Practice Theory Quotes & Sayings

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. — Archibald MacLeish

An ounce of practice is generally worth more than a ton of theory. — E.F. Schumacher

To a Western observer, schooled in the theory and practice of Western freedom, it is precisely the lack of freedom - freedom of the mind from constraint and indoctrination, to question and inquire and speak; freedom of the economy from corrupt and pervasive mismanagement; freedom of women from male oppression; freedom of citizens from tyranny - that underlies so many of the troubles of the Muslim world. But the road to democracy, as the Western experience amply demonstrates, is long and hard, full of pitfalls and obstacles. Page 115 — Bernard Lewis

Theory without practice is pointless, practice without theory is mindless. Lenin — Andrew MacLennan

American society has tried so hard and so ably to defend the practice and theory of production for profit and not primarily for use that now it has succeeded in making its jobs and products profitable and useless. — Paul Goodman

A hurt mammal never forgets. Epigenetic theory suggests an almost Lamarckian transfer down the generations; some genes are activated by experiences, others are not. Genes, language, history: what it all meant in actual practice was that fear passed down through the years, altering organisms for generation after generation, thus altering the species. Fear, an evolutionary force. — Kim Stanley Robinson

Which is to say that culture is not a reflex of political economy, but
that society is now a reflex of key shifts in music theory and practice ...
[Sampladelia is] the sound made by those early-twentieth-century discoveries
in particle physics and relativiity theory, the projection of the minds of
Einstein, Heisenbery, and Bohr, their fateful explorations of liquid time,
curving space, uncertainty fields and relativity theorems, into densely
configured and fully ambivalent android music tracks — Arthur Kroker

Being-'subject' means taking up a position from which an actor can make the transition from theory to practice. This transition usually takes place once an actor has found the motive that liberates them from hesitation and disinhibits them for action. — Peter Sloterdijk

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

Religious creeds are a great obstacle to any full sympathy between the outlook of the scientist and the outlook which religion is so often supposed to require ... The spirit of seeking which animates us refuses to regard any kind of creed as its goal. It would be a shock to come across a university where it was the practice of the students to recite adherence to Newton's laws of motion, to Maxwell's equations and to the electromagnetic theory of light. We should not deplore it the less if our own pet theory happened to be included, or if the list were brought up to date every few years. We should say that the students cannot possibly realise the intention of scientific training if they are taught to look on these results as things to be recited and subscribed to. Science may fall short of its ideal, and although the peril scarcely takes this extreme form, it is not always easy, particularly in popular science, to maintain our stand against creed and dogma. — Arthur Stanley Eddington

AUGUST 5, 1981. That's the date it became official. It's rare that we can point to an exact date when a business theory or idea becomes an accepted practice. But in the case of mass layoffs, we can. August 5, 1981, was the day President Ronald Reagan fired more than 11,000 air traffic controllers. — Simon Sinek

If you find that you're spending almost all your time on theory, start turning some attention to practical things; it will improve your theories. If you find that you're spending almost all your time on practice, start turning some attention to theoretical things; it will improve your practice. — Donald Knuth

Let's face it: suffering discredits goodness. I'm agnostic in practice though faith-based in theory. I used to pray but now know he'll do what he darn well pleases when he darn well pleases. Will he listen? Maybe. We have a book that says so, but how much happens beyond that book, I can't say. That's agnosticism in its bleakest and most honest form. Don't judge me, yet believe me when I tell you that years of abuse tend to wring out every ounce of one's ability to understand and adhere to faith in standard form. — Chila Woychik

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. — Paulo Freire

Children live in the only successful Marxist state ever created: the family. 'From each according to his ability, to each according to his need' is the family's practice as well as its theory. Even with today's scattershot patterns of marriage and parenting, a family is collectivist to a more than North Korean degree. — P. J. O'Rourke

With all of its false assumptions and evil methods, communism grew as a protest against the hardships of the underprivileged. Communism in theory emphasized a classless society, and a concern for social justice, though the world knows from sad experience that in practice it created new classes and a new lexicon of injustice. — Martin Luther King Jr.

