Theoretical Quotes

#1. I have confronted theoretical positions whose protagonists claim that what I take to be historically produced characteristics of what is specifically modern are in fact the timelessly necessary characteristics of all and any moral judgment, of all and any selfhood.

Alasdair MacIntyre

#2. The blood kept welling up and getting over things so that she couldn't see what she was doing, which annoyed her; but she knew that theoretical clarity was unattainable in times of action.

William T. Vollmann

#3. 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

#4. When computers came along, I felt for the first time that I had the proper tools for the kind of theoretical work I wanted to do. So I moved over to that, and that got me into psychology.

Herbert A. Simon

#5. It would of course be a great step forward if we succeeded in combining the gravitational field and the electromagnetic field into a single structure. Only so could the era in theoretical physics inaugurated by Faraday and James Clerk Maxwell be brought to a satisfactory close.

Albert Einstein

#6. Theoretical scientists who probe the secrets of the universe and philosophers who seek answers to existence, as well as painters such as Paul Klee who find the thoughts of men of science compatible with art, influence me far more than most photographers.

Wynn Bullock

#7. My work was fairly theoretical. It was in recursive function theory. And in particular, hierarchies of functions in terms of computational complexity. I got involved in real computers and programming mainly by being - well, I was interested even as I came to graduate school.

Dennis Ritchie

#8. I've always really been into science, and in the last five years I've gotten into theoretical physics and the origins of the universe.

Adam Pascal

#9. Not infrequently ... the theoretical is a synonym of the stereotyped. For the 'theoretical' in chess is nothing more than that which can be found in the textbooks and to which players try to conform because they cannot think up anything better or equal, anything original.

Mikhail Chigorin

#10. Einstein would be one of the greatest theoretical physicists of all time even if he had not written a single line on relativity.

Max Born

#11. This presentation was truly a testament to the epic magnitude of getting into Thomas Treadwell's class. This exercise was pointedly not some theoretical simulation dreamed up by an academic with no real-world experience. We were presenting our ideas to real venture capitalists and angel investors.

Mitty Walters

#12. When you design a building, you start from a general philosophy, and you come down, and you start from detail and come up. Only the theoretical architect believes that you can make the concept and then sometime, somebody will come to build it.

Renzo Piano

#13. I recognise that Socialism has ended its purely theoretical course, and that the hour to construct has come.

John Burns

#14. I studied economics and made it my career for two reasons. The subject was and is intellectually fascinating and challenging, particularly to someone with taste and talent for theoretical reasoning and quantitative analysis.

James Tobin

#15. The raging monster upon the land is population growth. In its presence, sustainability is but a fragile theoretical construct. To say, as many do, that the difficulties of nations are not due to people, but to poor ideology and land-use management is sophistic.

Pete Wilson

#16. In specific circumstances the period of aging decline can set in earlier in a particular organ than in the organism as a whole which, in a certain general or theoretical sense, is left a cripple or invalid.

Wilhelm, Ostwald

#17. Economics was like psychology, a pseudoscience trying to hide that fact with intense theoretical hyperelaboration. And gross domestic product was one of those unfortunate measurement concepts, like inches or the British thermal unit, that ought to have been retired long before.

Kim Stanley Robinson

#18. The line of least resistance in the progress of civilization is to make that theoretical postulate real by the continually increasing force of the world's public opinion.

Elihu Root

#19. We whip the groaning masses of the country towards a theoretical future happiness, which only we can see.

Arthur Koestler

#20. If you really want to contribute to our theoretical understanding of physical laws - and it is an exciting experience if you succeed! - there are many things you need to know. First of all, be serious about it!

Gerard 't Hooft

#21. A towering theoretical achievement of exceptional elegance ... Like most great books, Sociobiology is unpedantic, lucid, and eminently accessible.

Pierre L. Van Den Berghe

#22. If we analyse the supernova data by assuming the Copernican principle is correct and get out something unphysical, I think we should start questioning the Copernican principle ... . Whatever our theoretical predilections, they will in the end have to give way to the observational evidence.

George F. R. Ellis

#23. One is almost tempted to say ... at last I can almost see a bond. But that will never be, for a bond does not really exist at all: it is a most convenient fiction which, as we have seen, is convenient both to experimental and theoretical chemists.

Charles Coulson

#24. What I do is very theoretical. It won't necessarily have implications for anything anyone is doing tomorrow, yet you know that there's a sense of progress in science, and as we understand more, it just turns out that, somehow, the world evolves with us.

