Quotes About Theory

The student of the word should not make his opinions a center around which truth is to revolve. He should not search for the purpose of finding texts of Scripture that he can construe to prove his theories, for this is wresting the Scriptures to his own destruction.

From a mindful perspective, however, uncertainty creates the freedom to discover meaning. If there are meaningful choices, there is uncertainty. If there is no choice, there is no uncertainty and no opportunity for control. The theory of mindfulness insists that uncertainty and the experience of personal control are inseparable.

As Sommerfeld said in his famous text "Spectral Lines and Atomic Constitution," on which a generation of physicists learned the subject, "In the fine structure constant e is the representative of the electron theory, h the appropriate representative of the quantum theory, c comes from relativity and characterizes it in contrast to classical theory.

Race is a social construction for which there is no scientific basis; racism is the foundation of that construction...but when I am out in the world with my daughters, it is not a construction or it's consequences that I fear will hurt them. What I fear are human beings, white human beings, who are not made of theory, but of flesh and blood.

We have seen the immediate effect of the first exposition of the evangelical theory of faith. When applied to the case of the morbidly-despairing sinner, that theory has one argumentative imperfection which the logical sharpness of madness will soon discover and point out. The simple reply is: "I do not feel the faith which you describe. I wish I could feel it; but it is no use trying to conceal the fact, I am conscious of nothing like it."

No one, either in the nineteenth century or the twentieth, has ever built a persuasive case proving that dinosaurs as a whole were more like reptilian crocodiles than warm-blooded birds. No one has done this because it can't be done.

The well-known paradox of the theory of probabilities is that, to all seeming, it can extract knowledge from ignorance and certainty from doubt.

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

Blinker] Hall, operating on the quaint theory that the Navy might be needed for battle and that whatever increased the ship's efficiency was a criterion for change, had continued trampling on the toes of orthodoxy.

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.

The turn of events in Belgium was a product of the German theory of terror. Clausewitz had prescribed terror as the proper method to shorten war, his whole theory of war being based on the necessity of making it short, sharp, and decisive. The civil population must not be exempted from war's effects but must be made to feel its pressure and be forced by the severest measures to compel their leaders to make peace.

In theory the Holy Roman Emperor exercised a temporal sway matching the spiritual rule of the Pope over the universal community under God.

Clement VI to shorten the interval to fifty years. The Pope of the joyous murals operated on the amiable principle that "a pontiff should make his subjects happy." He complied with Rome's request in a Bull of 1343. Momentously for the Church, Clement formulated in the same Bull the theory of indulgences, and fixed its fatal equation with money.

Most creative scientists, even the most prolific and versatile, produce one theory per subject. When that theory has run its course they move on to another topic, or stop inventing. Maxwell was unique in the way he could return to a topic and imbue it with new life by taking an entirely fresh approach.

His electromagnetic theory embodied the notion that things we can measure directly, like mechanical force, are merely the outward manifestations of deeper processes, involving entities like electric field strength, which are beyond our powers of visualisation. This

Goodness knows what Maxwell would make of our current relish for watching people indulging in histrionic self-exposure on television. He would certainly have a wry smile at the irony of the fact that his own electromagnetic theory provides the means of bringing such unwholesome displays into our homes.

With 'The Keep,' I began with a theory about pitting the isolated disconnection of the gothic realm against present-day hyperconnectedness. I emerged feeling that the gothic genre is all about hyperconnectedness - the possibility of disembodied communication - and that we now live in a kind of permanently gothic state.

Darwin himself recorded the fact that he accepted the Malthusian idea.

Nearly everyone I know seems to have a well-developed theory as to why this country is past redemption, or almost, and every theory seems almost right.

The evolution of sex is the hardest problem in evolutionary biology.

In theory it is still possible to be an orthodox religious believer without being intellectually crippled in the process.

When nationalism first became a religion, the English looked at the map, and, noticing that their island lay very high in the Northern Hemisphere, evolved the pleasing theory that the further north you live the more virtuous you become. The histories I was given when I was a little boy started off by explaining in the naïvest way that a cold climate made people energetic while a hot one made them lazy, and hence the defeat of the Spanish Armada.

The ordinary people in the street – partly, perhaps, because they are not sufficiently interested in ideas to be intolerant about them – still vaguely hold that I suppose everyone's got a right to their own opinion. 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.

In theory I rather admire the Spaniards for not sharing our Northern time-neurosis; but unfortunately I share it myself.