Top 100 Quotes About Theories
#1. And theories are no more than fictions which help us to make sense of experience and which are subject to disconfirmation when their explanations are no longer adequate.
Chinua Achebe
#2. Sometimes you brush against a truth, feeling it before you can say it, and instead of theories or conclusions, tears are the evidence it leaves.
Dianna Ortiz
#3. The artist discards all theories, both his own and those of others. He forgets everything when he is in front of his canvas.
Georges Rouault
#4. History will never change because of politics or conquests or theories or wars; that's mere repitition, it's been going on since the beginning of time. History will only change when we are able to use the energy of love, just as we use energy of the wind, the seas, the atom.
Paulo Coelho
#5. Theories come and go, but fundamental data always remain the same.
Mary Leakey
#6. Paradox is the sharpest scalpel in the satchel of science. Nothing concentrates the mind as effectively, regardless of whether it pits two competing theories against each other, or theory against observation, or a compelling mathematical deduction against ordinary common sense.
Hans Christian Von Baeyer
#7. Scientific progress isn't a parade of miraculously wrong theories - it's an optimistic snowball, gathering the structure of reality as it rolls.
Amanda Gefter
#8. Academics love to make theories about a body of work, but each book consumes the writer and is the sum of his or her world.
Jeanette Winterson
#9. I like relativity and quantum theories because I don't understand them and they make me feel as if space shifted about like a swan that can't settle, refusing to sit still and be measured; and as if the atom were an impulsive thing always changing its mind.
D.H. Lawrence
#10. The wise man regulates his conduct by the theories both of religion and science. But he regards these theories not as statements of ultimate fact but as art-forms.
John B. S. Haldane
#11. I want to give people theories, I want to expose them to scientific stories that force them to re-evaluate the way they use these three pounds of meat inside their head.
Jonah Lehrer
#12. It's hard to observe without imposing a theory to explain what we're seeing, but the trouble with theories, as Einstein said, is that they explain not only what is observed but what CAN BE observed. We start to build expectations based on our theories. And often those expectations get in the way.
Michael Crichton
#13. Where do new ideas come from? The answer is simple: differences. While there are many theories of creativity, the only tenet they all share is that creativity comes from unlikely juxtapositions. The best way to maximize differences is to mix ages, cultures, and disciplines.
Nicholas Negroponte
#14. In degenerating programmes, however, theories are fabricated only in order to accommodate known facts
Imre Lakatos
#15. Hutton's world consisted of his rocks and his friends. The rocks provided the raw material he needed to formulate his theories; the friends provided the guidance he needed to articulate those theories.
Eric Weiner
#16. A good teacher offers practice , a bad one offers theories .
Anthony De Mello
#17. I began my work in the '70s, teaching at a university in Bangladesh, and these economic theories that I had learned stopped ringing true for me, as I saw the misery of people living all around me.
Muhammad Yunus
#18. Delirium tremens in a drunk alcoholic are an unmistakable symptom, but those intoxicated with theories are easily mistaken for geniuses.
Samael Aun Weor
#19. It's not that bad. Conspiracy theories come up whenever people feel like the universe is too random. Absurd. If it's all an enemy plot, at least there's someone calling the shots.
James S.A. Corey
#20. Paull has his own style, which is folksy, not canned.
Religion? He's got one. His prophet's Ayn Rand.
By Rand's eerie theories he's fervently gripped,
So he won't do flip-flops. He long ago flipped.
Calvin Trillin
#21. There's a few conspiracy theories that I believe in, but not too many.
Jason Ritter
#22. Economics has paid a terrible price for its dalliances with the Keynesian and neoclassical theories.
Edmund Phelps
#23. I am an enthusiast, but not a crank in the sense that I have some pet theories as to the proper construction of a flying machine. I wish to avail myself of all that is already known and then, if possible, add my mite to help on the future worker who will attain final success.
Wilbur Wright
#24. If those who had set themselves to explain the various theories of Christianity had set themselves instead to do the will of the Master, how different the world would be now!