Lisa Randall

#25. This success led my theoretical group to the chemical reactivity theory, extending more and more widely the range of compound and reactions that were discussed.

Kenichi Fukui

#26. The word "ungodly and word-group" in Jude...It describes, not theoretical atheism, but practical godlessness.

Richard Bauckham

#27. About 1960, it became clear that it was best for me to bring the experimental part of my research program to a close - there was too much to do on the theoretical aspects - and I began the process of winding down the experiments.

Rudolph A. Marcus

#28. Theory and knowledge remain suspect, not because of inherent worthlessness, but because of their historic isolation from action. Without theoretical orientation, however, action is vulnerable to oversimplified and glib imitativeness-even mimicry-and to the use of the gimmick.

Erving Polster

#29. The only object of theoretical physics is to calculate results that can be compared with experiment ... it is quite unnecessary that any satisfactory description of the whole course of the phenomena should be given.

Paul Dirac

#30. Teddy tried, in the manner of a simple layman, to keep up with theoretical physics, via articles in the Telegraph and an heroic struggle with Stephen Hawking in 1996, but admitted defeat when he came across string theory. From then on he took every day as it came, hour by hour.

Kate Atkinson

#31. Theoretical principals must sometimes give way for the sake of practical advantages.

William Pitt

#32. I have taken the opportunity to update the book and include new theoretical and observational results obtained since the book was first published (on April Fools' Day, 1988).

Stephen Hawking

#33. [Critical social science attempts] to determine when theoretical statements grasp invariant regularities of social action as such and when they express ideologically frozen relations of dependence that can in principle be transformed.

Jurgen Habermas

#34. The theory of the lung as a gland has justified its existence and done excellent service in bringing forward facts, which shall survive any theoretical construction that has been or may hereafter be put upon them.

August Krogh

#35. For even the best of peace training is more theoretical than practical experience ... indirect practical experience may be the more valuable because infinitely wider.

B.H. Liddell Hart

#36. [Gauss calculated the elements of the planet Ceres] and his analysis proved him to be the first of theoretical astronomers no less than the greatest of 'arithmeticians.'

W. W. Rouse Ball

#37. There had never been a Class A1 event; it had always been a purely theoretical designation. Until now.

A. Ashley Straker

#38. Before gathering any data, one must have concepts about the data being gathered. These are conceptual categories, meanings, and relationships that are all pre-empirical. They are purely theoretical. Imagine

Steve Patterson

#39. History shows that the human mind, fed by constant accessions of knowledge, periodically grows too large for its theoretical coverings, and bursts them asunder to appear in new habiliments, as the feeding and growing grub, at intervals, casts its too narrow skin and assumes another.

Charles Darwin

#40. The American doctrinaire is the converse of the American demagogue, and, in this way, is scarcely less injurious to the public. The first deals in poetry, the last in cant. He is as much a visionary on one side, as the extreme theoretical democrat is a visionary on the other.

James F. Cooper

#41. Theology is faith seeking understanding, but understanding is more than theoretical. If we really grasp who and where we are as disciples, we should know how to live out our faith.

Kevin Vanhoozer

#42. The frontier orbital approach was further developed in various directions by my own group and many other scientists, both theoretical and experimental.

Kenichi Fukui

#43. The career of a young theoretical physicist consists of treating the harmonic oscillator in ever-increasing levels of abstraction.

Sidney Coleman

#44. Although they can do it all the time, you know, they're far better than me, on a musically, on a theoretical music level. You know, they're out of my league.

Eric Clapton

#45. This is the key of modern science and is the beginning of the true understanding of nature . This idea . That to look at the things, to record the details, and to hope that in the information thus obtained, may lie a clue to one or another of a possible theoretical interpretation.

Richard P. Feynman

#46. Thus, the weight of my criticism is directed against the inadequacy of the theoretical foundations of the laissez-faire doctrine upon which I was brought up and for many years I taught

John Maynard Keynes

#47. Our users are trapeze artists, high school football coaches - I got cornered by a couple of theoretical physicists who said Dropbox lets them collaborate across the world and share their experiments' results. They were raving about how it's driving their research.

Drew Houston

#48. Experience arises together with theoretical assumptions not before them, and an experience without theory is just as incomprehensible as is (allegedly) a theory without experience.

Paul Feyerabend

#49. I spent the first few months of graduate school pretending to be a student of theoretical physics. This required no great acting skill beyond the effort to appear unperturbed in the face of the inexplicable, which is as far as I can see one of the central tasks of adulthood.

Barbara Ehrenreich

#50. To say this, however, is not to claim that it was the object of theoretical study.

