Top 100 Theory And Practice Quotes
#1. If we have a correct theory but merely prate about it, pigeonhole it and do not put it into practice, then that theory, however good, is of no significance.
Mao Zedong
#2. An aphorism is an extreme synthesis of thesis and antithesis, theory and practice, it's a mixture of intuition and observation, hypothesis and illusions of certainty and probability, history and stupidity.
William C. Brown
#3. There is a distinction, but no opposition, between theory and practice. Each to a certain extent supposes the other. Theory is dependent on practice; practice must have preceded theory.
Sir William Hamilton, 9th Baronet
#4. In theory, everybody buys the best and cheapest commodities offered to him on the market. In practice, if every one went around pricing, and chemically testing before purchasing, the dozens of soaps or fabrics or brands of bread which are for sale, economic life would become hopelessly jammed.
Edward Bernays
#5. An economist is someone who sees something that works in practice and wonders if it would work in theory.
Ronald Reagan
#6. That's all well and good in practice, but how does it work in theory?
Shmuel Weinberger
#7. I have a theory that there is something abnormal about children who like to practice instruments They are either geniuses or, more often, completely untalented. I certainly did not like to practice, and the teacher who hit me, and the view of the park, did not help to improve my attitude.
Georg Solti
#8. A feeble execution is but another phrase for a bad execution; and a government ill executed, whatever may be its theory, must, in practice, be a bad government.
Joseph Story
#9. It is only, or at any rate it is chiefly, the literary and scientific intelligentsia, the very people who ought to be the guardians of liberty, who are beginning to despise it, in theory as well as in practice.
George Orwell
#10. A thing may look specious in theory, and yet be ruinous in practice; a thing may look evil in theory, and yet be in practice excellent.
Edmund Burke
#11. The state and its elites must be subject, in theory and in practice, to the same laws that its poorest citizens are.
Mo Ibrahim
#12. The tool which serves as intermediary between theory and practice, between thought and observation, is mathematics; it is mathematics which builds the linking bridges and gives the ever more reliable forms.
David Hilbert
#13. Talent and genius operate outside the rules, and theory conflicts with practice.
Carl Von Clausewitz
#14. In my travels, I also noticed that kids in Thailand like spicy food, and kids in India love curry. I'm hoping to introduce my son, Hudson, to lots of veggies and spices when he's young. I say that before he's started on solid foods, so it could be easier in theory than practice!
Curtis Stone
#15. Beautiful Evidence is about the theory and practice of analytical design.
Edward Tufte
#16. In any given culture and at any given moment, there is always only one 'episteme' that defines the conditions of possibility of all knowledge, whether expressed in theory or silently invested in a practice.
Michel Foucault
#17. Theory is knowledge that doesn't work. Practice is when everything works and you don't know why.
Hermann Hesse
#19. Wyndham Lewis is basically a pessimist, thinking of human beings as doomed animals or determinist machines. His theory of satire is based on this view, and he finds plenty of evidence to support it in contemporary practice.
Louis MacNeice
#20. I think it is widely agreed that Carl Steinitz, over the 50 years he taught at Harvard, has been one of the most important figures in influencing the theory and practice of landscape architecture and the application of computer technology to planning.
Jack Dangermond
#21. design is a term that bridges theory and practice. It encompasses both a principled approach and a set of contextualized practices that are constantly adapting to circumstances.
Helen Beetham
#22. There is a gulf between the high value Americans put on life in theory and its cheapness in practice.
Elizabeth Joan Smith
#23. Gita and Ganga constitute the essence of Hinduism; one its theory and the other its practice.
Swami Vivekananda
#24. Although 1870 proved the corollary of the theory and practice of terror, that it deepens antagonism, stimulates resistance, and ends by lengthening war, the Germans remained wedded to it.
Barbara W. Tuchman
#25. Everyone agrees in theory that we can't judge a new idea or point of view unless we enter into it and try it out, but the practice itself is rare.
Peter Elbow
#26. All social life is essentially practical. All mysterious which lead theory to mysticism find their rational solution in human practice and in the comprehension of the practice.
Karl Marx
#27. Neither in theory nor in practice does one farmer in a hundred realize how important it is to cultivate, cultivate, and cultivate.
Albert Howard
#28. You hear the word, and believe it in theory, while you deny it in practice. I say to you, that 'you decveive yourselves'.
