"Theorist" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... said that the proletariat had no right to take power until it was ready for it. In a bourgeois revolution like this.... the seizure of power by the masses means the tragic end of the Revolution.... Trotzky, as a Social Democratic theorist, is himself opposed to what he is now advocating...." (Cries, "Enough! ...
— Ten Days That Shook the World • John Reed
... in this way that the most modern metaphysical, and the most modern empirical philosophies alike have illustrated emphatically, justified, expanded, the divination (so we may make bold to call it under the new light now thrown upon it) of the ancient theorist of Ephesus. The entire modern theory of "development," in all its various phases, proved or unprovable,—what is it but old Heracliteanism awake once more in a new world, ...
— Plato and Platonism • Walter Horatio Pater
... people were no more disposed to relinquish those advantages for fear of calamities which occurred at long intervals than to refrain from building houses for fear of fires, or from building ships for fear of hurricanes. It is a curious circumstance that a man who, as a theorist, was distinguished from all the merchants of his time by the largeness of his views and by his superiority to vulgar prejudices, should, in practice, have been distinguished from all the merchants of his time by the obstinacy with which he adhered ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 4 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... looked at their strong, useless hands, and cursed theorist and politician alike. And meanwhile the Cabinet was sitting, deliberating, as best it might, over the tidings of disaster. The House of Commons, after voting full powers to the Cabinet and the Council of Defence, had been united ...
— The World Peril of 1910 • George Griffith
... the thing we call good judgment or common-sense. A man does not succeed in business because he knows a lot of facts, but because he knows what to do with the facts. An encyclopedia is full of facts but it cannot run a business. Every theorist and dreamer is loaded with facts. The successful man is the one with balance ...
— Elementary Theosophy • L. W. Rogers
... nearly a century afterward, in sustaining a theory contradictory to history as well as to common sense. It is as if the familiar expressions often employed in our own time, such as "the people of Africa," or "the people of South America," should be cited, by some ingenious theorist of a future generation, as evidence that the subjects of the Khedive and those of the King of Dahomey were but "one people," or that the Peruvians and the Patagonians belonged to the ...
— The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government • Jefferson Davis
... was thought to coincide with that of the resolution of the body. The ghost always marked with decay—the danger seemingly ending with the process of dissolution—here is tempting matter for the theorist. But it will not do. The lady of the flowers had been long dead, and her spirit was still supposed to bear the brand of perishability. The Resident had been more than a fortnight buried, and his vampire was still ...
— In the South Seas • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Savonarola also has said one or two things, and there are gossiping guardian angels, of whom I need not speak. Let me say, though, that nothing has surprised me quite so much as your inquiring about Armageddon, because I am used to think of you as the least in the world of a theorist, and am half afraid of you sometimes, and range the chairs before my speculative dark corners, that you may not think or see 'how very wild that Ba is getting!' Well, now it shall be my turn to be sensible and unbelieving. There's a forced ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume II • Elizabeth Barrett Browning
... missed him!" cried the rival theorist joyfully. He was mistaken: the smoke cleared, and there was the pirate captain leaning wounded against the mainmast with a Yankee bullet in his shoulder, and his crew uttering yells of dismay and vengeance. They jumped, and raged, and brandished their knives, and made horrid gesticulations ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... widely distant from each other, that no stretch of imagination can conceive how the thoughts were led from the former to the latter. The transitions, nevertheless, may have been all so easy and gradual, that, were they successfully detected by the fortunate ingenuity of a theorist, we should instantly recognize, not only the verisimilitude, but the truth of the conjecture: in the same way as we admit, with the confidence of intuitive conviction, the certainty of the well-known ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... scientist in my sympathies. I believe in the methods of the chemist and the electrician. I prefer the experimenter to the theorist. I like the calm, clear, concise statements of these European savans, who approach the subject, not as bereaved persons, but as biologists. I am ready to go wherever science leads, and I should be ...
— The Shadow World • Hamlin Garland
... leave anticipations and imaginings,—which, by the way, is a forbearance hard of practice in a region where all things are on the whirl of speculative change, and where practical results outrun the projections of even the most visionary theorist,—and return to make such rapid survey of this interesting city as may be ventured on during a first visit of some twenty days. I feel, indeed, that but little can be really known in so short a time of a place containing two hundred and twenty thousand souls, and having in a rapid ...
— Impressions of America - During the years 1833, 1834 and 1835. In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Tyrone Power
... A theorist as well as performer, the Lord Keeper Guilford enunciated his views regarding the principles of melody in 'A Philosophical Essay of Musick, Directed to a Friend'—a treatise that was published without ...