George MacDonald
#25. Would you think me impertinent if I were to put your theories to a more severe test?" "On the contrary," he answered, "it would prevent me from taking a second dose of cocaine. I
Arthur Conan Doyle
#26. I am not offering God as a theory to compete with scientific theories about the universe. Rather I am saying that those self-contained, secular theories provide evidence for theologically neutral premises in philosophical arguments leading to a conclusion that has theistic significance.
William Lane Craig
#27. Free market economists frequently see minimum wage legislation as mere political intervention. However, there are decent economic theories which show that, under certain circumstances, minimum wages can be beneficial, as it makes workers more productive.
Ha-Joon Chang
#28. Most of beliefs that are commonly known as scientific facts are based on various theories, which have never been validated. Many of them will never be.
Question your beliefs. Choose what promotes love and unity.
Raphael Zernoff
#29. His fingerprints are all over today's technologies. Photoelectric cells and lasers, nuclear power and fiber optics, space travel, and even semiconductors all trace back to his theories.
Walter Isaacson
#30. It's not so much what you have to learn if you accept weird theories, it's what you have to UNlearn.
Isaac Asimov
#31. On a small scale, person-to-person, Jesus encountered the kinds of suffering common to all of us. And how did he respond? Avoiding philosophical theories and theological lessons, he reached out with healing and compassion. He forgave sin, healed the afflicted, cast out evil, and even overcame death.
Philip Yancey
#32. I believe without exception that theory follows practice. Whenever there is a conflict between theory and practice, theory is wrong. As far as I'm concerned, we make theories for what people have done.
David Baker
#33. Theories are always very thin and insubstantial, experience only is tangible.
Hosea Ballou
#34. Whoever has the mind stuffed with theories and more theories, suffers horribly because he is unable to realize nothing of what they have read..
Samael Aun Weor
#35. One of my pet theories is that readers have built-in BS detectors that enable them to recognize insincerity in writers. David [Halberstam] was sincerity to the core. He believed in what he wrote, and that conviction conveyed itself to readers.
Jonathan Yardley
#36. I'd heard theories. Destruction of forests had altered pressure zones. Global warming made for stronger storms. Chemtrails indicated government manipulation of the weather. God punished the family and neighbors of idolaters.
Carl-John X. Veraja
#37. Nowadays only cosmologists and particle physicists are allowed to invent new kinds of matter when they want to explain why their theories totally fail to match observed reality.
Terry Pratchett
#38. During the many centuries that magic, here on this planet, was presumed to have worked, there were at least as many theories as to how magic worked as there were cultures and religions.
Lynn Abbey
#39. Great theories are expansive; failures mire us in dogmatism and tunnel vision.
Stephen Jay Gould
#40. From the Cognitive Revolution onwards, historical narratives replace biological theories as our primary means of explaining the development of Homo sapiens.
Yuval Noah Harari
#41. Never let yourself be goaded into taking seriously problems about words and their meanings. What must be taken seriously are questions of fact, and assertions about facts: theories and hypotheses; the problems they solve; and the problems they raise.
Karl R. Popper
#42. The conflict of theories, leading, as it eventually must, to the survival of the fittest, is advantageous.
Grove Karl Gilbert
#43. It is always incorrect to assume you can know what someone's moral convictions are based on their philosophical theories.
Stanley Fish
#44. Washington's insatiable desire to spend our children's inheritance on failed stimulus plans and other misguided economic theories have given record debt and left us with far too many unemployed.
Rick Perry
#45. Well-established theories collapse under the weight of new facts and observations which cannot be explained, and then accumulate to the point where the once useful theory is clearly obsolete.
Al Gore
#46. There was an idea in the air, becoming clearer and stronger, an idea not just in the theories of Karl Marx but in the dreams of writers and artists through the ages: that people might cooperatively use the treasures of the earth to make life better for everyone, not just a few.
Howard Zinn
#48. The question is this - Is man an ape or an angel? My Lord, I am on the side of the angels. I repudiate with indignation and abhorrence these new fanged theories.