All mysteries which lead theory to mysticism find their rational solution in human practice and in the comprehension of this practice. — Karl Marx

The experience of seeing differences of dogma made moot in practice by the bonds of family affection and neighborly respect was formative for him. It seemed to leave him with a lasting sense that life was more complicated in practice than in theory - and that this was a good thing. — Yuval Levin

the process of learning a theory depends upon the study of applications, including practice problem-solving both with a pencil and paper and with instruments in the laboratory. If, for example, the student of Newtonian dynamics ever discovers the meaning of terms like 'force,' 'mass,' 'space,' and 'time,' he does so less from the incomplete though sometimes helpful definitions in his text than by observing and participating in the application of these concepts to problem-solution. That — Thomas S. Kuhn

Everyone agrees in theory that we can't judge a new idea or point of view unless we enter into it and try it out, but the practice itself is rare. — Peter Elbow

Feminism is the theory. Lesbianism is the practice. — Alison Bechdel

A symptom of the revolution: When we state something is impossible in theory, but then change our minds when we discover that it is possible in practice. — Seth Godin

Democracy is talking itself to death. The people do not know what they want; they do not know what is the best for them. There is too much foolishness, too much lost motion. I have stopped the talk and the nonsense. I am a man of action. Democracy is beautiful in theory; in practice it is a fallacy. You in America will see that some day. — Benito Mussolini

[Knowledge is governed not by] a theory of knowledge, but by a theory of discursive practice. — Michel Foucault

Theory and practice sometimes clash. And when that happens, theory loses. Every single time. — Linus Torvalds

Every person should embrace those [dogmas] that he, being the best judge of himself, feels will do most to strengthen in him love of justice. — Baruch Spinoza

Starting from the very reasonable, but unfortunately revolutionary concept that social practices which threaten the continuation of life on Earth must be changed, we need a theory of revolutionary ecology that will encompass social and biological issues, class struggle, and a recognition of the role of global corporate capitalism in the oppression of peoples and the destruction of nature. — Judi Bari

Protestants, on the contrary, rejected the Church as a vehicle of revelation; truth was to be sought only in the Bible, which each man could interpret for himself. If men differed in their interpretation, there was no divinely appointed authority to decide the dispute. In practice, the State claimed the right that had formerly belonged to the Church, but this was a usurpation. In Protestant theory, there should be no earthly intermediary between the soul and God. — Bertrand Russell

I have, however, to live in an age of Faith - the sort of thing I used to hear praised and recommended when I was a boy. It is damned unpleasant, really. It is bloody in every sense of the word. And I have to keep my end up in it. Where do I start?

With personal relationships. Here is something comparatively solid in a world full of violence and cruelty. Not absolutely solid... We don't know what other people are like. How then can we put any trust in personal relationships, or cling to them in the gathering political storm? In theory we can't. But in practice we can and do. Though A is unchangeably A or B unchangeably B, there can still be love and loyalty between the two. For the purpose of loving one has to assume that the personality is solid, and the "self" is an entity, and to ignore all contrary evidence. And since to ignore evidence is one of the characteristics of faith, I certainly can proclaim that I believe in personal relationships. — E. M. Forster

Earlier in this century, the Heisenberg Principle established that the very act of observing a natural phenomenon can change what is being observed. Although the initial theory was limited in practice to special cases in subatomic physics, the philosophical implications were and are staggering. — Al Gore

Sometimes things that seem like good ideas in theory, in practice turn out to be the worst kinds of boneheaded blunders. — Jean Ferris

In theory we are all equal before the law. In practice, there are overwhelming privileges that come with winning the birth lottery. — Arianna Huffington

