Theoretical Quotes - Page 3

• Thus not only the mental and the material, but the theoretical and the practical in the mathematical world, are brought into more intimate and effective connection with each other.

  Ada Lovelace

  World, Connections, Intimate

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• What if life after death is all based within memory: you die, and you don't ascend on a bed of clouds to Jesus, but your brain has a terrain that it can use to propel itself further. It's more of a theoretical afterlife. If that's true, all of these theoretical afterlives of people could potentially interact or network. That space seems way more powerful and exciting than reality. This potential boundlessness is more of what god is to me.

  Blake Butler

  Jesus, Memories, Powerful

  "'We don't realize what we're walking on half the time'". Interview with David Rice, logger.believermag.com. October 16, 2014.

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• Theory and knowledge remain suspect, not because of inherent worthlessness, but because of their historic isolation from action. Without theoretical orientation, however, action is vulnerable to oversimplified and glib imitativeness-even mimicry-and to the use of the gimmick.

  Erving Polster

  Gimmicks, Mimicry, Use

  Erving Polster, Miriam Polster (1973). “Gestalt therapy integrated: contours of theory and practice”

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• Theoretical concepts of music and extended techniques are more like seasoning to me; they're not the meal. I like outside music that still has a sense of forward motion and an emotive quality to it.

  Gerard Cox

  Quality, Technique, Meals

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• you know you have made a theoretical advance when you can no longer reconstruct why you failed for so long to see the obvious.

  Daniel Kahneman

  Long, Made, Obvious

  Daniel Kahneman (2011). “Thinking, Fast and Slow”, p.316, Macmillan

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• Theology is faith seeking understanding, but understanding is more than theoretical. If we really grasp who and where we are as disciples, we should know how to live out our faith.

  Kevin Vanhoozer

  Understanding, Should, Theology

  Source: exiledpreacher.blogspot.com

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• The ultimate arbiter of truth is experiment, not the comfort one derives from one's a priori beliefs, nor the beauty or elegance one ascribes to one's theoretical models.

  Lawrence M. Krauss

  Truth, Comfort, Belief

  Lawrence M. Krauss (2012). “A Universe From Nothing”, p.16, Simon and Schuster

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• It has long been my personal view that the separation of practical and theoretical work is artificial and injurious. Much of the practical work done in computing, both in software and in hardware design, is unsound and clumsy because the people who do it have not any clear understanding of the fundamental design principles of their work. Most of the abstract mathematical and theoretical work is sterile because it has no point of contact with real computing.

  Christopher Strachey

  Real, Views, Long

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• When I was a college student at Yale, I was studying physics and mathematics and was absolutely intent on becoming a theoretical physicist.

  James Rothman

  College, Yale, Becoming

  "A Nobel Prize Winner on Why We Need Foundational Research". Interview with Lisa Rosenbaum, www.newyorker.com. October 10, 2013.

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• I would be lying, however, if I claimed that I could always formulate worthwhile hypotheses on the basis of my theoretical framework. Sometimes there were no reflexive processes to be found; sometimes I failed to find them; and, what was the most painful of all, sometimes I got them wrong. One way or another, I often invested without a worthwhile hypothesis and my activities were not very different from a random walk.

  George Soros

  Lying, Different, Would Be

  George Soros (1994). “The Alchemy of Finance: Reading the Mind of the Market”, p.14, John Wiley & Sons

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• The idea of buddha mind is not purely a concept or a theoretical, metaphysical idea. It is something extremely real that we can experience ourselves. In fact, it is the ego that feels that we have an ego. It is ego that tells us, My ego is bothering me. I feel very self-conscious about having to be me. I feel that I have a tremendous burden in me, and I wonder what the best way to get rid of it is. Yet all those expressions of restlessness that keep coming out of us are the expression of buddha nature: the expression of our unborn, unobstructed, and nondwelling nature.

  Chogyam Trungpa

  Real, Ideas, Self

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• The classes of problems which are respectively known and not
  known to have good algorithms are of great theoretical interest. [...]
  I conjecture that there is no good algorithm for the traveling
  salesman problem. My reasons are the same as for any mathematical
  conjecture: (1) It is a legitimate mathematical possibility, and
  (2) I do not know.

  Jack Edmonds

  Class, Algorithms, Problem

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• Conspiracies and all the theories of conspiracy are a part of the canon of fakes. And I'm involved, in all of my writings, the theoretical ones as well as the novels, with the production of fakes.