Charles Grandison Finney
#29. According to Lenin, socialism and democracy are indivisible ... The essence of perestroika lies in the fact that it unites socialism with democracy and revives the Leninist concept of socialist construction both in theory and in practice. We want more socialism and, therefore, more democracy.
Mikhail Gorbachev
#30. Modern psychology teaches that experience is not merely the best teacher, but the only possible teacher.. There is no war between theory and practice. The most valuable experience demands both, and the theory should supplement the practice and not precede it.
Charles Kettering
#31. Being-'subject' means taking up a position from which an actor can make the transition from theory to practice. This transition usually takes place once an actor has found the motive that liberates them from hesitation and disinhibits them for action.
Peter Sloterdijk
#32. Those who say theory and practice are two unrelated realms are fools in one and scoundrels in the other.
Ayn Rand
#33. Pornography is the theory, and rape is the practice.
Robin Morgan
#34. If the freedom of religion, guaranteed to us by law in theory, can ever rise in practice under the overbearing inquisition of public opinion, [then and only then will truth]prevail over fanaticism.
Thomas Jefferson
#35. It would be consistent and proper for us to join the war for democratic freedom, only if we would likewise be assured that democratic freedom in theory as well as in practice.
Aung San
#36. Politics cannot be a science, because in politics theory and practice cannot be separated, and the sciences depend upon their separation.
W. H. Auden
#37. Discrepancy between theory and practice, which in sound physical and mechanical science is a delusion, has a real existence in the minds of men; and that fallacy, through rejected by their judgments, continues to exert and influence over their acts.
William John Macquorn Rankine
#38. Most married couples, even though they love each other very much in theory, tend to view each other in practice as large teeming flaw colonies, the result of being that they get on each other's nerves and regularly erupt into vicious emotional shouting matches over such issues as toaster settings.
Dave Barry
#39. There are many Christians who are Christians in theory only, and they are worldlings in practice.
John Alexander Dowie
#40. Critical reflection on practice is a requirement of the relationship between theory and practice. Otherwise theory becomes simply "blah, blah, blah, " and practice, pure activism.
Paulo Freire
#41. Theory and practice sometimes clash. And when that happens, theory loses. Every single time.
Linus Torvalds
#42. It is the theory of all modern civilized governments that they protect and foster the liberty of the citizen; it is the practice of all of them to limit its exercise, and sometimes very narrowly.
H.L. Mencken
#43. I wrote my first textbook in 1970. It was called 'The Theory and Practice of Group Psychotherapy,' and over the years, many students told me that they enjoyed reading it because there were so many stories in there; often just a paragraph or a page of something that happened in a group session.
Irvin D. Yalom
#44. In theory, every loss is for our own good; in practice, though, that is when we question the existence of God and ask ourselves: What did I do to deserve this?
Paulo Coelho
#45. There's a reason theory and practice are two different words.
Brent Weeks
#46. Intellectuals ... advertise their superiority to political practice but are absolutely in its thrall ... It is no accident that Marxist theory and practice use the intellectuals as tools and keep them in brutal subservience.
Allan Bloom
#47. Egalitarians never seem to understand that promoting economic equality in theory means promoting resentments and polarization in practice, making everyone worse off. - Thomas Sowell (2016)
George Gilder
#48. Telling someone who was clinically depressed, for example, to shake it off and get out of the house was tantamount to telling a man with two broken legs to sprint across the room. That was all well and good in theory, but in practice, the stigma continued.
Harlan Coben
#49. Human life is a series of compromises, and it is not always easy to achieve in practice what one has found to be true in theory.
Mahatma Gandhi
#50. If we examine the accomplishments of man in his most advanced endeavors, in theory and in practice, we find that the cell has done all this long before him, with greater resourcefulness and much greater efficiency.
Albert Claude
#51. In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. But in practice, there is.
Yogi Berra
#52. In sum: banking theory and practice, as immobilizing and fixating forces, fail to acknowledge men and women as historical beings; problem-posing theory and practice take the people's historicity as their starting point.
Paulo Freire
#53. All mysteries which lead theory to mysticism find their rational solution in human practice and in the comprehension of this practice.
Karl Marx
#54. The idea of God implies the abdication of human reason and justice; it is the most decisive negation of human liberty and necessarily ends in the enslavement of mankind both in theory and practice.
