To despise theory is to have the excessively vain pretension to do without knowing what one does, and to speak without knowing what one says.
Interpretation
Ignoring theory leads to ignorance in one's actions and words.
This quote emphasizes the importance of understanding the underlying principles and theories behind our actions and words. Without this understanding, one risks being arrogant and misguided, as they speak and act without true knowledge or awareness of their implications.
In practice
In a lecture on critical thinking, I might say, 'As Bernard Le Bovier De Fontenelle noted, to despise theory is to disregard the foundation of informed discourse.'
Amusement should be used to do us good “like a medicine”: it must never be used as the food of the man...Many have had all holy thoughts and gracious resolutions stamped out by perpetual trifling. Pleasure so called is the murderer of thought. This is the age of excessive amusement: everybody craves for it, like a babe for its rattle.
There's no such thing as turning back the hands of time, and it makes me crazy that we live in a society where that's sold to women—that we're supposed to believe that if we're getting older, we've failed somehow, that we have failed by not staying young. I wish that women would let other women age gracefully and allow them to get older and know that as we get older, we become wiser.
We live in the midst of alarms; anxiety beclouds the future; we expect some new disaster with each newspaper we read.
It is his restraint that is honorable to a person, not their liberty.
People have a right to their own opinions, but not to their own facts. Evidence must be located, not created, and opinions not backed by evidence cannot be given much weight.
Now this relaxation of the mind from work consists on playful words or deeds. Therefore it becomes a wise and virtuous man to have recourse to such things at times.
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