Theoretical Quotes

#1. What are they going to do about it?"
"So far? Get drunk. Yell at each other or at us. Design theoretical judicial systems. Most of them seem to want the whole thing to just go away sot hey can get on with their research."
Murtry chuckled. "God bless the eggheads.

James S.A. Corey

#2. Now, it is the view of the Ministry that a theoretical knowledge will be more than sufficient to get you through your examination, which, after all, is what school is all about.

J.K. Rowling

#3. It's time that Islam should be redefined by the world based upon, the goodness of all the peace-loving Muslims, instead of the theoretical teachings of some books, be it Quran or the Hadith.

Abhijit Naskar

#4. Responsible Development is the style of development I aspire to now. It can be summarized by answering the question, How would I develop if it were my money? I'm amazed how many theoretical arguments evaporate when faced with this question.

Kent Beck

#5. All the evidence, experimental and even a little theoretical, seems to indicate that it is the energy content which is involved in gravitation, and therefore, since matter and antimatter both represent positive energies, gravitation makes no distinction.

Richard P. Feynman

#6. Carlsen came with a line that was not very theoretical, trying to challenge the World Champion to play chess. [ ... ] But Anand proved that even this obscure line is something he has studied before, and it was Carlsen that was set back.

Alejandro Ramirez

#7. The facile economic and psychological debunking of the theoretical life cannot do away with its irreducible beauties.

Allan Bloom

#8. Most people don't have time to master the very mathematical details of theoretical physics.

Stephen Hawking

#9. Theoretical and experimental physicists are now studying nothing at all-the vacuum. But that nothingness contains all of being.

Heinz Pagels

#10. Waiting for Godot ... has achieved a theoretical impossibility - a play in which nothing happens, that yet keeps the audience glued to their seats. What's more, since the second act is a subtly different reprise of the first, he has written a play in which nothing happens, twice.

Vivian Mercier

#11. We were convinced that the people need and require this faith. We have therefore undertaken the fight against the atheistic movement, and that not merely with a few theoretical declarations; we have stamped it out.

Adolf Hitler

#12. Fiction and essays can create empathy for the theoretical stranger.

Barbara Kingsolver

#13. That which Steinitz gave to the theoretical aspect of the game when he was at his best is very remote to all out home-bred chess philosophers, but with his views on Morphy, whom he tries to discredit completely, it is of course impossible to agree.

Alexander Alekhine

#14. The entire annals of Observation probably do not elsewhere exhibit so extraordinary a verification of any theoretical conjecture adventured on by the human spirit!

John Pringle Nichol

#15. The basis for comprehension is theory, and the language of theoretical science is mathematics.

D.C. Rapaport

#16. Much theoretical work, of course, focuses on existing economic institutions. The theorist wants to explain or forecast the economic or social outcomes that these institutions generate.

Eric Maskin

#17. One of the goals of philosophy is wage theoretical battle. That is why we can say that every thesis is always, by its very nature, an antithesis. A thesis is only ever put forward in opposition to another thesis, or in defence of a new one.

Louis Althusser

#18. A mother who undergoes a nine-month pregnancy is likely to feel that the product of all that pain and discomfort 'belongs' to her.

Shulamith Firestone

#19. The theoretical understanding of the world, which is the aim of philosophy, is not a matter of great practical importance to animals, or to savages, or even to most civilised men.

Bertrand Russell

#20. Value is consequently the necessary theoretical starting point whence we can elucidate the peculiar phenomenon of prices resulting from capitalist competition.

Rudolf Hiferding

#21. Yes, he wanted me to do Funny Games before, which I didn't want to do because the film was very theoretical - the way people experience violence on screen. There was very little space for fiction, it was more like a sacrifice for the actors than anything else.

Isabelle Huppert

#22. Since the beginning of physics, symmetry considerations have provided us with an extremely powerful and useful tool in our effort to understand nature. Gradually they have become the backbone of our theoretical formulation of physical laws.

Tsung-Dao Lee

#23. Working in theoretical systems can take away the juice. It can also be very beautiful, but when you're trying to satisfy a theoretical principle rather than a sonic reality, then it can become dry.

Pauline Oliveros

#24. But theoretical, imagined suffering is not what distresses a man and destroys his peace of mind. Only what you have seen with pitying eyes can really shake you.

Stefan Zweig

#25. No matter how we may single out a complex from nature ... its theoretical treatment will never prove to be ultimately conclusive ... I believe that this process of deepening of theory has no limits.

