Theory Quotes - Page 14

• We tend to think human knowledge as progressive; because we know more and more, our parents and grandparents are back numbers. But a contrary theory is possible - that we simply recognize different things at different times and in different ways.

  Robertson Davies

  Thinking, Numbers, Grandparent

  Robertson Davies (1992). “The Cornish Trilogy”, Penguin Group USA

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• He just waited until I stopped talking and said, 'Jesus, kid, you're almost a detective. All you need now is a gun, a gut, and three ex-wives. So what's your theory?

  John Green

  Jesus, Kids, Gun

  John Green (2013). “Paper Towns”, p.151, A&C Black

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Oh, I'm developing a beautiful character! It droops a bit under cold and frost, but it does grow fast when the sun shines. That's the way with everybody. I don't agree with the theory that adversity and sorrow and disappointment develop moral strength. The happy people are the ones who are bubbling over with kindliness.

  Jean Webster

  Beautiful, Disappointment, Character

  Jean Webster (2016). “Daddy Long-Legs and Dear Enemy: Illustrated”, p.35, Jester House Publishing

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• You have a pet theory, one you have been turning over for years, that life itself is a kind of Rube Goldberg device, an extremely complicated machine designed to carry out the extremely simple task of constructing your soul.

  Kevin Brockmeier

  Simple, Years, Soul

  Kevin Brockmeier (2008). “The View from the Seventh Layer: Stories”, p.103, Vintage

  9 Copy quote

  Show source

• Dad's Theory of Arrogance--that everyone always assumes they're the Principal Character of Desire and/or Loathing in everybody else's Broadway Play.

  Marisha Pessl

  Dad, Character, Play

  Marisha Pessl (2006). “Special Topics in Calamity Physics”, p.197, Penguin

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• The theory must not contradict empirical facts.

  Albert Einstein

  Facts

  Albert Einstein, Stephen W. Hawking (2007). “A Stubbornly Persistent Illusion: The Essential Scientific Works of Albert Einstein”, p.348, Running Press

  10 Copy quote

  Show source

• We could speak about the meaning of life vis-a-vis non-consequential/deontological theories, apodictic transformation schemata, the incoherence of exemplification, metaphysical realism, Cartesian interactive dualism, revised non reductive dualism, postmodernist grammatology and dicey dichotomies. But we would still be left with Nietzsche's preposterous mustache which instills great anguish and skepticism in the brain, which leads (as it did in his case) to utter madness. I suggest we go to Paris instead.

  Maira Kalman

  Paris, Mustache, Brain

  4 Copy quote

• If we assume that man actually does resemble God, then we are forced into the impossible theory that God is a coward, an idiot and a bounder.

  H. L. Mencken

  Men, Coward, Doe

  H. L. Mencken (2009). “Prejudices: Third Series”, p.124, Cosimo, Inc.

  6 Copy quote

  Show source

• I have been a writer since 1949. I am self-taught. I have no theories about writing that might help others. When I write, I simply become what I seemingly must become. I am six feet two and weigh nearly two hundred pounds and am badly coordinated, except when I swim. All that borrowed meat does the writing. In the water I am beautiful.

  Kurt Vonnegut

  Beautiful, Writing, Helping Others

  4 Copy quote

• I believe there is a theory that men and women emerge finer and stronger after suffering, an that to advance in this or any world we must endure ordeal by fire." (From Rebecca)

  Daphne du Maurier

  Believe, Men, Fire

  4 Copy quote

• My life isn’t theories and formulae. It’s part instinct, part common sense. Logic is as good a word as any, and I’ve absorbed what logic I have from everything and everyone… from my mother, from training as a ballet dancer, from Vogue magazine, from the laws of life and health and nature.

  Audrey Hepburn

  Life, Mother, Vogue Magazine

  9 Copy quote

• Unfortunately for the good sense of mankind, the fact of their fallibility is far from carrying the weight in their practical judgement, which is always allowed to it in theory; for while every one well knows himself to be fallible, few think it necessary to take any precautions against their own fallibility.

  John Stuart Mill

  Thinking, Judgement, Weight

  John Stuart Mill (2015). “On Liberty, Utilitarianism and Other Essays”, p.78, OUP Oxford

  10 Copy quote

  Show source

• During the lifetime of great revolutionaries, the oppressing classes constantly hounded them, received their theories with the most savage malice, the most furious hatred and the most unscrupulous campaigns of lies and slander. After their death, attempts are made to convert them into harmless icons, to canonize them, so to say, and to hallow their names to a certain extent for the “consolation” of the oppressed classes and with the object of duping the latter, while at the same time robbing the revolutionary theory of its substance, blunting its revolutionary edge and vulgarizing it.