— A Book About Lawyers • John Cordy Jeaffreson
... relatives on finding themselves sweeping at such a magnificent rate over the great Polar basin?—that mysterious sea, which some believe to be a sea of thick-ribbed ice, and others suppose to be no sea at all, but dry land covered with eternal snows. One theorist even goes the length of saying that the region immediately around the Pole is absolutely nothing at all!—only empty space caused by the whirling of the earth,—a space which extends through its centre ...
— The Giant of the North - Pokings Round the Pole • R.M. Ballantyne
... never reduced to the painful necessity of punishing, or even of pardoning, his personal enemies. During his government of twenty-five years, the penalty of death was abolished in the Roman empire, a law of mercy most delightful to the humane theorist, but of which the practice, in a large and vicious community, is seldom consistent with the public safety. Severe to himself, indulgent to others, chaste, frugal, abstemious, the philosophic Marcus would not have disdained the ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 4 • Edward Gibbon
... existed as a body of the Infinite; and that the man of genius must first know the Infinite, unless he wished to become not a poet, but a maker of idols.' Still he felt in himself a capability, nay, an infinite longing to speak; though what he should utter, or how—whether as poet, social theorist, preacher, he could not yet decide. Barnakill had forbidden him painting, and though he hardly knew why, he dared not disobey him. But Argemone's dying words lay on him as a divine command to labour. All his doubts, his social observations, his dreams of the beautiful and the blissful, his intense ...
— Yeast: A Problem • Charles Kingsley
... of the conscious or unconscious demonomaniacs who do evil for evil's sake. They are no more mad than the rapt monk in his cell, than the man who does good for good's sake. Anybody but a medical theorist can see that the desire for good and the desire for evil simply form the two opposing poles of the soul. In the fifteenth century these extremes were represented by Jeanne d'Arc and the Marshal de Rais. Now there is no more reason for attributing madness to Gilles ...
— La-bas • J. K. Huysmans
... intended at the same time—more, however, by implied than open comparison—to exhibit the relations of the principles established here to the development of modern society and government in France and elsewhere in Europe. It is a manual alike for the political theorist and the practical statesman; and whatever changes our institutions may undergo, its value will ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 49, November, 1861 • Various
... realized that Moncada knew far more than he did about monetary questions, and among his friends he admitted it; but he gave them to understand that Caesar was only a theorist, incapable ...
— Caesar or Nothing • Pio Baroja Baroja
... back a lot of sketches and studies. I'm sorry to say that I loafed a good deal there; I used to feel that I had eternity before me; and I was a theorist and a purist and an idiot generally. There are none of them fit to ...
— A Foregone Conclusion • W. D. Howells
... theory: and if the end of art were representation it would be sound enough. But the end of art is not representation, as the great Impressionists, Renoir, Degas, Manet, knew (two of them happily know it still) the moment they left off arguing and bolted the studio door on that brilliant theorist, Claude Monet. Some of them, to be sure, turned out polychromatic charts of desolating dullness—Monet towards the end, for instance. The Neo-Impressionists—Seurat, Signac, and Cross—have produced little else. And any Impressionist, under the influence ...
— Art • Clive Bell
... editorial on the street corners and in the stores. The next week there was another editorial, personal and local in its application, and thereby it became evident that the new proprietor of the "Herald" was a theorist who believed, in general, that a politician's honor should not be merely of that middling healthy species known as "honor amongst politicians"; and, in particular, that Rodney McCune should not receive the nomination of his party ...
— The Gentleman From Indiana • Booth Tarkington
... man no longer despises the knowledge of the mere farmers, but turns to good account the information derivable from their experience; whilst the farmer, on the other side, has ceased to speak in contemptuous terms of mere "book learning." It is to this happy combination of the theorist with the practical man that the recent remarkable advance in agriculture is chiefly due; and to it we may confidently look for improvement in the economic production of meat and butter, and for the enlargement of our knowledge ...
— The Stock-Feeder's Manual - the chemistry of food in relation to the breeding and - feeding of live stock • Charles Alexander Cameron
... place in the development of oil proceedings that wrought ruin in the hopes of many an ardent operator. In the Oil Creek region, some of the smaller wells having been exhausted, resort was had to deeper boring. One hopeful theorist imagined that if the desirable fluid came from a very great depth, it might be good policy to seek it in a stratum still nearer its rocky home. So down he penetrated, regardless of the 'fine show' of oil that presented itself by the way, until at the depth of five hundred feet in the rock, a ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, Issue 2, February, 1864 • Various
... sentimentalism will perhaps decry and ridicule the demand for an apotheosis of it. There are some who deny its existence, and assert that maternity is forced upon every woman. Reduced to its elements, such nonsense turns out the absurd pose of the theorist desperate to epater le bourgeois or to cover up hidden defects in ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... spirited school boards, individually and collectively, and to the leaders of rural communities and of social centers generally. I have tried to avoid the two extremes which Guizot says are always to be shunned, viz.: that of the "visionary theorist" and that of the "libertine practician." The former is analogous to a blank cartridge, and the latter to the mire of a swamp or the entangled underbrush of a thicket. The legs of one's theories (as Lincoln said of those of a man) should be long enough ...