Albert Einstein

#26. The main concern of the study is with the outline of a theoretical system. Its minor variations from writer to writer are not a matter of concern to this analysis.

Talcott Parsons

#27. There is scarcely a subject that cannot be mathematically treated and the effects calculated or the results determined beforehand from the available theoretical and practical data.

Nikola Tesla

#28. In art, in taste, in life, in speech, you decide from feeling, and not from reason ... If we were obliged to enter into a theoretical deliberation on every occasion before we act, life would be at a stand, and Art would be impracticable.

William Hazlitt

#29. And I wondered if that was the problem with literature - it made sense only in theoretical situations and didn't often help in real life, where it took a hell of a lot more courage to live than to turn pages all alone, hidden away from the world in a corner or a bed or under a tree.

Matthew Quick

#30. Before we aspire after theoretical perfection in the amelioration of our political state, it is necessary that we possess those advantages which we have been cheated of, and which the experience of modern times has proved that nations even under the present conditions are susceptible.

Percy Bysshe Shelley

#31. While extroverts tend to attain leadership in public domains, introverts tend to attain leadership in theoretical and aesthetic fields.

Susan Cain

#32. Consequently, the sensuous aspect of art is related only to the two theoretical sensesof sight and hearing, while smell, taste, and touch remain excluded.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

#33. The life of theoretical philosophy is the best and happiest a man can lead. Few men are capable of it and then only intermittently. For the rest there is a second-best way of life, that of moral virtue and practical wisdom.

Aristotle.

#34. Thus not only the mental and the material, but the theoretical and the practical in the mathematical world, are brought into more intimate and effective connection with each other.

Ada Lovelace

#35. The most important tool of the theoretical physicist is his wastebasket.

Albert Einstein

#36. Yet all the knowledge on earth will give me nothing to assure me that this world is mine. ( ... ) I realize that if through science I can seize phenomena and enumerate them, I cannot, for all that, apprehend the world.

Albert Camus

#37. The hypothesis may be put forward, to be tested by the s subsequent investigation, that this development has been in large part a matter of the reciprocal interaction of new factual insights and knowledge on the one hand with changes in the theoretical system on the other.

Talcott Parsons

#38. Such is life, imaginary or otherwise: a continuous parting of ways, a constant flux of approximation and distanciation, lines of fate intersecting at a point which is no-time, a theoretical crossroads fictitiously 'present,' an unstable ice floe forever drifting between was and will be.

Sol Luckman

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

Sunday Adelaja

#40. I had a theoretical reverence and homage for beauty, elegance, gallantry, fascination but had I met those qualities incarnate in masculine shape, I should have known instinctively that they had nor could have sympathy with anything in me ...

Charlotte Bronte

#41. [T]he shaman treats all realities as subjective, much like some modern theoretical physicists are beginning to do. In such a viewpoint the question of whether an experience is real or not makes no sense, because the answer is yes and no, depending on your point of view.

Serge King

#42. I wrote my novel 'Bitter Greens' as the creative component of a Doctorate of Creative Arts and am now looking at the history of the Rapunzel tale as my theoretical component.

Kate Forsyth

#43. The work is what it is and hopefully it's seen as feminist work, or feminist-advised work, but I'm not going to go around espousing theoretical bullshit about feminist stuff.

Cindy Sherman

#44. There are ... scientific works - star catalogues, for example - which are not art; but the theoretical structures of Gauss, Einstein, or Maxwell are original, individual, "very personal" responses and expressions of exactly the same kind as the creative works of Beethoven or Dostoievski.

James R Newman

#45. They (fables) teach us that human beings learn and absorb ideas and concepts through narrative, through stories, not through lessons or theoretical speeches.

Carlos Ruiz Zafon

#46. You may be theoretically rich but practically poor.

Pushpa Rana

#47. Mental illness, of course, is not literally a 'thing' - or physical object - and hence it can 'exist' only in the same sort of way in which other theoretical concepts exist.

Thomas Szasz

#48. So instead of talking about theoretical ways of ending the war and violence, I say that we have to get rid of the individual asholes in each office and situation.

Colin Quinn

#49. When I was young I used to practice a martial art that was a mixture of karate, kung fu, Jujitsu, Yawara Kubotan, Aikido, Okinawan kobudo, Newaza, etc.; now I am just a theoretical samurai or a bushido scholar if you prefer.

William C. Brown

#50. I am not, however, militant in my atheism. The great English theoretical physicist Paul Dirac is a militant atheist. I suppose he is interested in arguing about the existence of God. I am not. It was once quipped that there is no God and Dirac is his prophet.

