Quotes on Theory

I have a theory and I really believe it. I think your worst weakness can become your greatest single strength.

There is no theory. You have only to listen. Pleasure is the law. I love music passionately. And because l love it, I try to free it from barren traditions that stifle it. It is a free art gushing forth, an open-air art boundless as the elements, the wind, the sky, the sea. It must never be shut in and become an academic art.

String theory is not the only theory that can accommodate extra dimensions, but it certainly is the one that really demands and requires it.

While a modicum of consciousness may have had survivalist properties during an immemorial chapter of our evolution – so one theory goes – this faculty soon enough became a seditious agent working against us … we need to hamper our consciousness for all we are worth or it will impose upon us a too clear vision of what we do not want to see … Consciousness has forced us into the paradoxical position of striving to be unself-conscious of what we are – hunks of spoiling flesh on disintegrating bones

Be ready to revise any system, scrap any method, abandon any theory, if the success of the job requires it.

E pur si muove. "Albeit It does move". (That's what Galileo purportedly muttered after torturers forced him to recant his theory that the earth orbits the sun.)

If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed, which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down. But I can find no such case.

As to the doubt of the soul I discover it to be false: a mood not a conclusion. My conclusion is the Faith. Corporate, organized, a personality, teaching. A thing, not a theory. It.

Theory-free science makes about as much sense as value-free politics.

Before I married, I had three theories about raising children and no children. Now, I have three children and no theories.

Experience by itself teaches nothing... Without theory, experience has no meaning. Without theory, one has no questions to ask. Hence, without theory, there is no learning.

Fortunately I experienced Max Wertheimer's teaching in Berlin and collaborated for over a decade with Wolfgang Köhler. I need not emphasize my debts to these outstanding personalities. The fundamental ideas of Gestalt theory are the foundation of all our investigations in the field of the will, of affection, and of the personality.

For the record, feminism by definition is: 'The belief that men and women should have equal rights and opportunities. It is the theory of the political, economic and social equality of the sexes.'

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.

I've often been accused of, 'Oh the movies looked good but there's no story,' but I disagree with that in theory, and '9' is a perfect example for me because the feel, the texture, and the look of that world, and those characters, is the story. That's a major component of why you feel the way you do when you're watching it.

In some ways, risk-taking is the ultimate act of self-indulgence , an obscene insult to the preciousness of life. And yet, how can one dismiss something that persists despite every reasonable theory that it shouldn't?

Never in all their history have men been able truly to conceive of the world as one: a single sphere, a globe, having the qualities of a globe, a round earth in which all the directions eventually meet, in which there is no center because every point, or none, is center - an equal earth which all men occupy as equals. The airman's earth, if free men make it, will be truly round: a globe in practice, not in theory.

The revolution which began with the creation of quantum theory and relativity theory can only be finished with their unification into a single theory that can give us a single, comprehensive picture of nature.

No theory is good unless it permits, not rest, but the greatest work. No theory is good except on condition that one use it to go on beyond.

If even in science there is no a way of judging a theory but by assessing the number, faith and vocal energy of its supporters, then this must be even more so in the social sciences: truth lies in power.

The existence of these patterns [fractals] challenges us to study forms that Euclid leaves aside as being formless, to investigate the morphology of the amorphous. Mathematicians have disdained this challenge, however, and have increasingly chosen to flee from nature by devising theories unrelated to anything we can see or feel.