Aristotle.

#51. For me, playwriting is and has always been like making a chair. Your concerns are balance, form, timing, lights, space, music. If you don't have these essentials, you might as well be writing a theoretical essay, not a play.

Sam Shepard

#52. As a theoretical physicist, I feel at once proud and humble at the thought of the illustrious figures that have preceded me here to receive the greatest of all honors in science, the Nobel prize.

Murray Gell-Mann

#53. I'm convinced that Theoretical Physicist is just another way of saying BS Artist.

J.C. Cassels

#54. The aether: Invented by Isaac Newton, reinvented by James Clerk Maxwell. This is the stuff that fills up the empty space of the universe. Discredited and discarded by Einstein, the aether is now making a Nixonian comeback. It's really the vacuum, but burdened by theoretical, ghostly particles.

Leon M. Lederman

#55. Now, I'm not saying I'm fashionable, but there are sociological interests that matter to me, things that are theoretical, political, intellectual and also concerned with vanity and beauty that we all think about but that I try to mix up and translate into fashion.

Miuccia Prada

#56. In days gone by, scientists would speak solemnly about our solar system's 'habitable zone' - a theoretical region extending from Venus to Mars, but perhaps not encompassing either, where a planet would be the right temperature to have liquid water on its surface.

Seth Shostak

#57. Which had required enough dimensional finagling to make an entire university of theoretical physicists beg for mercy,

Ilona Andrews

#58. Let me end by summarizing some advantages of exemplarism. Exemplarist virtue theory has the theoretical simplicity and power of foundationalism without the problems of a conceptual foundation.

Anonymous

#59. There were theoretical elements in the subjection of women and it is not possible to avoid the conclusion that a large contribution was made to them by the Church. In part this was a matter of its hostile stance towards sexuality.

J.M. Roberts

#60. faith is not a static, theoretical concept, but rather is central to one's life and is thus developed carefully and allowed to flourish in all areas of life, it becomes measurable in its effects.

Thomas E. Woodward

#61. I may be just an empty flesh terminal reliant on technology for all my ideas, memories and relationships, but I am confident that all of that everything that makes me a unique human being is still out there somewhere, safe in a theoretical storage space owned by giant, multinational corporations.

Stephen Colbert

#62. The methods of theoretical physics should be applicable to all those branches of thought in which the essential features are expressible with numbers.

Paul Dirac

#63. The only knowledge that can truly orient action is knowledge that frees itself from mere human interests and is based in Ideas in other words knowledge that has taken a theoretical attitude.

Jurgen Habermas

#64. When friends and lovers die and your world gets quieter; that's when the silence comes closer; that's when next isn't the least bit theoretical or abstract.

Bruce Jackson

#65. When I was a college student at Yale, I was studying physics and mathematics and was absolutely intent on becoming a theoretical physicist.

James Rothman

#66. We are, quite rightly, not interested in the theoretical issue of suffering and evil; rather, we are torn apart by what is happening to real people, to those we know and love.

Stanley Hauerwas

#67. We read many books, but that does not bring us knowledge. We may read all the Bibles in the world, but that will not give us religion. Theoretical religion is easy enough to get, any one may get that. What we want is practical religion.

Swami Vivekananda

#68. There is not some glorious theoretical synthesis of capitalism that you can write down in a book and follow. You have to grope your way

Robert Solow

#69. As a constellation, theoretical thought circles the concept it would like to unseal, hoping that it may fly open like the lock of a well-guarded safe-deposit box: in response, not to a single key or a single number, but to a combination of numbers

Theodor Adorno

#70. It is hard to see how one could begin to develop a quantum-theoretical description of brain action when one might well have to regard the brain as "observing itself" all the time!

Roger Penrose

#71. The amount of detailed information which an individual has at his command and his theoretical elaborations of the same are mutually dependent; they grow in and through each other.

Hermann Ebbinghaus

#72. My homosexuality remained at that point purely theoretical, an untested hypothesis. But it was a hypothesise so thorough and so convincing I saw no reason not to share it immediately.

Alison Bechdel

#73. What is destiny - a mechanical fact, a theoretical possibility, a concept, a superstition, a mere word? Ian McCullough was inclined to think one or another of these depending upon his mood. Destiny, the seemingly benign verso of fate.

Joyce Carol Oates

#74. The total vacuity of world leadership thinking has lead to the practice of claiming to heal the world through politicising unviable theoretical means of finding world peace,what we need is just to cement the differences between people and there will be a piece of peace at every doorstep

Mpho Leteng

#75. A number of current theoretical explorations will turn out to be passing fancies ...