Neuroscientists rarely have to grapple with the issue of presentism versus existentialism. But in practice, neuroscientists are implicitly presentists. They view the past, present, and future as fundamentally distinct, as the brain makes decisions in the present, based on the memories of the past, to enhance our well being in the future. But despite its intuitive appeal, presentism is the underdog theory in physics and philosophy. — Dean Buonomano

In this nonfundamentalist understanding of faith, practice is more important than theory, love more important than law, and mystery is seen as an insight into truth rather than an obstacle. It is the great lie of our time that all religious faith has to be fundamentalist to be valid. — Andrew Sullivan

Against the urgency of people dying in the streets, what in God's name is the point of cultural studies?...At that point, I think anybody who is into cultural studies seriously as an intellectual practice, must feel, on their pulse, its ephemerality, its insubstantiality, how little it registers, how little we've been able to change anything or get anybody to do anything. If you don't feel that as one tension in the work that you are doing, theory has let you off the hook. — Stuart Hall

Abstinence is perfectly reasonable in theory," Gregory said, "It just doesn't work in practice. It's like dieting. You can go a day or two, maybe even a week. But eventually that pizza just smells too good. — Tom Perrotta

Around the world, countries flush with cash but poor in arable land are now rushing to secure vast amounts of acreage in land-rich but underdeveloped nations. In theory, of course, such trades could benefit both sides, but in practice they usually raise extraordinarily troubling ethical and political questions. What — Michael T. Klare

Agricultural practice served Darwin as the material basis for the elaboration of his theory of Evolution, which explained the natural causation of the adaptation we see in the structure of the organic world. That was a great advance in the knowledge of living nature. — Trofim Lysenko

Gradualism in theory is perpetuity in practice. — William Lloyd Garrison

There's a reason theory and practice are two different words. — Brent Weeks

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. — George Orwell

The practice of celibacy alone was opening me up to a deeper sense of the way the mind-body connection works. I saw over and over that my mind and body could be filled with desire and that no matter how intense the craving was it would always pass. I didn't have to satisfy every desire that arose in my mind. I began to understand impermanence through direct experience rather than just intellectual theory. — Noah Levine

Men act like brutes in so far as the sequences of their perceptions arise through the principle of memory only, like those empirical physicians who have mere practice without theory. — Gottfried Leibniz

Some men learn all they know from books; others from life; both kinds are narrow. The first are all theory; the second are all practice. It's the fellow who knows enough about practice to test his theories for blow-holes that gives the world a shove ahead, and finds a fair margin of profit in shoving it. — George Horace Lorimer

I think it is widely agreed that Carl Steinitz, over the 50 years he taught at Harvard, has been one of the most important figures in influencing the theory and practice of landscape architecture and the application of computer technology to planning. — Jack Dangermond

I wrote my first textbook in 1970. It was called 'The Theory and Practice of Group Psychotherapy,' and over the years, many students told me that they enjoyed reading it because there were so many stories in there; often just a paragraph or a page of something that happened in a group session. — Irvin D. Yalom

The genuflection toward 'fairness' is a familiar newsroom piety, in practice the excuse for a good deal of autopilot reporting and lazy thinking but in theory a benign ideal. In Washington, however, a community in which the management of news has become the single overriding preoccupation of the core industry, what 'fairness' has often come to mean is a scrupulous passivity, an agreement to cover the story not as it is occurring but as it is presented, which is to say as it is manufactured. — Joan Didion

It is of course no secret to contemporary philosophers and psychologists that man himself is changing in our violent century, under the influence, of course, not only of war and revolution, but also of practically everything else that lays claim to being "modern" and "progressive." We have already cited the most striking forms of Nihilist Vitalism, whose cumulative effect has been to uproot, disintegrate, and "mobilize" the individual, to substitute for his normal stability and rootedness a senseless quest for power and movement, and to replace normal human feeling by a nervous excitability. The work of Nihilist Realism, in practice as in theory, has been parallel and complementary to that of Vitalism: a work of standardization, specialization, simplification, mechanization, dehumanization; its effect has been to "reduce" the individual to the most "Primitive" and basic level, to make him in fact the slave of his environment, the perfect workman in Lenin's worldwide "factory. — Seraphim Rose