Linus Pauling

#51. In practice I regarded prayer as somehow more spiritual than sitting on a committee, preaching as more anointed than plumbing. Only the revelation of Christ's Humanity infused vigor into my bloodless theoretical doctrine.

Mark Shea

#52. Who is writing these screenwriting books? Not actually writing for the studios in Hollywood. These are people that have one or a half of a credit on maybe one movie, or none. So they're all theoretical.

Thomas Lennon

#53. The spirit of rebellion can only exist in a society where a theoretical equality conceals great factual inequalities. The problem of rebellion, therefore, has no meaning except within our own Western society.

Albert Camus

#54. Petersburg, the most theoretical and intentional town on the whole terrestrial globe.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

#55. The best notes are action-based and less, I don't know, heady, theoretical, because, as actors, we're too much in our heads anyway.

Josh Peck

#56. But in psychoanalysis there are no unimportant thoughts; there are only thoughts that pretend to be unimportant in order to not be told.

Shulamith Firestone

#57. When you work on something that combines both the spectacular and the relatable, the hyperreal and the real, it suddenly can become supernatural. The hypothetical and the theoretical can become literal.

J.J. Abrams

#58. One is led to the conclusion that the one hundred per cent male and the one hundred per cent female are theoretical

Niels Hoyer

#59. The early 1960s, when I started my graduate studies at UC Berkeley, were a period of experimental supremacy and theoretical impotence.

David Gross

#60. after all, our purpose in theoretical physics is not just to describe the world as we find it, but to explain - in terms of a few fundamental principles - why the world is the way it is.

Steven Weinberg

#61. The demands of Sex Privatization contradict the demands of the Beauty Ideal, causing the severe feminine neurosis about personal appearance.

Shulamith Firestone

#62. After reading a paper by a young theoretical scientist, Pauli, shaking his head sadly, commented:
That is not even wrong.

Wolfgang Pauli

#63. ...I stand looking at the aircraft, trying in vain to remember all the theoretical lore which i was supposed to have absorbed in school. The effort is discouraging.

Ernest K. Gann

#64. The strictly theoretical and so attractive dream of possible equality had been traded for the worst authoritarian nightmare in history when it was applied to reality, understood, with good reason (more, in this case), as the only criterion of truth.

Leonardo Padura

#65. After some minor pieces of theoretical study that I worked on, a student in my statistical mechanics class brought to my attention a problem in polyelectrolytes.

Rudolph A. Marcus

#66. The quantum theory of parallel universes is not the problem, it is the solution. It is not some troublesome, optional interpretation emerging from arcane theoretical considerations. It is the explanation, the only one that is tenable, of a remarkable and counter-intuitive reality.

David Deutsch

#67. Darwin himself, in his day, was unable to fight free of the theoretical errors of which he was guilty. It was the classics of Marxism that revealed those errors and pointed them out.

Trofim Lysenko

#68. Contemporary art photography is paradoxical. Anyone can look at it and form an opinion about what they see. Yet it usually represents aesthetic and theoretical positions that only a small minority of well-informed viewers can access.

Lucy Soutter

#69. I said to myself that maturity consisted in accepting the turn that existence had taken without getting too upset, following a path between daily practices and theoretical achievements, learning to see oneself, know oneself, in expectation of great changes.

Elena Ferrante

#70. In some ways I'm a frustrated scientist or mathematician. The amount of times I've thought I'd go back to university and do theoretical physics because I like the big questions, but really I know now that that's not quite me. What's me is to do it in novels.

Scarlett Thomas

#71. Today, just two generations on, the Monte Carlo method (in various forms) so dominates some fields that many young scientists don't realize how thoroughly they've departed from traditional theoretical or experimental science.

Sam Kean

#72. I cook more theoretically than I do practically. My job is creative, and in the kitchen, the biggest part of my creativity is theoretical.

Ferran Adria

#73. Except for a small strip of shin that poked out from between the top of his socks and the bottom of his pants, his legs were purely theoretical.

Tom Perrotta

#74. If the aim of physical theories is to explain experimental laws, theoretical physics is not an autonomous science; it is subordinate to metaphysics.

Pierre Duhem

#75. Cognition is ... not an individual process of any theoretical "particular conciousness." Rather it is the result of a social activity, since the existing stock of knowledge exceeds the range available to any one individual.