— Rural Life and the Rural School • Joseph Kennedy
... all individual minds; (2) man has no reason for expecting that his mind or soul will be immortal; (3) no reason, except such as inheres in the very desire which he feels for immortality. These opinions, deliberately expressed by Shelley at different dates as a theorist in prose, should be taken into account if we endeavour to estimate what he means when, as a poet, he speaks, whether in Hellas or in Adonais, of an individual, his mind and his immortality. When Shelley calls upon us to regard Keats (Adonais) as mortal in body but ...
— Adonais • Shelley
... and recognizes them heartily,—loves, hates, admires, despises; in fine, he deals with history not merely as a scientist or theorist, but first of all as a man. There are those who will think this weak. They are superior to this partiality of man for himself, they! They would be ashamed not to sink the man in the savant. But Mr. Kingsley refuses to dehumanize himself in order to ...
— Atlantic Monthly,Volume 14, No. 82, August, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... practice so moonstruck and misleading as the ideal of practicality. Nothing has lost so many opportunities as the opportunism of Lord Rosebery. He is, indeed, a standing symbol of this epoch—the man who is theoretically a practical man, and practically more unpractical than any theorist. Nothing in this universe is so unwise as that kind of worship of worldly wisdom. A man who is perpetually thinking of whether this race or that race is strong, of whether this cause or that cause is promising, is the man ...
— Heretics • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... about a commercial treaty on the principles of free trade. Poulett Thomson, who has been at Paris some time, has originated it, and Althorp selected George Villiers for the purpose, but has added to him as a colleague Dr. Bowring, who has in fact been selected by Thomson, a theorist, and a jobber, deeply implicated in the 'Greek Fire,' and a Benthamite. He was the subject of a cutting satire ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. II • Charles C. F. Greville
... one of Buffon's contemporaries and countrymen; one who was the first true field geologist, an observer rather than a compiler or theorist. This was Jean E. Guettard (1715-1786). He published, says Sir Archibald Geikie, in his valuable work, The Founders of Geology, about two hundred papers on a wide range of scientific subjects, besides half a dozen quarto volumes of his observations, together with many excellent plates. ...
— Lamarck, the Founder of Evolution - His Life and Work • Alpheus Spring Packard
... is thoroughly interesting, and his point of view is very different from that of the closest theorist.''- Springfield Republican. ...
— Increasing Efficiency In Business • Walter Dill Scott
... letter is dated 1771 and the Jesuits were expelled in 1767. As the writer of the letter was on the spot in an official position, and nominated by the very Viceroy who had been the expeller of the Jesuits, his testimony would seem to be as valuable as that of the ablest theorist on government, Catholic or ...
— A Vanished Arcadia, • R. B. Cunninghame Graham
... theorist of the present age has much such a way of curing all human diseases; that is, he drives one disorder out of the system by introducing another more powerful—in some cases similar, in others directly opposite; as ...
— An Old Sailor's Yarns • Nathaniel Ames
... That eminent theorist of Pre-Raphaelitism, Sir James Tuckett, does not shrink from placing the Madonna of the National Gallery on a level with the masterpieces of Christian art. "By giving to the Virgin's head," says Sir James Tuckett, ...
— Penguin Island • Anatole France
... Christian theorist, with the idea of offences that else would unfit you for heaven being washed out by repentance. But hearken a moment. Figure the case of those innumerable people that, having no temptation, small or great, to commit murder, would have committed it cheerfully for half-a-crown; ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... merely political.... So accommodating and flexible is the human mind, so "practical" may it become through dealing with men and affairs, that in listening to Judge Bering I was able to ignore the little anomalies such a situation might have suggested to the theorist, to the mere student of the institutions of democracy. The friendly glasses of rye and water Mr. Bering had taken in Monahan's saloon, the cases he had "arranged" for the firm of Watling, Fowndes and Ripon were forgotten. Forgotten, too, when Theodore Watling stood ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... would be as wrong as the mechanical theorist, among our death-watches; and, probably, the only death-watch who would be right would be the one who should maintain that the sole thing death-watches could be sure about was the nature of the clock-works and the way they ...