Get back to work, he would tell himself sternly. There's a garuda to get airborne. — China Mieville

Pornography is the theory, and rape is the practice. — Robin Morgan

Smart technologies are not just disruptive; they can also preserve the status quo. Revolutionary in theory, they are often reactionary in practice. — Evgeny Morozov

Theory attracts practice as the magnet attracts iron. — Carl Friedrich Gauss

He who loves practice without theory is like the sailor who boards ship without a rudder and compass and never knows where he may cast. — Leonardo Da Vinci

Pfuel was one of those theorists who love their theory so dearly they lose sight of the aim of all theory, which is to work out in practice. He was so much in love with theory that he hated all practice and didn't want to know about it. He positively rejoiced in failure, because failure was due to practical infringements of his theory, which went to show how right the theory was. — Leo Tolstoy

System administration is where theory meets practice with a vengeance. — Steve Simmons

We don't need unity in theory, we need solidarity in practice. — Curious George Brigade

Dialectical thought understands the critical tension between "is" and "ought" first as an ontological condition, pertaining to the structure of Being itself. However, the recognition of this state of Being its theory intends from the beginning a concrete practice. Seen in the light of a truth which appears in them falsified or denied, the given facts themselves appear false and negative. — Herbert Marcuse

An economist is a man who, when he finds something works in practice, wonders if it works in theory. — Walter Heller

There is a gulf between the high value Americans put on life in theory and its cheapness in practice. — Elizabeth Joan Smith

Things just seem so much better in theory than in practice. — Chris Wooding

F the beginning of the thought or theory is not rooted in reality, the end or the final results of such a thought or theory could well be disastrous in practice. — Nirmala Srivastava

Theory is knowledge that doesn't work. Practice is when everything works and you don't know why. — Hermann Hesse

Democracy is beautiful in theory; in practice it is a fallacy. — Benito Mussolini

I firmly believe people have hitherto been a great deal too much taken up about doctrine and far too little about practice. The word "doctrine," as used in the Bible, means teaching of duty, not theory. — George MacDonald

The German Fuhrer, as I have consistently maintained, is an evolutionist; he has consistently sought to make the practices of Germany conform to the theory of evolution. — Arthur Keith

for instance, the theories and practices of art and photography with anthropological theory and practice (e.g. Edwards 1997a; da Silva and Pink 2004; Grimshaw and Ravetz 2004; Schneider and Wright 2005). The interdisciplinary focus in visual methods has also been represented in Theo van Leeuwen and Carey Jewitt's Handbook of Social Research (2000) and Chris Pole's Seeing is Believing (2004) both of which combine case studies in visual research from across disciplines. The idea that visual research as a field of interdisciplinary practice is also central to Advances in Visual Methodology (Pink 2012a) and is demonstrated by the work of the volume's contributors, as well as by the recent SAGE Handbook of Visual Research Methods (Margolis and Pauwels 2011). Likewise the interdisciplinary journal Visual Studies (formerly Visual Sociology) provides an excellent series of examples of visual research, practice, theory and methodology. — Sarah Pink

Success is the important thing. Propaganda is not a matter for average minds, but rather a matter for practitioners. It is not supposed to be lovely or theoretically correct. I do not care if I give wonderful, aesthetically elegant speeches, or speak so that women cry. The point of a political speech is to persuade people of what we think right. I speak differently in the provinces than I do in Berlin, and when I speak in Bayreuth, I say different things than I say in the Pharus Hall. That is a matter of practice, not of theory. We do not want to be a movement of a few straw brains, but rather a movement that can conquer the broad masses. Propaganda should be popular, not intellectually pleasing. It is not the task of propaganda to discover intellectual truths. — Joseph Goebbels

