Theoretical Knowledge Quotes

Of course, we would love to know more about the exact moment of Big Bang, but interposing an outside intelligence does nothing to add to that knowledge, as we still know nothing about the creation of that intelligence.

Learn your theories as well as you can, but put them aside when you touch the miracle of the living soul

There are so many things which you do not have to consider if you are developing and studying a theory in a classroom. It is useful to deal with theories in developing youthful minds, for later they will deal with facts and profit by what they have learned of other men's thoughts, but it is quite different to be faced with actual situations that have to be met in one way or another in a given period of time.

That's the whole problem with science. You've got a bunch of empiricists trying to describe things of unimaginable wonder.

But isn't the knowledge that comes from experience more valuable than the knowledge that doesn't? It seems fairly obvious to some of us that a lot of scholars need to go outside and sniff around - walk through the grass, talk to the animals. That sort of thing.

[Logic and philosophy] were of no use, in the church or the state, in the cloister or the court, in peace or war, at home or abroad or anywhere but in the schools

The experience gathered from books, though often valuable, is but the nature of learning; whereas the experience gained from actual life is one of the nature of wisdom.

Indeed we may consider the engine as the material and mechanical representative of analysis, and that our actual working powers in this department of human study will be enabled more effectually than heretofore to keep pace with our theoretical knowledge of its principles and laws, through the complete control which the engine gives us over the executive manipulation of algebraical and numerical symbols.

I've always wished that I had a great ability to verbalize art theory and find a way that I fit in to the whole lineage, but I don't have a clue.

I didn't know so well chess theory, the theory of chess openings. And so, of course I knew the theory, but not on the level of the best players, so this was my... this was always my weakness.

Most academic economists know nothing of economy. In fact, they know little of anything.

Farming looks mighty easy when your plow is a pencil, and you're a thousand miles from the corn field.

For scholars and laymen alike it is not philosophy but active experience in mathematics itself that can alone answer the question: What is mathematics?

An expert is somebody who is more than 50 miles from home, has no responsibility for implementing the advice he gives, and shows slides.

It is true that the grasping of truth is not possible without empirical basis. However, the deeper we penetrate and the more extensive and embracing our theories become the less empirical knowledge is needed to determine those theories.

If you read books forever and ever, they will never replace what really counts - that's practical experience.

Knowledge above the average can be crammed into the average man, but it remains dead, and in the last analysis sterile knowledge. The result is a man who may be a living dictionary but nevertheless falls down miserably in all special situations and decisive moments in life.

Geology does better in reclothing dry bones and revealing lost creations, than in tracing veins of lead and beds of iron; astronomy better in opening to us the houses of heaven than in teaching navigation; surgery better in investigating organiation than in setting limbs; only it is ordained that, for our encouragement, every step we make in science adds something to its practical applicabilities.

A mathematical theorem can be true whether or not it is realized in the world.

If Monsieur X spent an eternity studying treatises on optics, he would never paint 'La Grande Jatte.'

No amount of reading and intelligent deduction could supplant the direct experience.

We read many books, but that does not bring us knowledge. We may read all the Bibles in the world, but that will not give us religion. Theoretical religion is easy enough to get, any one may get that. What we want is practical religion.

The words printed here are concepts. You must go through the experiences.

I was at a speaking engagement for MIT... and I said, 'The Professor has all sorts of degrees, including one from this very institution [MIT]! And that's why I can make a radio out of a coconut, and not fix a hole in a boat!'

What I've come to believe is that psychological advice isn't worth much if it isn't rooted in personal experience.