Theory Quotes

“Theoretical knowledge is not the exclusive domain of ivory tower intellectuals, but is, in fact, a crucial necessity of man's proper survival. Every bit of your mental contents is derived from some theory, and your success and happiness hinge on whether it is true or false, good or evil.”
― Mike Mentzer, Heavy Duty

“História foi algo que um grupo muito pequeno de pessoas fez, enquanto todos os outros aravam os campos e carregavam baldes de água”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

“Colui che ha occhi per vedere e orecchi per sentire deve convincersi che nessun mortale sa mantenere un segreto: se le sue labbra sono serrate parlerà con la punta delle dita, il suo tradirsi trasuderà da ogni poro.”
― Sigmund Freud

“Indeed, just as possession depends on the discontinuity of the series (real or virtual), and on the choice of a privileged term within it, so sexual perversion is founded on the inability, to apprehend the other qua, object of desire in his, or her unique totality, as a person, to grasp the other in any, but a discontinuous way: the other is transformed into the paradigm of various eroticized parts of the body, a single one of which becomes the focus of objectification. A particular woman is no longer a woman, but merely a sex, breasts, belly, thighs, voice, and face – and preferably just one of them. She thus becomes a constituent 'object' in a series whose different terms are gazetted by desire, and whose real referent is by no means the loved person but, rather, the subject himself, collecting and eroticizing himself, and turning the relationship of love into a discourse directed towards him alone.”
― Jean Baudrillard, The System of Objects

“Learning to be a parasite is the crucible of unmet longing for that something-else that can complete you, enfolded somewhere, still perhaps hidden.”
― A. V. Marraccini, We the Parasites

“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

“One relationship among elements in the novel may well be that of conflict, but the reduction of narrative to conflict is absurd. (I have read a how-to-write manual that said, “A story should be seen as a battle,” and went on about strategies, attacks, victory, etc.) Conflict, competition, stress, struggle, etc., within the narrative conceived as carrier bag / belly / box / house / medicine bundle, may be seen as necessary elements of a whole which itself cannot be characterized either as conflict or as harmony, since its purpose is neither resolution nor stasis but continuing process.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places

“So, when I came to write science-fiction novels, I came lugging this great heavy sack of stuff, my carrier bag full of wimps and klutzes, and tiny grains of things smaller than a mustard seed, and intricately woven nets which when laboriously unknotted are seen to contain one blue pebble, an imperturbably functioning chronometer telling the time on another world, and a mouse’s skull; full of beginnings without ends, of initiations, of losses, of transformations and translations, and far more tricks than conflicts, far fewer triumphs than snares and delusions; full of space ships that get stuck, missions that fail, and people who don’t understand.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places

“All this attending educational lectures and reading is greatly tempting, of course, and a great many would-be students spend their whole lives in such study. But in reality they have reached an unseen or unobserved impasse, and are merely milling around base camp and congratulating themselves and their fellow wayfarers on having achieved such dizzying heights.”
― H.M. Forester, The Imaginal Veil

“Ignoring the psychoanalytic constitution of subjectivity in its core dimensions of desire, libidinal ties, suffering, and anxiety cannot go without consequences in the formative enterprise of curriculum work”
― Fernando M. Murillo, A Lacanian Theory of Curriculum in Higher Education: The Unfinished Symptom

“You’re the keyboard wizard; the Google Scholar; the armchair expert; the one with a quote for every occasion. That’s your Hallmark, if you will excuse the jest ...”
― H.M. Forester, The Imaginal Veil

“I believe the technology industry is going in a different direction in which one may think about the Metaverse. Why spend trillions of dollars on big data when big data is becoming more useless? We need dynamic content to create a boom in the tech industry for the next millennium. Why hire someone with a 4 year degree in college for a career in database administration when companies can't afford to pay 100k a year? We can manage that quite fine in Google sheets or excel. The creation of AI would then completely defeat the purpose of data as a service when a program can dynamically build meta searcheable objects in random access memory and store them Inna virtualized file container ;)." - Jonathan Roy Mckinney”
― Jonathan Roy Mckinney

“Although the characteristic of noise is that of reminding us brutally of life, the Art of Noises should not limit itself to an imitative reproduction. It will achieve its greatest emotional power in acoustical enjoyment itself, which the inspiration of the artist will know how to draw from the combining of noises.”
― Luigi Russolo, The Art of Noise

“It will not be through a succession of noises imitative of life but through a fantastic association of the different timbres and rhythms that the new orchestra will obtain the most complex and novel emotions of sound.”
― Luigi Russolo, The Art of Noise

“Taste can be cultivated, a sort of eros of wanting certain things, but behind taste is the throbbing want that is perhaps closest to the parasitic, Darwinian imperative.”
― A. V. Marraccini, We the Parasites

“To write or read on the precipice feels right in this moment in particular, as if it is coming into a new fullness, a wholeness which was not possibly entirely in the complacency of our living before, the city whose obverse was not at Necropolis yet. This is the moment when the skin of the fig gives into the needle of the wasp’s thorax, when the wasp breaks into the dark.”
― A. V. Marraccini, We the Parasites

“Someone who thinks up a new theory is the last person who should be trusted with the job of testing it. A new theory should be tested by independent researchers who aren’t cronies of the theorist and who don’t have an axe to grind. It’s division of labor again: proposing theories and doing research to test them are jobs that should be carried out by different entities.

