Theorizing Quotes & Sayings

I'm from the beatnik generation, where everybody wanted to be a poet or writer or something. And at that time, I was a jazz critic, and I was always thinking, theorizing about what makes great art or what's important in art. — Harvey Pekar

Some of the best theorizing comes after collecting data because then you become aware of another reality. — Robert J. Shiller

The bar was crowded with theorizing Sherlockians, who in the absence of any actual evidence had created grand machinations to explain the crime. Minor points of canonical disagreement became reasons for brutal murder. Some tried to piece together their theories in small groups, hoping that with enough brainpower and expertise they might arrive at a solution. Others jumped straight over the "investigation" phase and landed square at the end of the story they were creating, instantly accusing the man across the table of some vile treachery. And, moreover, actually employing phrases like "vile treachery" in doing so. Everyone was a suspect. But at the world's largest Sherlockian gathering, everyone was a detective as well. — Graham Moore

[Photography] is always like a state of grace, like the appearance of something that I hadn't foreseen, that surprises me and stops me. If I only did what I had in mind, there would be no emotion. It would be like keeping one's eyes shut rather than open, like theorizing rather than seeing. — Sarah Moon

I don't like theorizing about my work myself, but that's not to say I have no interest in theory. Other people are free to say what they want about my work. — David Shrigley

Unless we encounter God, speculating about God becomes nothing more than abstract conjecture and theorizing that has little impact on daily life. — N Graham Standish

I just wanted to tell the story of a bunch of musicians who had never had their story told before. There's no preaching or theorizing. — Michael Azerrad

The notion that "applied" knowledge is somehow less worthy than "pure" knowledge, was natural to a society in which all useful work was performed by slaves and serfs, and in which industry was controlled by the models set by custom rather than by intelligence. Science, or the highest knowing, was then identified with pure theorizing, apart from all application in the uses of life; and knowledge relating to useful arts suffered the stigma attaching to the classes who engaged in them. — John Dewey

Paranoid theorizing was too easy, too emotionally satisfying. — Graham Moore

Education is a vast sea of lies, waste, corruption, crackpot theorizing, and careerist log-rolling. — John Derbyshire

Such a principled disregard of ad hominem evidence is a characteristically modern prejudice of professional philosophers. For most Greek and Roman thinkers from Plato to Augustine, theorizing was but one mode of living life philosophically. To Socrates and the countless classical philosophers who tried to follow in his footsteps, the primary point was not to ratify a certain set of propositions (even when the ability to define terms and analyze arguments was a constitutive component of a school's teaching), but rather to explore 'the kind of person, the sort of self' that one could elaborate as a result of taking the quest for wisdom seriously. — James Miller

Giese was an unemotional man, but then in the study of Solaris emotion is a hindrance to the explorer. Imagination and premature theorizing are positive disadvantages in approaching a planet where - as has become clear - anything is possible ... The fact is that in spite of his cautious nature the scrupulous Giese more than once jumped to premature conclusions. Even when on their guard, human beings inevitably theorize. — Stanislaw Lem

There is nothing wrong in theorizing and hypothesizing; a writer is not an escapist, he creates a world he would love to be in. A world he would rather be in. — Kartik Sharma

From the outset, the Christian was the theorizing Jew, the Jew is therefore the practical Christian, and the practical Christian has become a Jew again. — Karl Marx

One suspects that the conservatives of left and right don't much like the "mass" and its badly informed preferences. Let us take care of you, they cry. Let tradition celebrated by wise elders, or planning implemented by wise experts, guide you, oh you sadly misled mass. (The ruling lords and the monopolists view the clerisy's conservative theorizing with delight, resting assured that the elders and the planners will inadvertently shield their rents.) — Deirdre N. McCloskey

The fact that Science walks forward on two feet, namely theory and experiment, is nowhere better illustrated than in the two fields for slight contributions to which you have done me the great honour of awarding the the Nobel Prize in Physics for the year 1923. Sometimes it is one foot that is put forward first, sometimes the other, but continuous progress is only made by the use of both - by theorizing and then testing, or by finding new relations in the process of experimenting and then bringing the theoretical foot up and pushing it on beyond, and so on in unending alterations. — Robert Andrews Millikan

I'm much better at working out ideas in action than I am in theorizing about it and then transferring my thinking to action. I don't work that way. I work with tentative ideas and I experiment and then with that experimentation in action, I finally come to the conclusions about what I think is the right way to do it. — Myles Horton

Posterity will surely be amazed, and I hope vastly amused, that such slipshod and unconvincing theorizing should have so easily captivated twentieth-century minds and been so widely and recklessly applied. — Malcolm Muggeridge

Wallace's sales agent, back in London, heard mutterings from some naturalists that young Mr. Wallace ought to quit theorizing and stick to gathering facts. Besides expressing their condescension toward him in particular, that criticism also reflected a common attitude that fact-gathering, not theory, was the proper business of all naturalists. — David Quammen