Benjamin Disraeli
#49. From outside one will always triumphantly impress theories upon the world and then fall straight into the ditch one has dug, but only from inside will one keep oneself and the world quiet and true.
Franz Kafka
#50. Propose theories which can be criticized. Think about possible decisive falsifying experiments-crucial experiments. But do not give up your theories too easily-not, at any rate, before you have critically examined your criticism.
Karl Popper
#52. If faith cannot be reconciled with rational thinking, it has to be eliminated as an anachronistic remnant of earlier stages of culture and replaced by science dealing with facts and theories which are intelligible and can be validated.
Erich Fromm
#54. Most of the research which is done is determined by the requirement that it shall, in a fairly obvious and predictable way, reinforce the approved or fashionable theories.
Celia Green
#55. If you have to choose between two theories, prefer the one that doesn't center on you.
Paul Graham
#56. In art, theories are as useful as a doctor's prescription; one must be sick to believe them.
Maurice De Vlaminck
#57. 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
#58. This was the pivotal insight of the Scientific Revolution: that the advancement of knowledge depends on current theories collapsing in the face of new insights and discoveries. In this model of progress, errors do not lead us away from the truth. Instead, they edge us incrementally toward it.
Kathryn Schulz
#59. We tend to think of science as finding equations, like E=MC2, that are simple and elegant. But maybe some theories are complicated, and we can only find the simple ones.
Hod Lipson
#60. Evolutionary cosmology formulates theories in which a universe is capable of giving rise to and generating future universes out of itself, within black holes or whatever.
Robert Nozick
#61. The truly privileged theories are not the ones referring to any particular scale of size or complexity, nor the ones situated at any particular level of the predictive hierarchy, but the ones that contain the deepest explanations.
David Deutsch
#62. Because essentially Schoenberg was an extremely gifted man. And in spite of many of his theories and so on, when he really began to write music, he still was guided very much by his internal hearing, by what we call your internal ear.
Leo Ornstein
#63. On the one hand we publicly pronounce the equality of all peoples; on the other hand, in our immigration laws, we embrace in practice these very theories we abhor and verbally condemn.
Emanuel Celler
#64. The problem with people who live in a world of speeches and books and theories is they don't know how to fix things in the real world when they go wrong. They feign ignorance, blame others, and make another eloquent speech.
Kathleen Troia McFarland
#65. Good theories of the mind must span at least three different scales of time: slow, for the billions of years in which our brains have survivied; fast, for the fleeting weeks and months of childhood; and in between, the centuries of growth of our ideas through history.
Marvin Minsky
#66. Men who believe too firmly in their theories, do not believe enough in the theories of others. So ... these despisers of their fellows ... make experiments only to destroy a theory, instead of to seek the truth.
Claude Bernard
#67. There are prophets, there are guides, and there are argumentative people with theories, and one must be careful to discriminate between them.
Peter Brook
#68. The critic can affect my aesthetic theories only by affecting my aesthetic experience. All systems of aesthetics must be based on personal experience--that is to say, they must be subjective.
Clive Bell
#69. Things are still in early stages, but one can imagine that as we build up and systematize our theories of these associations, and try to boil them down to their core, the result might point us toward the sort of fundamental principles I advocate.
David Chalmers
#70. Medical theories are most of the time even more peculiar than the facts themselves.
August Bier
#71. Theories are like a stairway; by climbing, science widens its horizon more and more, because theories embody and necessarily include proportionately more facts as they advance.
Claude Bernard
#72. Theories should be judged by their ability to predict events rather than by the realism of their assumptions.
Milton Friedman
#73. Our mistake is not that we take our theories too seriously, but that we do not take them seriously enough.
Steven Weinberg
#74. Everybody thinks of economics whether he is aware of it or not. In joining a political party or in casting his ballot, the citizen implicitly takes a stand upon essential economic theories.
Ludwig Von Mises
#75. I believe conspiracy theories are part of a larger conspiracy to distract us from the real conspiracy. String theory.
Andy Kindler
#76. Language is the continuation of coercion by other means."