“A good theory should go in advance of the evidence,” the evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller said in a recent interview. “It should stick its neck out and say, this is how I think the world is, and leave it to other people to test it.”

Making a virtue of necessity, I will leave it to other people to test my theory.”
― Judith Rich Harris, No Two Alike: Human Nature and Human Individuality

“Mistuboshi dont try to escape the saver love leaves you in hostage for fortune while legacy subdues love”
― Ben Jr Grey

“There is no such thing as a diet without toxins. The diets of all our ancestors, like those of today, were compromises between costs and benefits. This is one of the less welcome conclusions that arise from an evolutionary view of medicine.”
― Randolph M. Nesse, Why We Get Sick: The New Science of Darwinian Medicine

“We can also, more than any other species, protect ourselves from being poisoned by learning about how to avoid it. Only we can read about the dangerous plants in our gardens and woodlands, and we are the the species whose diets are most shaped by social learning. A food our mothers fed us can usually be accepted as safe and nourishing. What our friends eat without apparent harm is at least worth a try. What they avoid we would be wise to treat cautiously.”
― Randolph M. Nesse, Why We Get Sick: The New Science of Darwinian Medicine

“Our capacity to create and manipulate mental representations has many benefits, and the ability to foresee new dangers is clearly one of them. This capacity also helps us to avoid repetitions of actual experiences of danger or injury without creating unnecessary phobias.”
― Randolph M. Nesse, Why We Get Sick: The New Science of Darwinian Medicine

“Some cues -for instance, snakes, spiders, and heights- readily elicit fear in ourselves and other primates. It should not surprise us to discover that we instinctively avoid certain cues that have long been associated with such dangers as falling and dangerous animals.”
― Randolph M. Nesse, Why We Get Sick: The New Science of Darwinian Medicine

“Pain and fear are useful, and people who lack them are seriously handicapped. As noted already, the rare individuals who are born without the sense of pain are almost all dead by age thirty. If there are people born without the capacity for fear, you might well look for them in the emergency room or the morgue. We need our pains and our fears. They are normal defenses that warn us of danger. Pain is the signal that tissue is being damaged. It has to be aversive to motivate us to set aside other activities to do whatever is necessary to stop the damage. Fear is a signal that a situation may be dangerous, that some kind of loss or damage is likely, that escape is desirable.”
― Randolph M. Nesse, Why We Get Sick: The New Science of Darwinian Medicine

“The single thing most people can do to most improve their health is to cut the fat content of their diets.”
― Randolph M. Nesse, Why We Get Sick: The New Science of Darwinian Medicine

“During most all of human evolution, it was adaptive to conserve energy by being lazy as circumstances permitted. Energy was a vitally needed resourse and could not be wasted. Today this take-it-easy adaptation may lead us to watch tennis on television when we would be better off playing it. This can only aggravate the effects of excess nutrition. The average office worker would be much more healthy if he or she spent the day digging clams or harvesting fruit in scattered tall trees.”
― Randolph M. Nesse, Why We Get Sick: The New Science of Darwinian Medicine

“Except for professional athletes, dancers, cowboys, and a few other groups, most people in modern industrial societies have abnormally low energy expenditures. Workers sitting in swivel chairs or in driver's seats of cars or even pushing vacuum cleaners or electrically powered lawn mowers are being sedentary, and their leisure hours may be even more so.”
― Randolph M. Nesse, Why We Get Sick: The New Science of Darwinian Medicine

“Our dietary problems arise from a mismatch between the tastes evolved for Stone Age conditions and their likely effects today. Fat, sugar, and salt were in short supply through nearly all of our evolutionary history. Almost everyone, most of the time, would have been better off with more of these substances, and it was consistenly adaptive to want more and try to get it. Today most of us can afford to eat more fat, sugar, and salt than is biologically adaptive, more than would ever have been available to our ancestors of a few thousands years ago.”
― Randolph M. Nesse, Why We Get Sick: The New Science of Darwinian Medicine

“The current danger for most of us is not the deprivation suffered bu our ancestors but an excess of nutrition.”
― Randolph M. Nesse, Why We Get Sick: The New Science of Darwinian Medicine

“Just as the capacity for experiencing fatigue has evolved to protect us from overexertion, the capacity for sadness may have evolved to prevent additional losses. Maladaptive extremes of anxiety, sadness, and other emotions make more sense when we understand their evolutionary origins and normal, adaptive functions.”
― Randolph M. Nesse, Why We Get Sick: The New Science of Darwinian Medicine

“Emotional capacities are shaped by situations that occurred repeatedly in the course of evolution and that were important to fitness. Attacks by predators, threats of exclusion from the group, and opportunities for mating were frequent and important enough to have shaped special patterns of preparedness, such as panic, social fear, and sexual arousal. Situations that are best avoided shape aversive emotions, while situations that involve opportunity shape positive emotions.”
― Randolph M. Nesse, Why We Get Sick: The New Science of Darwinian Medicine