There are some modern practitioners, who declaim against medical theory in general, not considering that to think is to theorize; and that no one can direct a method of cure to a person labouring under disease, without thinking, that is, without theorizing; and happy therefore is the patient, whose physician possesses the best theory. — Erasmus Darwin

The story serves as an important reminder to all of us that sometimes, when people are hurting, they don't need our advice and theological theorizing as much as they need our understanding and comfort. — Justin Lee

American liberty is being destroyed by Marxist doctrines that explain society in terms of hegemonic and oppressed groups - whether classes, races or genders - fighting for suzerainty. In these societies spun out of Marxist theorizing, good will does not exist, only the material interests of warring groups. Morality resides in the oppressed, but if the oppressed succeed in becoming hegemonic, their claim to moral supremacy evaporates. — Paul Craig Roberts

What is the use of theorizing as to wherein lies the charm that moves us? — Alfred De Vigny

PERFECTION The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality. His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the "quantity" group: fifty pounds of pots rated an "A", forty pounds a "B", and so on. Those being graded on "quality", however, needed to produce only one pot - albeit a perfect one - to get an "A". Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the "quantity" group was busily churning out piles of work-and learning from their mistakes - the "quality" group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay. — David Bayles

To whatever extent the Hell's Angels may or may be latent sadomasochists or repressed homosexuals is to me
after nearly a year in the constant company of outlaw motorcyclists
almost entirely irrelevant. There are literary critics who insist that Ernest Hemingway was a tortured queer and that Mark Twain was haunted to the end of his days by a penchant for interracial buggery. It is a good way to stir up a tempest in the academic quarterlies, but it won't change a word of what either man wrote, nor alter the impact of their work on the world they were writing about. Perhaps Manolete was a hoof fetishist, or suffered from terrible hemorrhoids as a result of long nights in Spanish horn parlors ... but he was a great matador, and it is hard to see how any amount of Freudian theorizing can have the slightest effect on the reality of the thing he did best. — Hunter S. Thompson

This is the perpetual and pitiful tragedy of the practical man in practical affairs. He always begins with a flourish of contempt for what he calls theorizing and what people who can do it call thinking. He will not wait for logic-that is, in the most exact sense, he will not listen to reason. It will therefore appear to him an idle and ineffectual proceeding to say that there is a reason for his present failure. Nevertheless, it may be well to say it, and to try and make it clear even to him. — Gilbert K. Chesterton

I don't think anybody's really been successful with theorizing about value or creating a price theory. — P. J. O'Rourke

Science proceeds by inference, rather than by the deduction of mathematical proof. A series of observations is accumulated, forcing the deeper question: What must be true if we are to explain what is observed? What "big picture" of reality offers the best fit to what is actually observed in our experience? American scientist and philosopher Charles S. Peirce used the term "abduction" to refer to the way in which scientists generate theories that might offer the best explanation of things. The method is now more often referred to as "inference to the best explanation." It is now widely agreed to be the philosophy of investigation of the world characteristic of the natural sciences. — Alister E. McGrath

Reformation of the world begins with reformation of self. We cannot hope to influence others in the direction of moral virtue unless we live lives of virtue. The example of our virtuous living will carry a greater influence than will all the preaching, postulating, and theorizing in which we might indulge. We cannot expect to lift others unless we are standing on higher ground. — Gordon B. Hinckley

Nothing is more futile than theorizing about music. No doubt there are laws, mathematically strict laws, but these laws are not music; they are only its conditions? The essence of music is revelation. — Heinrich Heine

I soon became convinced ... that all the theorizing would be empty brain exercise and therefore a waste of time unless one first ascertained what the population of the universe really consists of. — Fritz Zwicky

For people of color - especially African Americans - the idea that racist cops might frame members of their community is no abstract notion, let alone an exercise in irrational conspiracy theorizing. Rather, it speaks to a social reality about which blacks are acutely aware. — Tim Wise

One would think that potential motherhood should make women as a class as sacred as the priesthood. In common parlance we have much fine-spun theorizing on the exalted office of the mother, her immense influence in moulding the character of her sons; "the hand that rocks the cradle moves the world," etc., but in creeds and codes, in constitutions and Scriptures, in prose and verse, we do not see these lofty paeans recorded or verified in living facts. As a class, women were treated among the Jews as an inferior order of beings, just as they are to-day in all civilized nations. And now, as then, men claim to be guided by the will of God. — Elizabeth Cady Stanton

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

The thing about writing is not to talk, but to do it; no matter how bad or even mediocre it is, the process and production is the thing, not the sitting and theorizing about how one should write ideally, or how well one could write if one really wanted to or had the time. — Sylvia Plath

Natural objects, for example, must be experienced before any theorizing about them can occur. — Edmund Husserl

One salutary development in recent ethical theorizing is the widespread recognition that no short argument will serve to eliminate any of the major metaethical positions. Such theories have to weave together views in semantics, epistemology, moral psychology and metaphysics. The comprehensive, holistic character of much recent theorizing suggests the futility of fastening on just a single sort of argument to refute a developed version of realism or antirealism. No one any longer thinks that ethical naturalism can be undermined in a single stroke by the open question argument, or that appeal to the descriptive semantics of moral discourse is sufficient to refute noncognitivism. — Russ Shafer-Landau