"Bullshit. It's cooperation." Both theories explained what had happened plausibly. I resisted, because it felt trite, saying that they weren't as contradictory as they sounded.
China Mieville
#77. Because pessimism needs to counter that argument in order to be at all persuasive, a recurring theme in pessimistic theories throughout history has been that an exceptionally dangerous moment is imminent.
David Deutsch
#78. There is a class, moreover, by whom all these scientific theories, and more are held as ascertained facts, and as the basis of philosophical inferences which strike at the root of theistic beliefs.
Asa Gray
#79. If you think about basic science or coming up with new theories of mathematics, these are not the kinds of things which are necessarily a well-defined market to pay people.
Peter Thiel
#80. McKinsey partners tend to be designers of ditches, not diggers of ditches. When it comes to executing their lofty theories, well, consultants lean toward leaving those messy realities to the companies themselves.
Bethany McLean
#82. No part of the aim of normal science is to call forth new sorts of phenomena; indeed those that will not fit the box are often not seen at all. Nor do scientists normally aim to invent new theories, and they are often intolerant of those invented by others.
Thomas Kuhn
#83. I think it laughable, frankly, that the physics community comes up with a theory for everything. There isn't one theory for everything. There is not one explanation. We may eventually have several theories that can tie things together nicely but there is not a single theory of everything.
Edgar Mitchell
#84. In the little hall leading to it was a rack holding various Socialist or radical newspapers, tracts, and pamphlets in very small print and on very bad paper. The subjects treated were technical Marxist theories.
Agnes Smedley
#85. People can get along without your theories and opinions, "Thus saith the Lord" - that is what we want.
D.L. Moody
#86. If anyone imagines that scientists are dispassionate and impartial people, discussing theories and ideas unemotionally in the cool clear light of reason, they have been seriously misled.
Eva Jablonka
#87. Other psychological theories say a good deal about compensation.
Allen Tate
#89. Others loved themselves, money, theories, power: Lenin loved his fellow men ... Lenin was God, as Christ was God, because God is Love and Christ and Lenin were all Love!
Isadora Duncan
#90. Just because you have a nut theory it doesn't mean that you agree with other nut theories. In fact, it often makes you very hostile to them. After all, there's a limited pool there that we're all after.
Terence McKenna
#91. There are two theories of evolution. There is the genuine scientific theory; and there is the talk-radio pretend version, designed not to enlighten but to deceive and enrage.
Edward Humes
#92. In my opinion, assassination theories will continue to revolve around these assassinations as they have around several other significant assassinations in American history. The assassination of President Lincoln comes to mind.
Louis Stokes
#93. There's nothing worse than people talking about theories and humor.
John Currin
#94. I never thought that others would take my theories so much more seriously than I did.
Albert Einstein
#95. I have lived among enough painters and around studios to have had all the theories - and how contradictory they are - rammed down my throat. A man has to have a gizzard like an ostrich to digest all the brass-tacks and wire nails of modern art theories.
D.H. Lawrence
#96. Only now are increasing numbers of political and social scientists beginning to realize that Kelso's theories provide a private-property-based alternative to the imminent passage of a government-distributed "guaranteed income" or "negative income tax."
Hazel Henderson
#97. There are many theories about the best way to remove excess carbon from the atmosphere - some are ludicrous, others are at least worth study. The most commonly discussed plan is to lace the sky with reflective chemicals.
Michael Specter
#98. It is imperative for many branches of fundamentalist christianity to constantly feel conspired against ... so they cite humanist manifestos and theosophical societies and concoct these vast and dark organizations that exist nowhere but in the minds of those who conceive these theories.
J. Michael Straczynski
#99. All the rest of [Shakespeare's] vast history, as furnished by the biographers, is built up, course upon course, of guesses, inferences, theories, conjectures - an Eiffel Tower of artificialities rising sky-high from a very flat and very thin foundation of inconsequential facts.
Mark Twain
#100. Philosophy without action is the ruin of the soul. One brave deed is worth a hundred books, a thousand theories, a million words. Now as always we need heroes. And heroines! Down with the passive and the limp.
Edward Abbey