  Umberto Eco

  Writing, Fake, Conspiracy

  Interview with Chris Wallace, www.interviewmagazine.com. November 2, 2015.

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• If we analyse the supernova data by assuming the Copernican principle is correct and get out something unphysical, I think we should start questioning the Copernican principle…. Whatever our theoretical predilections, they will in the end have to give way to the observational evidence.

  George F. R. Ellis

  Thinking, Data, Giving

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• The panorama-city is a 'theoretical' (that is, visual) simulacrum, in short a picture, whose condition of possibility is an oblivion and a misunderstanding of practices.

  Michel de Certeau

  Practice, Cities, Oblivion

  Michel de Certeau (2011). “The Practice of Everyday Life”, p.93, Univ of California Press

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• When I made my theoretical model, I could not have guessed that people would try to realise it with Molotov cocktails.

  Theodor Adorno

  Molotov Cocktail, People, Trying

  "The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research, 1923-1950". Book by Martin Jay, p. 279, 1973.

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• From it genesis twelve hundred years ago to today, Islamic philosophy (al-hikmah; al-falsafah) has been one of the major intellectual traditions within the Islamic world, and it has influenced and been influenced by many other intellectual perspectives, including Scholastic theology (kalam) and doctrinal Sufism (al-ma'rifah or al-tasawwuf al-'ilmi) and theoretical gnosis ('irfan-i nazari).

  Seyyed Hossein Nasr

  Philosophy, Islamic, Years

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• When you're younger, it's all theoretical. It's all potential. As you get older, it becomes actual, and your life gets filled with unexpected complexity; some of it asked for, and some of it not. It becomes richer, I find.

  Nicole Krauss

  Unexpected, Complexity, Filled

  "Nicole Krauss’ Plot Thickens". Interview with Christopher Bollen, www.interviewmagazine.com. November 2, 2010.

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• Cognition is ... not an individual process of any theoretical "particular conciousness." Rather it is the result of a social activity, since the existing stock of knowledge exceeds the range available to any one individual.

  Ludwik Fleck

  Cognition, Individual, Social

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• The trouble is that when you read criticisms about the other films that I've made you get the impression that they're all about themes, or problems, or ideas. But those are actually things that develop out of characters, out of images and out of other things. These more abstract things develop while working on the material, and out of it. It's not a theoretical exercise from the outset.

  Michael Haneke

  Character, Exercise, Ideas

  Interview with Rob Carnevale, www.indielondon.co.uk.

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• The best notes are action-based and less, I don't know, heady, theoretical, because, as actors, we're too much in our heads anyway.

  Josh Peck

  Actors, Too Much, Action

  Source: www.movieweb.com

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• Will posterity believe that, while the Press has swarmed with inflammatory productions that tend to prove the blessing of theoretical confusion and speculative licentiousness, not one writer of talent has been employed to refute and confound the fashionable doctrines, nor the least care taken to disseminate works of another complexion.

  Arthur Young

  Believe, Taken, Blessing

  Arthur Young (1889). “Travels in France During the Years 1787, 1788, 1789”

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• I often notice how students can gain the capacity to use certain critical methodologies through engaging with very different texts - how a graphic novel about gentrification and an anthology about Hurricane Katrina and a journalistic account of war profiteering might all lead to very similar classroom conversations and critical engagement. I'm particularly interested in this when teaching law students who often resist reading interdisciplinary materials or materials they interpret as too theoretical.

  Dean Spade

  War, Teaching, Reading

  "On Normal Life". Interview with Natalie Oswin, societyandspace.org. January 15, 2014.

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• I see anarchism as the theoretical ideal to which we are all gradually evolving to a point where everybody can tell the truth to everybody else and nobody can get punished for it. That can only happen without hierarchy and without people having the authority to punish other people.

  Robert Anton Wilson

  People, Hierarchy, Anarchy

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• Interpretations of Muslim assimilation have gravitated between two arguments: that Muslims will remain as permanent outsiders or that Muslims will blend in with little difficulty at all. Mucahit Bilici demonstrates how wanting these arguments are. Finding Mecca in America takes us into the uncharted territory of what it is actually like to be Muslim immigrants in the United States. I am especially impressed by the study's theoretical depth and empirical insights.

  Robert Wuthnow

  Two, America, Depth

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