to embrace the other in an encompassing, brightly illuminated ellipse? We would then have neither ethnography nor theory, nor even a compound of both. What we would have is an undivided, interstitial field of anthropology. If ethnographic theory is the hyperbola, anthropology is the ellipse. For ethnography, when it turns, is no longer ethnography but the educational correspondences of real life. And theory, when it turns, is no longer theory, but an imagination nourished by its observational engagements with the world. The rupture between reality and imagination—the one annexed to fact, the other to theory—has been the source of much havoc in the history of consciousness. It needs to be repaired. It is surely the task of anthropology, before all else, to repair it. In calling a halt to the proliferation of ethnography, I am not asking for more theory. My plea is for a return to anthropology.

In order to enter that zone we must finally let go of the embodied distances that place grants. But what does this do to what we commonly think of as the past? I think of cyberspace, which is no place at all, as akin to the dark imaginary out of which poems come, their rhythms, their discrete music punctuating the inner life.

In the business people with expertise, experience and evidence will make more profitable decisions than people with instinct, intuition and imagination.

I still feel glad to emphasize the duty, the defining characteristic of the pure scientist—probably to be found working in universities—who commit themselves absolutely to specialized goals, to seek the purest manifestation of any possible phenomenon that they are investigating, to create laboratories that are far more controlled than you would ever find in industry, and to ignore any constraints imposed by, as it were, realism. Further down the scale, people who understand and want to exploit results of basic science have to do a great deal more work to adapt and select the results, and combine the results from different sources, to produce something that is applicable, useful, and profitable on an acceptable time scale.

I suspect that 'Kindness and Cruelty' and 'Mercy and Justice' all have secret affairs, as though they rendezvous only within certain sophisticated souls: those who hate being offensive, but love telling the truth.

I" theory take a later of course without "O" and you will see that all are build with "I".

I think a strong claim can be made that the process of scientific discovery may be regarded as a form of art. This is best seen in the theoretical aspects of Physical Science. The mathematical theorist builds up on certain assumptions and according to well understood logical rules, step by step, a stately edifice, while his imaginative power brings out clearly the hidden relations between its parts. A well constructed theory is in some respects undoubtedly an artistic production. A fine example is the famous Kinetic Theory of Maxwell. ... The theory of relativity by Einstein, quite apart from any question of its validity, cannot but be regarded as a magnificent work of art.

I think actually if you take the analogy with other areas of engineering, and increasingly of science and even mathematics, you can see people do not have to learn the vast number of formulae they used to learn. Instead, they have to learn to use the computer effectively. This frees them, I feel, to understand concepts and the foundations while they’re learning the mechanics of the application of the theory.

It may be asked how I know that there are any Reals. If this hypothesis is the sole support of my method of inquiry, my method of inquiry must not be used to support my hypothesis. The reply is this: 1. If investigation cannot be regarded as proving that there are Real things, it at least does not lead to a contrary conclusion; but the method and the conception on which it is based remain ever in harmony. No doubts of the method, therefore, necessarily arise from its practice, as is the case with all the others. 2. The feeling which gives rise to any method of fixing belief is a dissatisfaction at two repugnant propositions. But here already is a vague concession that there is some one thing which a proposition should represent. Nobody, therefore, can really doubt that there are Reals, for, if he did, doubt would not be a source of dissatisfaction. The hypothesis, therefore, is one which every mind admits. So that the social impulse does not cause men to doubt it. 3. Everybody uses the scientific method about a great many things, and only ceases to use it when he does not know how to apply it. 4. Experience of the method has not led us to doubt it, but, on the contrary, scientific investigation has had the most wonderful triumphs in the way of settling opinion. These afford the explanation of my not doubting the method or the hypothesis which it supposes; and not having any doubt, nor believing that anybody else whom I could influence has, it would be the merest babble for me to say more about it. If there be anybody with a living doubt upon the subject, let him consider it.

It is the theory which decides what can be observed

I will repeat the following until I am hoarse: it is contagion that determines the fate of a theory in social science, not its validity.

It will be seen how subjectivism and objectivism, spiritualism and materialism, activity and suffering, only lose their antithetical character, and thus their existence, as such antitheses in the social condition; it will be seen how the resolution of the theoretical antitheses is only possible in a practical way, by virtue of the practical energy of men. Their resolution is therefore by no means merely a problem of knowledge, but a real problem of life, which philosophy could not solve precisely because it conceived this problem as merely a theoretical one.

It’s so easy to lose faith and become lost in all of the politics of the world. That’s why we need the arts. To sublimate our frustration and anger into something beautiful. Freud called sublimation a virtuous defence mechanism because it is in the arts that we can find our humanity.

Marx made theory... Lenin applied it with his sense of large-scale social organization... And Henry Ford made the work of the socialist state possible.

Mankind has uncovered two extremely efficient theories: one that describes our universe's structure (Einstein's gravity: the theory of general relativity), and one that describes everything our universe contains (quantum field theory), and these two theories won't talk to each other.

Modern art always projects itself into a twilight zone where no values are fixed. It is always born in anxiety, at least since Cézanne. And Picasso once said that what matters most to us in Cézanne, more than his pictures, is his anxiety. It seems to me a function of modern art to transmit this anxiety to the spectator, so that his encounter with the work is--at least while the work is new-- a genuine existential predicament. Like Kierkegaard's God, the work molests us with its aggressive absurdity [...]. It demands a decision in which you discover something of your own quality; and this decision is always a "leap of faith," to use Kierkegaard's famous term. And like Kierkegaard's God, who demands a sacrifice from Abraham in violation of every moral standard: like Kierkegaard's God, the picture seems arbitrary, cruel, irrational, demanding your faith, while it makes no promise of future rewards. In other words, it is in the nature of original contemporary art to present itself as a bad risk. And we the public, artists included, should be proud of being in this predicament, because nothing else would seem to us quite true to life; and art, after all, is supposed to be a mirror of life.

Misunderstanding me probably means that I am Alien. (As far from here I can tell you sounds pretty interesting Theory... - DeYtH Banger is Alien. I like it!)

Night had fallen, and Diane admired the deep sky behind Steve's calm countenance. They looked into each other's eyes again and felt the spark and excitement of discovery. As if to celebrate the perfect, life-enabling distance of the earth from the sun, Diane and Steve kissed again." "-The Grand Unified Story (a Short Story) from Stories and Scripts: an Anthology

Moral relativism sounds good in theory but is impossible to practice.

My action is my prayer.

Padauža išsyk atkreipė ginklą į mane. Vargšelis visas tirtėjo, prakaitas liejosi kaip iš kibiro, todėl labai jau išmintingai nutariau, kad pistoletas neužtaisytas ir man tik reikia jį atimti. Pirmoji kulka pataikė į pilvą ir ištaškė į skutus visą mano teoriją.

Non-fiction is to theory as fiction is to experience.