Ludwik Fleck

#76. For Metafiction, in its ascendant and most important phases, was really nothing more than a single-order expansion of its own great theoretical nemisis, Realism: if realism called it like it saw it, Metafiction simply called it as it saw itself seeing itself see.

David Foster Wallace

#77. Religion is a natural phenomenon of the human mind, but today, in the hands of theoretical bloodsucking religious preachers it has become a lifeless mockery. Now is the time that you take back religion from those intellectual idiots and place it where it belongs, in the temple of your inner cosmos.

Abhijit Naskar

#78. The brain-mind is not a computer, and regarding it as one has led to a variety of theoretical dead ends.

Siri Hustvedt

#79. It is tribute to how far we have come in theoretical physics that it now takes enormous machines and a great deal of money to perform experiments whose results we can not predict.

Stephen Hawking

#80. This law (regarding the theoretical efficiency of heat engines by Mr. Joule), and the law of the maximum efficiency of heat engines, are particular cases of a general law which regulates all transformation of energy, and is the basis of the Science of Energetics.

William John Macquorn Rankine

#81. On a level, they might be perfect for one another, but it's a theoretical perfection only, compromised by timing. Their bests passed one another on the way to here, and now exist epochs apart.

Billy O'Callaghan

#82. On the theoretical side, I was concerned with stochastic resonance.

Richard Ernst

#83. We do have tendency, now in biology especially to make up stories, to make theoretical biology a kind of game, in fact we have game theory in biology which is meant to use the theory of games to make predictions or explain things.

Richard Lewontin

#84. Close contact between science and the practice of collective farms and State farms creates inexhaustible opportunities for the development of theoretical knowledge, enabling us to learn ever more and more about the nature of living bodies and the soil.

Trofim Lysenko

#85. In Fischer's hands, a slight theoretical advantage is as good a being a Queen ahead

Isaac Kashdan

#86. Representation of the world, like the world itself, is the work of men; they describe it from their own point of view, which they confuse with absolute truth.

Simone De Beauvoir

#87. It was at this moment that I wrote my first important paper in theoretical physics. I was 32 years old, 5 years beyond the alleged age of senility for theorists.

Robert B. Laughlin

#88. ... it should be remembered that the atomicity of electric charge has already found its expression in the specific numerical value of the fine structure constant, a theoretical understanding of which is still missing today.

Wolfgang Pauli

#89. Being a common laborer all my life at poor and underpaid jobs, I had worked with more black men, known more black men, drank with more black men, fought with more black men than any theoretical liberal with books jammed between the ears.

Charles Bukowski

#90. The ideology and philosophy of neo-Darwinism which is sold by its adepts as a scientific theoretical foundation of biology seriously hampers the development of science and hides from students the field's real problems.

Vladimir L. Voeikov

#91. The switch from 'steam engines' to 'heat engines' signals the transition from engineering practice to theoretical science.

Hans Christian Von Baeyer

#92. It is that of increasing knowledge of empirical fact, intimately combined with changing interpretations of this body of fact - hence changing general statements about it - and, not least, a changing a structure of the theoretical system.

Talcott Parsons

#93. Of course you will, Hodges thinks. You might think you know what you're risking, but you don't. When you're seventeen, the future is strictly theoretical.

Stephen King

#94. They asked for Plato's assistance. He told them: "You hated wisdom and ran away from geometry, therefore God has afflicted you a punishment, for wisdom and philosophical knowledge have a high rank with God." ... The plague was lifted and they ceased to defame the branches of theoretical knowledge.

Mulla Sadra

#95. Practical sciences proceed by building up; theoretical science by resolving into components.

Thomas Aquinas

#96. Actually, I was more or less determined to be a theoretical physicist at the age of thirteen.

David Gross

#97. He was bookish, she was not; he was theoretical, she political. She called a rose a rose. He called it an accumulation of cultural and biological constructions circulating around the mutually attracting binary poles of nature/artifice.

Zadie Smith

#98. Theoretical webs, dirty webs, fusty webs, old and shrivelling away into nothingness, a fine dust.Who needs that kind of stuff. Far far better getting out into the open air and doing it, actually doing it, something solid and concrete and unconceptualisable.

James Kelman

#99. We have forensic psychiatrists who try to draw a line between those who are sick and those who are criminal, and they bend and twist the truth to make it fit into their world of theoretical models.

Jo Nesbo

#100. Each of us has had plenty of experience with technology, but few of us have the theoretical or theological tools to make sense of the consequences of our use of technology.

Tim Challies