Mikhail Bakunin
#55. Using theory can help to justify actions and explain practice to service users, carers and society in general.
Siobhan Maclean
#56. In theory one is aware that the earth revolves, but in practice one does not perceive it, the ground upon which one treads seems not to move, and one can live undisturbed. So it is with Time in one's life.
Marcel Proust
#57. Think of Zen as the bow and Zazen as the arrow. The bow is the guiding theory behind the practice, while Zazen is the arrow which puts that practice into action. The better you understand the bow and the better you control the arrow, the better you'll be at hitting your target.
Bino Schree
#58. Bread is a staple article of diet in theory, rather than in practice. There are few who are truly fond of bread in its simplest, most pure, and most healthful state ... Is there one person in a thousand who would truly enjoy a meal of simple bread of two days old?
William Alcott
#59. My experience has been that times always ends. In theory, you are right, the quantum physicists are right, the religious and romantics are right. Time without end. In practice we both wear a watch.
Jeanette Winterson
#60. The road is messy in the way that real life is messy. It leads us out of denial and into reality, out of theory and into practice, out of caution and into action, out of statistics and into stories - in short, out of our heads and into our hearts.
Gloria Steinem
#61. This book is the best treatment of the best American Marxist philosopher-and the best philosopher to emerge from American slums. Young Sidney Hook is essential reading for anyone interested in democratic theory and practice in America.
Cornel West
#62. In theory, food writing is an aid or a prelude to actual meals: you read a recipe, and then you cook. In practice - in a 'paradox' that Michael Pollan, among others, has identified - our current gastronomic fantasies, particularly on TV, have coincided with a decline in home cooking.
Bee Wilson
#63. In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they are not.
Anonymous
#64. Cantor's discovery that lines, planes, cubes, and polytopes were all equivalent as sets of points goes a long way toward explaining why set theory was such a revolutionary development for math-revolutionary in theory and practice both.
David Foster Wallace
#65. In community we work out our connectedness to God, to one another and to ourselves ... In human relationships I learn that theory is no substitute for love. It is easy to talk about the love of GOD; it is another thing to practice it
Joan D. Chittister
#66. The difference between theory and practice is larger in practice than the difference between theory and practice in theory.
Jan L.A. Van De Snepscheut
#67. Criticism - however valid or intellectually engaging - tends to get in the way of a writer who has anything personal to say. A tightrope walker may require practice, but if he starts a theory of equilibrium he will lose grace (and probably fall off).
J.R.R. Tolkien
#68. If we taught music the way we try to teach engineering, in an unbroken four year course, we could end up with all theory and no music. When we study music, we start to practice from the beginning, and we practice for the entire time ...
Charles Kettering
#69. 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
#70. I want to affirm that thinking and living, knowing and doing, theory and practice intersect.
Namsoon Kang
#71. In theory, practice and theory are the same, but in practice they are different.
Larry McVoy
#72. The behavior and reactions of the oppressed, which lead the oppressor to practice cultural invasion, should evoke from the revolutionary a different theory of action. What distinguishes revolutionary leaders from the dominant elite is not only their objectives, but their procedures.
Paulo Freire
#73. And it's frustrating because you've never been taught how to bridge the gap between theory and practice, between your New Year's resolutions and your actual behaviour.
Aldous Huxley
#74. I'm very much involved with Asian art and its theory and practice, mainly Chinese because that was quite sophisticated. I tend to look at that more than I look the Western.
Brice Marden
#75. In ancient cultures, they didn*t practice theory in their dances; they wanted to arrive at a state of trance, and I think that's an appropriate approach for the arts: to create a work that is entrancing.
Reza Abdoh
#76. According to Krishnamacharya , practice and knowledge must always go together. He used to say, practice without right knowledge of theory is blind. This is also because without right knowledge, one can mindfully do a wrong practice.
A. G. Mohan
#77. All the time in the world may sound nice in theory, but in practice it can become a swift kick to the balls. CHAPTER 7 Harper's is the local convenience store around here, only it's nothing like the Wawas and 7-Elevens I frequented when I lived in the Philadelphia area.
Matthew Quick
#78. Forms of government are forged mainly in the fire of practice, not in the vacuum of theory. They respond to national character and to national realities.