  Vladimir Lenin

  Lying, Class, Names

  115 Copy quote

• In mysticism, knowledge cannot be separated from a certain way of life which becomes its living manifestation. To acquire mystical knowledge means to undergo a transformation; one could even say that the knowledge is the transformation. Scientific knowledge, on the other hand, can often stay abstract and theoretical. Thus most of today’s physicists do not seem to realize the philosophical, cultural and spiritual implications of their theories.

  Lois McMaster Bujold

  Spiritual, Philosophical, Mean

  9 Copy quote

• Maybe I’m just tired. (Geary) People only say that when they’re not really willing to deal with the issue at hand. It’s like when you ask a guy what he’s thinking and he says ‘nothing’ but in reality you know he’s checking out another woman and he doesn’t want you to give him grief over it. It’s Thia’s theory. (Tory) I think you need to stay away from her before she corrupts you. (Geary) Nah, it’s too much fun. She has the most misguided views on everything. But I think what I just said is one of the few lucid thoughts she’s ever managed. (Tory)

  Sherrilyn Kenyon

  Fun, Grief, Tired

  4 Copy quote

• The very power of [textbook writers] depends on the fact that they are dealing with a boy: a boy who thinks he is ‘doing’ his ‘English prep’ and has no notion that ethics, theology, and politics are all at stake. It is not a theory they put into his mind, but an assumption, which ten years hence, its origin forgotten and its presence unconscious, will condition him to take one side in a controversy which he has never recognized as a controversy at all.

  C. S. Lewis

  Boys, Thinking, Years

  4 Copy quote

• This you may say of man - when theories change and crash, when schools, philosophies, when narrow dark alleys of thought, national, religious, economic, grow and disintegrate, man reaches, stumbles forward, painfully, mistakenly sometimes. Having stepped forward, he may slip back, but only half a step, never the full step back.

  John Steinbeck

  Religious, Philosophy, School

  John Steinbeck (2016). “The Grapes of Wrath”, p.119, Hamilton Books

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• There is a theory going around that the U.S.A. was and still is a gigantic Masonic plot under the ultimate control of the group known as the Illuminati. It is difficult to look for long at the strange single eye crowning the pyramid which is found on every dollar bill and not begin to believe the story, a little. Too many anarchists in 19th-century Europe—Bakunin, Proudhon, Salverio Friscia—were Masons for it to be pure chance. Lovers of global conspiracy, not all of them Catholic, can count on the Masons for a few good shivers and voids when all else fails.

  Thomas Pynchon

  Believe, Eye, Pyramids

  19 Copy quote

• Don Basilio was a forbidding-looking man with a bushy mustache who did not suffer fools and who subscribed to the theory that the liberal use of adverbs and adjectives was the mark of a pervert or someone with a vitamin deficiency.

  Carlos Ruiz Zafon

  Men, Mustache, Suffering

  4 Copy quote

• Theory is the practice of the impotent.

  Carlos Ruiz Zafon

  Practice

  6 Copy quote

• The whole point of the Eugenic pseudo-scientific theories is that they are to be applied wholesale, by some more sweeping and generalizing money power than the individual husband or wife or household. Eugenics asserts that all men must be so stupid that they cannot manage their own affairs; and also so clever that they can manage each other's.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Clever, Husband, Stupid

  4 Copy quote

• I had four hundred thousand pages of continental philosophy and lit theory in my head. And by God, I was going to use it to prove to him that I was smarter than he was.

  David Foster Wallace

  Philosophy, Use, Four

  4 Copy quote

• I'm the Ted Bundy of string theory.

  Sam Harris

  Ted Bundy, Strings, String Theory

  10 Copy quote

• Josh had told me a long time ago that he had this theory that an entire relationship was based on what occurred over the course of the first five minutes you know each other. That everything that came after those first minutes was just details being filled in. Meaning: you already knew how deep the love was, how instinctually you felt about someone. What happened in their first five minutes? Time stopped.

  Laura Dave

  Filled In, Long, Details

  Laura Dave (2007). “London Is the Best City in America”, p.56, Penguin

  5 Copy quote

  Show source

• No theory ever benefited by the application of data, Amy. Data kills theories. A theory has no better time than when it's lying there naked, pure, unsullied by facts. Let's just keep it that way for a while." "So you don't really have a theory?" "Clueless." "You lying bag of fish heads." "I can fire you, you know. Even if Clay was the one that hired you, I'm not totally superfluous to this operation yet. I'm kind of in charge. I can fire you. Then how will you live?" "I'm not getting paid." "See, right there. Perfectly good concept ruined by the application of fact.

  Christopher Moore

  Lying, Clueless, Fire

  4 Copy quote