Abraham Pais

#76. Business schools make a fortune forcing their students to take in a HUGE amount of information. The majority of it is theoretical. The majority of that is useless.

Josh Kaufman

#77. I look at things and think about them,' Folly replied. 'And use my intuition, of course, and deduction and induction, as well as any historical or theoretical models that seem to apply.

Jim Butcher

#78. Willard Gibbs did for statistical mechanics and for thermodynamics what Laplace did for celestial mechanics and Maxwell did for electrodynamics, namely, made his field a well-nigh finished theoretical structure.

Robert Andrews Millikan

#79. A healthy economics has got to have both conceptual, theoretical research and applied, empirical research.

Edmund Phelps

#80. Tedium is the worst pain. the mind lays out the world in blocks, and the hushed blood waits for revenge. all order, i've come to understand, is theoretical, unreal - a harmless sensible, smiling mask men slide between the two great, dark realities, the self and the world - two snake pits.

John Gardner

#81. My inspiration is not only based on the theoretical work which is very conservative but also based on the Research work which is very broader aspect, In the state of mind I've learn basic facts from research and i am feeling proud that almost i have completed four researches in my life

Avinash Advani

#82. Marla had always been better at tearing things apart, at least in a physical level (though she liked to think she was good at building more theoretical things, like the complex structure of loyalty, fear, and obligation that kept things running back home).

Tim Pratt

#83. Special emphasis should be laid on this intimate interrelation of general statements about empirical fact with the logical elements and structure of theoretical systems.

Talcott Parsons

#84. Musically, swing pretty much dominated in the '30s. And into the late '30s, swing is beginning to change over to bebop in the early '40s, which is exactly when this new science of theoretical physics, particularly theoretical atomic physics, was really coming to the fore.

Chris Eigeman

#85. Myths often do a lot of theoretical good, while they are still new.

Gilbert Ryle

#86. We need less theoretical debate and more practical application and acknowledgment of what Europe can and does do so that it is brought home to people in a relevant way.

Charles Kennedy

#87. At the present time there exist problems beyond our ability to solve, not because of theoretical difficulties, but because of insufficient means of mechanical computation.

Howard Aiken

#88. All the questions discussed in the Talmud and related rabbinic literature are normative questions: either they are questions of what one is to think or what one is to do. Every prescribed thought has some practical implication; every prescribed act has some theoretical implication.

David Novak

#89. Our hypotheses are initially rooted in theoretical consistency and elegance, but ... ultimatel y it is experiment not rigid belief that determines what is correct.

Lisa Randall

#90. These three classes of problems-determinations of significant fact, matching facts with theory, and articulation of theory-exhaust, I think, the literature of normal science, both empirical and theoretical.

Thomas S. Kuhn

#91. "What would I do if?.." By thinking tactically, we can more easily arrive at correct tactical solutions, and practice - even theoretical practice - tends to produce confidence in our solutions which, in turn, makes it easier for us, and thus quicker, to reach a decision.

Jeff Cooper

#92. Post-structuralism is among other things a kind of theoretical hangover from the failed uprising of '68, a way of keeping the revolution warm at the level of language, blending the euphoric libertarianism of that moment with the stoical melancholia of its aftermath.

Terry Eagleton

#93. There's always a tension in my world between the pragmatic and the practical and the theoretical. I have a very theoretical turn of mind, but I also like to test things in place.

Michael Pollan

#94. I am now convinced that theoretical physics is actual philosophy.

Max Born

#95. Although it is nonreligious and nontheistic, it's difficult to present Buddhism without sounding theoretical and religious. As

Dzongsar Jamyang Khyentse

#96. Mysteries like these repeating cycles make it very interesting to be a theoretical physicist: Nature gives us such wonderful puzzles! Why does She repeat the electron at 206 times and 3,640 times its mass?

Richard Feynman

#97. a book of magic should be written by a practising magician, rather than a theoretical magician or a historian of magic.

Susanna Clarke

#98. The progress of science depends much less upon either theoretical considerations or systematic investigation than is commonly believed, but rather on the transmittal of reliable information, gained by chance or insight, from one set of men to their successors.

Gene Wolfe

#99. They [free market policies] were never based on solid empirical and theoretical foundations, and even as many of these policies were being pushed, academic economists were explaining the limitations of markets for instance, whenever information is imperfect, which is to say always.

Joseph Stiglitz

#100. Philosophers of science have repeatedly demonstrated that more than one theoretical construction can always be placed upon a given collection of data.

Thomas Kuhn