George F. Kennan
#79. A symptom of the revolution: When we state something is impossible in theory, but then change our minds when we discover that it is possible in practice.
Seth Godin
#80. Too often, ideas meant to yield a certain practice are instead transported into the academy, as fare for 'enriching' a curriculum and, of course, generating jobs for the growing professoriat.
Murray Bookchin
#81. Theory and practice are not only interwoven with one's culture but with the responsibility of shaping the environment, of breaking up social complacency, and challenging the power of the status quo.
Samuel Mockbee
#82. If a minister wants to be a man among men he need only to stop creating devotion to abstract ideals which every one accepts in theory and denies in practice, and to agonize about their validity and practicability in the social issues which he and others face in our present civilization.
Reinhold Niebuhr
#83. He who loves practice without theory is like the sailor who boards ship without a rudder and compass and never knows where he may cast.
Leonardo Da Vinci
#84. Before going back to college, i knew i didn't want to be an intellectual, spending my life in books and libraries without knowing what the hell is going on in the streets. Theory without practice is just as incomplete as practice without theory. The two have to go together.
Assata Shakur
#85. ...a "proletarian" world, with no variety, no "quality", nothing noble, ancient, memorial in it, but in theory simply a gigantic sty of evenly-fed swine, in practice a den of fratricidal and cannibalic monsters.
George Saintsbury
#86. The theory for admitting accomplice testimony that is uncorroborated is that conspiracy is by its nature secretive and that only the parties to it can know it occurred. But in practice this means the accomplice's guilt is modified to the degree that he can convict the defendant.
E.L. Doctorow
#87. The [engineer] should be equipped with knowledge of many branches of study and varied kinds of learning, for it is by his judgement that all work done by the other arts is put to test. This knowledge is the child of practice and theory.
Marcus Vitruvius Pollio
#88. Man can be an atheist only in theory, not in practice, because the universe is too frightening and too chaotic to be too independent!
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#89. Think good and positive thoughts and you will attract good and positive things, think bad and negative thoughts and you will attract bad and negative things. It's as simple as that in theory, but it takes time to master it fully, it takes time, patience and practice.
Jeanette Coron
#90. American society has tried so hard and so ably to defend the practice and theory of production for profit and not primarily for use that now it has succeeded in making its jobs and products profitable and useless.
Paul Goodman
#91. The wise woman patterns her life on the theory and practice of modern banking. She never gives her love, but only lends it on the best security and at the highest rate of interest.
Henri De Toulouse-Lautrec
#92. One lesson I learned from 'The Monstrumologist' was never to get too attached to your own characters. That's harder in practice than in theory. At the end of the third book - which coincided with the end of my contract - I was an emotional wreck. I mourned Will Henry and Warthrop.
Rick Yancey
#93. Men and women are not free to love decently until they have analyzed themselves completely and swept away every mystery from sex; and this means the acquisition of a profound philosophical theory based on wide reading of anthropology and enlightened practice.
Aleister Crowley
#94. With science, ideas can germinate within a bed of theory, form, and practice that assists their growth ... But we as gardeners, must beware ... for some seeds are the seeds of ruin ... and the most iridescent blooms are often the most dangerous
Alan Moore
#95. I firmly believe people have hitherto been a great deal too much taken up about doctrine and far too little about practice. The word "doctrine," as used in the Bible, means teaching of duty, not theory.
George MacDonald
#96. 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
#97. When it comes to peace, we need to facilitate peace-makers' personal engagement and their genuine desire to bridge the gap between advocacy knowledge and skills necessary to differentiate between theory and practice in the field of conflict management.
Widad Akreyi
#98. One important idea is that science is a means whereby learning is achieved, not by mere theoretical speculation on the one hand, nor by the undirected accumulation of practical facts on the other, but rather by a motivated iteration between theory and practice.
George E.P. Box
#99. The experience of seeing differences of dogma made moot in practice by the bonds of family affection and neighborly respect was formative for him. It seemed to leave him with a lasting sense that life was more complicated in practice than in theory - and that this was a good thing.
Yuval Levin
#100. I think that our form of government is certainly the best - not that can be imagined - but that has ever been experienced; and, while we are sure that practice is in its favour, it would be most absurd to dream of destroying it on theory.
Charlotte Turner Smith