Neither in theory nor in practice does one farmer in a hundred realize how important it is to cultivate, cultivate, and cultivate. — Albert Howard

Yoga is 99% practice and 1% theory. — K. Pattabhi Jois

In theory, practice and theory are the same, but in practice they are different. — Larry McVoy

In any given culture and at any given moment, there is always only one 'episteme' that defines the conditions of possibility of all knowledge, whether expressed in theory or silently invested in a practice. — Michel Foucault

Doctors kept stressing that mental disease was the same as physical disease. Telling someone who was clinically depressed, for example, to shake it off and get out of the house was tantamount to telling a man with two broken legs to sprint across the room. That was all well and good in theory, but in practice, the stigma continued. Maybe, to be more charitable, it was because you could hide a mental disease. — Harlan Coben

When your practice has led you to experiences that you can't understand, you need a better theory. Otherwise, if you try to understand these transcendent experiences with 'profane' or, we might say, 'materialistic' ways of thinking, your cultivation will be set back. — Betty Sue Flowers

That's all well and good in practice, but how does it work in theory? — Shmuel Weinberger

design is a term that bridges theory and practice. It encompasses both a principled approach and a set of contextualized practices that are constantly adapting to circumstances. — Helen Beetham

We must never assume that local practice conforms with state theory. — James C. Scott

The physics are simple in theory, but in practice they are filled with the possibility for limitless error. — Christopher Pike

Spreading straw might be considered rather unimportant, but it is fundamental to my method of growing rice and winter grain. It is connected with everything, with fertility, with germination, with weeds, with keeping away sparrows, with water management. In actual practice and in theory, the use of straw in farming is a crucial issue. This is something that I cannot seem to get people to understand. — Anonymous

The justification for those actions was that we were living in a very hard, predatory, cloak-and-dagger world and that the only way to deal with a totalitarian enemy was to intimidate him. The trouble with this theory was that while we live in a world of plot and counterplot, we also live in a world of cause and effect. Whatever the cause for the decision to legitimize and regularize deceit abroad, the inevitable effect was the practice of deceit at home. — Norman Cousins

This book is the best treatment of the best American Marxist philosopher-and the best philosopher to emerge from American slums. Young Sidney Hook is essential reading for anyone interested in democratic theory and practice in America. — Cornel West

Even though the transformation of energy, in all of its various forms, is the very basis of all economic activity, only a tiny fraction of economists have even studied thermodynamics. And only a handful of individuals inside the profession have attempted to redefine economic theory and practice based on the energy laws. — Jeremy Rifkin

If a minister wants to be a man among men he need only to stop creating devotion to abstract ideals which every one accepts in theory and denies in practice, and to agonize about their validity and practicability in the social issues which he and others face in our present civilization. — Reinhold Niebuhr

According to Christian belief, man exists for the sake of God; according to the liberal church, in practice if not in theory, God exists for the sake of man. — John Gresham Machen

The bait's got a theory; the bait's finding a practice, working it out; the bait's going to write it down and she don't have to use words, she'll make signs, in blood, she's good at bleeding, boys, the vein's open, boys, the bait's got plenty, each month more and more without dying for a certain long period of her life, she can lose it or use it, she works in broad strokes, she makes big gestures, big signs; oh and honey there's so much bait around that there's going to be a bloodbath in the old town tonight, when the new art gets its start. — Andrea Dworkin

What is then the central idea of transcendental philosophy? It is to construe each object of science as the focus of a synthesis of phenomena rather than as a thing in itself. And it is to accept accordingly that the very possibility of such objects depends on the connecting structures provided in advance by the procedures used in our research activities. Thus something is objective if it results from a universal and necessary mode of connection of phenomena. In other words, something is objective if it holds true for any (human) active subject, not if it concerns intrinsic properties of autonomous entities. (...)