I came to Freud for facts. I read 'The Interpretation of Dreams' and I thought- 'Oh, here is a man who is not just theorizing away, here is a man who has got facts. — Carl Jung

There ought not be two histories, one of political and moral action and one of political and moral theorizing, because there were not two pasts, one populated only by actions, the other only by theories. Every action is the bearer and expression of more or less theory-laden beliefs and concepts; every piece of theorizing and every expression of belief is a politcal and moral action. — Alasdair McIntyre

First, there is a large body of empirical evidence on the predictive accuracy of speculative markets, on everything from horse-racing to elections to invasions. "Put your money where your mouth is" turns out to be a great way to get the well informed to reveal what they know, and the poorly informed to quiet down. No system is perfect, but betting markets outperform other methods of prediction in a wide variety of circumstances. The PAM was inspired not by ivory tower theorizing, but by the proven success of betting markets in other areas. — Bryan Caplan

Every bit of theorizing I've ever done, including my interest in Berg, has come as a consequence of discoveries I made as a composer and interests that I developed as a composer. I never thought of my theory as being a kind of irrelevant activity to my composing. — George Perle

Theorizing is of course essential to make progress in understanding, but theorizing in the absence of knowing available relevant facts is not very productive. — Patricia Churchland

The theorizing mind tends always to the over-simplification of its materials. This is the root of all that absolutism and one-sided dogmatism by which both philosophy and religion have been infested. — William James

It started becoming clear to me how one might have views about the nature of mind and of knowledge which are empirically informed. This way of thinking about philosophical theorizing makes sense of how philosophy might be a legitimate intellectual activity, in a way that a good deal of the armchair philosophy, I believe, cannot. — Hilary Kornblith

Thank God she wasn't wearing shorts. She hadn't shaved her legs in a week, theorizing that October in the mountains was pretty darn cold and she might need the extra layer of insulation. — Victoria Dahl

Oppenheimer's theorizing was so startlingly original - so far in advance of the corroborating observations and so far off the beaten track of astrophysical research - that his colleagues' ignorance cost him the recognition he deserved. — Algis Valiunas

We humans have a lamentable tendency to spend more time theorizing the reasons behind human suffering, than working to alleviate human suffering. — Terryl L. Givens

However, science, by its very nature, forms its own inherent boundaries to man's progress. . . Focused as it is on the world out there, categorizing and measuring, theorizing and concluding all things based on external evidence and proof, science misses the core of life: the consciousness doing the experiencing. — Thomas Daniel Nehrer

Let us work without theorizing, tis the only way to make life endurable. — Voltaire

You and everyone else on the planet," I said. "Nobody actually knows, and they won't tell us, so everybody sits around guessing and theorizing, and it's all kind of pointless. Maybe they're spacefaring micemen from Planet Cheese and they've come for our provolone. — Rick Yancey

It was the summer in America when the nausea returned, when the joking didn't stop, when the speculation and the theorizing and the hyperbole didn't stop, when the moral obligation to explain to one's children about adult life was abrogated in favor of maintaining in them every illusion about adult life, when the smallness of people was simply crushing, when some kind of demon had been unleashed in the nation and, on both sides, people wondered "Why are we so crazy?" when men and women alike, upon awakening in the morning, discovered that during the night, in a state of sleep that transported them beyond envy or loathing, they had dreamed of the brazenness of Bill Clinton. I myself dreamed of a mammoth banner, draped dadaistically like a Christo wrapping from one end of the White House to the other and bearing the legend A HUMAN BEING LIVES HERE. — Philip Roth

The purpose of philosophy isn't complex theorizing, it is simple and clear thinking in relation to life's big questions. — Steven Colborne

The less theorizing you do about God, the more receptive you are to His inpouring. — Meister Eckhart

Jesus liberated us from religion. Jesus taught simple religious practices over major theorizing.... The only thoughts Jesus told us to police were our own: our own negative thoughts, our own violent thoughts, our own hateful thoughts-not other people's thoughts. — Richard Rohr

Postmodern science - by concerning itself with such things as undecidables, the limits of precise control, conflicts characterized by incomplete information, "fracta", catastrophes, and pragmatic paradoxes - is theorizing its own evolution as discontinuous, catastrophic, nonrectifiable, and paradoxical. — Jean-Francois Lyotard

Ideals and opportunities and social theorizing are just fine, but if you must understand only one thing, it is this: a warm hand and words whispered into the ear are what we want. Paths that can be seen and followed and walked upon are what we most need.
...And in the end, the thing that feeds us, no matter how tenuous, is what we will reach for. — Sonja Livingston

War reporter Lawrence Sheets's edgy memoir evokes exactly the fatalism, confusion, and centrifugal forces that suddenly broke up the Soviet Union two decades ago. Refreshingly free of faraway theorizing, this book focuses on what people actually saw and experienced in those years. — Hugh Pope