Night had fallen, and Diane admired the deep sky behind Steve’s calm countenance. They looked into each other’s eyes again and felt the spark and excitement of discovery. As if to celebrate the perfect, life-enabling...

I imagine that the intelligent people are the ones so intelligent that they don’t even need or want to look ‘intelligent’ anymore.

It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts.

Do you see this egg? With this you can topple every theological theory, every church or temple in the world.

A theory must be tempered with reality.

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.

Gray is the color of all theory

The discovery of the telephone has made us acquainted with many strange phenomena. It has enabled us, amongst other things, to establish beyond a doubt the fact that electric currents actually traverse the earth’s crust....

Both the brightness and the spectrum of the X-rays are very different from what theory predicts.

Theology is just not important in Judaism, or in any other religion, really. There’s no orthodoxy, as you have it in the Catholic Church. No complicated creeds to which everybody must subscribe. No infallible pronouncements...

What does literature do better than anything else? It provides a detailed representation of the inner experience of being alive in a given time and place.

Imagination is the other end of Reality.

Journalism was being whittled away by a Wall Street theory that profits can be maximized by minimizing the product.

Every theoretical explanation is a reduction of intuition.

A theory is the more impressive the greater is the simplicity of its premises, the more different are the kinds of things it relates and the more extended the range of its applicability.

What we have forgotten is that thoughts and words are conventions, and that it is fatal to take conventions too seriously. A convention is a social convenience, as, for example, money … but it is...

It’s the old armchair quarterback theory, that a fan can be a better coach, better owner than the guy in the owner’s box. This gives you an opportunity to prove you know football better than...

The coastal-migration theory has yet to be proven with hard evidence, but we have been finding earlier and more widespread evidence for coastal settlement around the Pacific Rim.

How empty is theory in the presence of fact!

If someone were to propose that the planets go around the sun because all planet matter has a kind of tendency for movement, a kind of motility, let us call it an ‘oomph,’ this theory...

[F]or a social theorist ignorance is more excusable than vagueness. Other investigators can easily show I am wrong if I am sufficiently precise. They will have much more difficulty showing by investigation what, precisely, I...

He had a theory that musicians are incredibly complex, and know far less than other artists what they want and what they are; that they puzzle themselves as well as their friends; that their psychology...

The double consequence of artifice–to project sentience out onto the made world and in turn to make sentience itself into a complex living artifact–is thus fractured, neatly fractured, into two separable consequences, one of which...

An ounce of practice is generally worth more than a ton of theory.

I never wanted to do the same kind of movies over and over anyway, so my theory on it all is I’m just gonna try and dodge the label and keep doing what I am...

In order to disprove the assertion that all crows are black, one white crow is sufficient.

Before going back to college, i knew i didn’t want to be an intellectual, spending my life in books and libraries without knowing what the hell is going on in the streets. Theory without practice...

The Theory of Groups is a branch of mathematics in which one does something to something and then compares the result with the result obtained from doing the same thing to something else, or something...

Life had stepped into the place of theory and something quite different would work itself out in his mind.

I think simplicity is a good guide: The more economical a theory, the better.

one will not break through to the enemy with theory. Directness is most important, when in front of the lion’s den…

I should point out, however, that at first some difficulty was experienced in observing the phenomena predicted by the theory, owing to the extreme smallness of the variations in the period of oscillation.

It is the theory that decides what we can observe.

I have never believed in the Wizard of Oz theory of consulting, that I am all-knowing and all-seeing, and that everyone around me is kind of a backbencher.

This is the old armchair quarterback theory. Everybody thinks they can be a better coach, a better general manager, a better owner.

That was our big theory when I was with Oakland. Run up the guy’s pitch counts, ’cause then you get the starting pitcher out of the game in the fifth inning. You’re making him throw...

… every hypothesis is a construction, and because of this it is an authentic theory. In so far as they merit that exigent name, ideas are never a mere reception of presumed realities, but they...

Details that could throw doubt on your interpretation must be given, if you know them. You must do the best you can—if you know anything at all wrong, or possibly wrong—to explain it. If you...

This theory [the oxygen theory] is not as I have heard it described, that of the French chemists, it is mine (elle est la mienne); it is a property which I claim from my contemporaries...

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...

Insofar as the theorist wins, therefore, by constructing an increasingly closed and terrifying machine, to that very degree he loses, since the critical capacity of his work is thereby paralysed, and the impulses of negation...

The end of science is not to prove a theory, but to improve mankind.

Poincaré was a vigorous opponent of the theory that all mathematics can be rewritten in terms of the most elementary notions of classical logic; something more than logic, he believed, makes mathematics what it is.

But it is the bane of psychology to suppose that where results are similar, processes must be the same. Psychologists are too apt to reason as geometers would, if the latter were to say that...

The people heard it, and approved the doctrine, and immediately practiced the contrary.

As every circumstance relating to so capital a discovery as this (the greatest, perhaps, that has been made in the whole compass of philosophy, since the time of Sir Isaac Newton) cannot but give pleasure...

Experience without theory is blind, but theory without experience is mere intellectual play.

I started out working on supersymmetry. The theory predicts that for every particle we know about, there will be an additional particle.

Since the beginning of physics, symmetry considerations have provided us with an extremely powerful and useful tool in our effort to understand nature. Gradually they have become the backbone of our theoretical formulation of physical...

My theory in anything you do is to keep exploring, keep digging deeper to find new stuff.