From a transcendental standpoint, the structure of a scientific theory is nothing less than the frame of procedural rationalities that underpin a certain research practice (and that, conversely, were constrained by the resistances arising from the enaction of this practice). — Michel Bitbol

Killing someone is different in practice than it is in theory. There are factors you can't prepare for, feelings in the moment where you'll question everything you thought you knew about yourself, other feelings that might follow you long after the deed is done. — Paula Stokes

In art, practice always comes before theory. — Pablo Picasso

Since CWIL's discipline-based practice was grounded not only in process but also in New Genre Theory, their criteria included assigning writing that would enable students to engage in the kinds of thinking typical of the discipline, as well as in writing in the genres typical of professional practice. The UCITF, however, was trying to draft criteria for the new Q (quantitative reasoning) and B (breadth) courses as well as for the W-courses. They were motivated to define courses in ways that would be comprehensive and meaningful, but would not impose demands likely to alienate faculty. — Wendy Strachan

In theory, multiculturalism is something we should all celebrate; unfortunately, in practice, multiculturalism means multi-morality ... The only antidote to such nihilistic thinking is ethical monotheism, the belief in one universal code of ethics. Differing cultures glorify humanity, but differing moralities destroy it. We must teach what Professor Viktor Frankl concluded after surviving Auschwitz: There are only two races of human beings, the decent and the indecent. That is how the world is divided: not between rich and poor, men and women, North and South, black and white, the powerful and the powerless, or any other nonmoral division that too many contemporary liberals have been advocating. — Dennis Prager

If abnegation has indeed so many charms for you, why do you fail to practice it in private life? Society will be grateful to you, for someone, at least, will reap the fruit; but to desire to impose it upon mankind as a principle is the very height of absurdity, for the abnegation of all is the sacrifice of all, which is evil erected into a theory. — Frederic Bastiat

Most married couples, even though they love each other very much in theory, tend to view each other in practice as large teeming flaw colonies, the result of being that they get on each other's nerves and regularly erupt into vicious emotional shouting matches over such issues as toaster settings. — Dave Barry

Psychology saves us from mistakes. It makes us more clear as to what we are about. We gain confidence in respect to any method which we are using as soon as we believe that it has theory as well as practice at its back. — William James

I have resisted the term sociolinguistics for many years, since it implies that there can be a successful linguistic theory or practice which is not social. — William Labov

According to Lenin, socialism and democracy are indivisible ... The essence of perestroika lies in the fact that it unites socialism with democracy and revives the Leninist concept of socialist construction both in theory and in practice. We want more socialism and, therefore, more democracy. — Mikhail Gorbachev

It's a bit counter-intuitive to think about the future in terms of the past. But ... I've learned an important trick: to develop foresight, you need to practice hindsight. Technologies, cultures, and climates may change, but our basic human needs and desires - to survive, to care for our families, and to lead happy, purposeful lives - remain the same.' p 5 — Jane McGonigal

Intellectuals ... advertise their superiority to political practice but are absolutely in its thrall ... It is no accident that Marxist theory and practice use the intellectuals as tools and keep them in brutal subservience. — Allan Bloom

In theory, everybody buys the best and cheapest commodities offered to him on the market. In practice, if every one went around pricing, and chemically testing before purchasing, the dozens of soaps or fabrics or brands of bread which are for sale, economic life would become hopelessly jammed. — Edward Bernays

I am attempting to move away from the exclusionary practices of feminist theory, particularly anti-pornography rhetoric, in order to amplify the discussion about the complexity of pleasure for women. — Barbara Degenevieve

Gita and Ganga constitute the essence of Hinduism; one its theory and the other its practice. — Swami Vivekananda

I have always been averse to theorizing about the art or craft of biography. Like Disraeli's biographer, Lord Blake, who offers the cautionary analogy of the biographical centipede unsure of her next step because of too much cerebration, I have made it my practice to let the facts find the theory. — David Levering Lewis