Top 1200 Literary Theory Quotes & Sayings - Page 3

Without theory, practice is but routine born of habit. Theory alone can bring forth and develop the spirit of inventions.

Today the theory of evolution is about as much open to doubt as the theory that the earth goes round the sun.

For decades, my research was driven by outstanding problems in macroeconomics: mainly growth theory and employment theory.

I came to realise that string theory offers us the best hope of finding a unified theory of all matter and forces.

"Interactive Decision Theory" would perhaps be a more descriptive name for the discipline usually called Game Theory.

To an intellectual who is adrift in politics, a theory is an aim; to a true politician his theory is a boundary.

I think my knowledge of music theory is rooted in jazz theory, and a lot of the writers of standards - Rodgers and Hart, and Gershwin.

Einstein's theory of General Relativity has a mathematical structure very similar to Yang-Mills theory.

The moment a person forms a theory, his imagination sees in every object only the traits which favor that theory.

For me the path to the literary goes through the non - literary. For this reason it surprises me that I am a writer, or that people speak of me as a writer. I'm flattered, but I don't quite believe it.

What is especially striking and remarkable is that in fundamental physics a beautiful or elegant theory is more likely to be right than a theory that is inelegant.

When I was in high school, I was really into string theory and superstring theory and read 'Scientific American.' It's fascinating.

I think that there is something that happens, a phenomenon that happens around a conspiracy theory, where if you believe in a conspiracy theory, then every critique of that theory is simply more proof that the conspiracy exists. And I think that that's something that goes on in the person of Donald Trump.

Hydrodynamics procreated complex analysis, partial differential equations, Lie groups and algebra theory, cohomology theory and scientific computing.

The theory of evolution by cumulative natural selection is the only theory we know of that is in principle capable of explaining the existence of organized complexity.

My literary criticism has become less specifically academic. I was really writing literary history in The New Poetic, but my general practice of writing literary criticism is pretty much what it always has been. And there has always been a strong connection between being a writer - I feel as though I know what it feels like inside and I can say I've experienced similar problems and solutions from the inside. And I think that's a great advantage as a critic, because you know what the writer is feeling.

Mainstream economics scholarship produces theory without facts ("pure theory") and facts without theory ("applied economics").

I think poems belong as much in the news pages as the literary pages. A lot of people throw aside the literary pages! Whereas everybody looks at the news section.

In 2010, my two Harvard mathematician colleagues and I dismantled kin-selection theory, which was the reigning theory of the origin of altruism at the time.

Socrates thought and so do I that the wisest theory about the gods is no theory at all.

If we have a correct theory but merely prate about it, pigeonhole it and do not put it into practice, then that theory, however good, is of no significance.

Whenever a theory appears to you as the only possible one, take this as a sign that you have neither understood the theory nor the problem which it was intended to solve.

Economists can never be free of from difficulties unless they will distinguish between a theory and the application of a theory.

My literary heroes were mostly women writers and thinkers - Joy Williams, Joan Didion, Anne Sexton, June Jordan, Sarah Schulman, Audre Lorde, Cherrie Moraga, Christa Wolf - and much of this writing was political as well as literary.

Theory is the essence of facts. Without theory scientific knowledge would be only worthy of the madhouse.

Whether or not you can observe a thing depends upon the theory you use. It is the theory which decides what can be observed.

The calcium theory has probably done more to damage our health than any single theory in the history of humanity.

There can be no theory of any account unless it corroborate with the theory of the earth.

The basic theory in twistor theory is not to add extra dimensions.

One of the main successes of string theory is that it has been able to unify the general theory of relativity, which describes gravity, and quantum mechanics.

It is a remarkable fact that the second law of thermodynamics has played in the history of science a fundamental role far beyond its original scope. Suffice it to mention Boltzmann's work on kinetic theory, Planck's discovery of quantum theory or Einstein's theory of spontaneous emission, which were all based on the second law of thermodynamics.

Criticism is concerned with evaluation. There may be evaluative principles implicit in this or that form of theory, but theory in and of itself is not prescriptive.

If criticism has made such discoveries as to necessitate the abandonment of the doctrine of plenary inspiration, it is not enough to say that we are compelled to abandon only a "particular theory of inspiration..." We must go on to say that that "particular theory of inspiration" is the theory of the apostles and of the Lord, and that in abandoning it we are abandoning them.

The literary artist lends verbal depth to the visual. The visual artist provides visible articulation for the literary.

Despite its name, the big bang theory is not really a theory of a bang at all. It is really only a theory of the aftermath of a bang.

Have you ever head this theory about drinking yourself sober?' Eddie asked. 'It's a very popular theory. Amongst drunks, anyway.

In the book, I make the point that here we have string theory and here we have twistor theory and we don't know if either one of them is the right approach to nature.

When the fact doesn't meet the theory then let go the theory.

The tradition of Chicago price theory is a good one, and it is a low-tech methodology that tries to apply simple economic theory to the world.

M-theory is the unified theory Einstein was hoping to find.

Deism is logically compatible with evolutionary theory for the simple reason that the theory says nothing about the origin of the universe or of the laws of nature.

But actually theory is very practical. Gravity is a theory, for example. It allows you to predict that if you step off a cliff you will fall; you don't have to collect data on that.

Mr. DeMille's theory of sexual difference was that marriage is an artificial state for women. The want to be taken, ruled, raped. That was his theory.

Those who promote the politically correct theory are favored with billions from government grants and neo-Marxist environmentalist largesse, and official recognition and award. Faked and tampered data and evidence has arisen in favor of the politically correct theory. Is not man-caused, catastrophic global warming now the only theory allowed to be taught in the West?

My opinion about Miller's experiments is the following. ... Should the positive result be confirmed, then the special theory of relativity and with it the general theory of relativity, in its current form, would be invalid. Experimentum summus judex. Only the equivalence of inertia and gravitation would remain, however, they would have to lead to a significantly different theory.

Democracy, the deceitful theory that the Jew would insinuate - namely, that theory that all men are created equal.

I also encourage my students to read literary criticism that is deeply personal yet formally inventive and intellectually expansive... books that offer unorthodox ways of doing double duty as literary criticism and as love letters to the power of literature per se.

Literary modernism kind of grew out of a sense that, “Oh my god! I’m telling a story! Oh, that can’t be the case, because I’m a clever person. I’m a literary person! What am I going to do to distinguish myself? I know! I’ll write Ulysses.”

A theory which is not refutable by any conceivable event is non-scientific. Irrefutability is not a virtue of a theory (as people often think) but a vice.

The theory of evolution, like the theory of gravity, is a scientific fact.

We're going to need a definitive quantum theory of gravity, which is part of a grand unified theory - it's the main missing piece.

If a theory can not be explained to a child, then the theory is probably worthless.

Don't confuse hypothesis and theory. The former is a possible explanation; the latter, the correct one. The establishment of theory is the very purpose of science.

The moment in the account of Adam and Eve in the book of Genesis is when they realize they're naked and try and cover themselves with fig leaves. That seemed to me a perfect allegory of what happened in the 20th century with regard to literary modernism. Literary modernism grew out of a sense that, “Oh my god! I'm telling a story! Oh, that can't be the case, because I'm a clever person. I'm a literary person! What am I going to do to distinguish myself?...a lot of modernism does seem to come out of a fear of being thought an ordinary storyteller.

They didn't accept me theory - not a theory, but just a thought I had about this character. I noticed that this man only exists when the boy comes into the grocery.

To an intellectual who is adrift in politics, a theory is an aim; to a true politician his theory is a boundary

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

According to 'M' theory, ours is not the only universe. Instead, 'M' theory predicts that a great many universes were created out of nothing.

I have emphasized experiments more than theory. Of course, we need some theory when thinking of soft matter.

The theory of the permanent revolution, in contradiction to the theory of socialism in one country, was recognized by the entire Bolshevik party during the period from 1917 to 1923.