— Critiques and Addresses • Thomas Henry Huxley
... again!" At least the toiling poor had this comfort of bread labor, and perhaps it did not matter that they gained it unknowingly and painfully, if only they walked in the path of labor. In the exercise of that curious power possessed by the theorist to inhibit all experiences which do not enhance his doctrine, I did not permit myself to recall that which I knew so well—that exigent and unremitting labor grants the poor no leisure even in the supreme moments of human suffering and that "all ...
— Twenty Years At Hull House • Jane Addams
... Maine speaks (p. 185) of "the saner political theorist, who holds that in secular matters it is better to walk by sight than by faith." He allows that a theorist of this kind, as regards popularly elected chambers, "will be satisfied that experience has shown ...
— Studies in Literature • John Morley
... "Revue des Progrs de la Gologie," with which he enriched the "Annales des Mines" for twenty years, would have been sufficient to engross the time of a less active scientific man, and one less ready to grasp the opening of a discovery. This indefatigable theorist never neglected the applications of science: the nature and the changes of the layers which form the under earth; the course and the depth of the subterraneous sheets of water; the mineralogical composition of the earth's vegetation, were represented by him on several ...
— Scientific American Suppl. No. 299 • Various
... circumstances which had not the smallest analogy in Scotland. So far as his knowledge went, he was a student of human nature as affected by political institutions. Wakefield, who advised him, was a doctrinaire theorist who put his preconceived principles into highly successful practice both in Australia and Canada. They said: "Your coercive system degrades and estranges your own fellow-citizens. Change it, and you will make them friendly, manly, and prosperous." They were right, ...
— The Framework of Home Rule • Erskine Childers
... Bagarrow. Yet it is quite generally conceded that Bagarrow is a very well-meaning fellow. But the trouble is to understand him. To do that I have been at some pains, and yet I am still a mere theorist. An anthropometric estimate of the man fails to reveal any reason for the distinction of my aversion. He is of passable height, breadth, and density, and, save for a certain complacency of expression, I find no salient objection in his face. He has ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells
... Maraton admitted, "but the time came when I was forced to ask myself whether they were not rather the plans of the dreamer and the theorist, when I was forced to ask myself whether I was justified in destroying this generation for the sake of those to come. Life, after all, is a marvellous gift. You and I may believe in immortality, but who can be sure? It is easy ...
— A People's Man • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... itself most strongly upon the young architect whom Bingham brought forward to evolve the plans, elevations, and specifications upon which he himself was to work. In matters architectural Jane was a purist of the purists, a theorist of the theorists; she fought this young man steadily on points of style, and never abandoned her ground until the exigencies of practicalities, reinforced by the prejudices of her mother and the unillumined indifference ...
— With the Procession • Henry B. Fuller
... party in power simply for the spoils in sight, but because he had the breadth and liberality of enlightened opinions, the prophetic instinct, and the force of character to make things go his way, without drifting into success by a fortunate turn in tide and wind. He was not a mere day-dreamer, a theorist, a philosopher, a scholar, although he possessed the gifts of each. He was, rather, a man of action—self-willed, self-reliant, independent—as ambitious as Burr without his slippery ways, and as determined as Hamilton ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... to comply with the senseless vagaries of the Interior Department and to protect your interests. I grew weary of forever sending good hard-earned dollars after bad ones, merely because of the shifting whim of some theorist ...
— The Iron Trail • Rex Beach
... difference between a speculation and a theory. A speculation involves the notion of a man climbing into a lofty position, and descrying a somewhat remote object which he cannot fully make out. A theory implies that the theorist has looked long and steadfastly till he is clear in his own mind concerning the nature of the thing which he is beholding. I submit that the "Savoyard" has unfairly made use of the failure ...
— Samuel Butler's Canterbury Pieces • Samuel Butler
... And in fact he became aware just then, in readings difficult indeed, but which from their all-absorbing interest seemed almost like an illicit pleasure, a sense of kinship with certain older minds. The study of many an earlier adventurous theorist satisfied his curiosity as the record of daring physical adventure, for instance, might satisfy the curiosity of the healthy. It was a tradition—a constant tradition—that daring thought of his; an echo, or haunting recurrent voice of the human soul itself, and as such sealed with natural ...
— Imaginary Portraits • Walter Horatio Pater
... here that the light of complete understanding dawned upon Blount; and with it came the disconcerting chill of a conviction overthrown. As a theorist he had always scoffed at the idea that a corporation, which is a creature of the law, could afford to be an open law-breaker. But here was a very striking refutation of the charitable assumption. His smoking-room companion of the Pullman car ...
— The Honorable Senator Sage-Brush • Francis Lynde
... "Who was the father of Christ?" He calls "not absolutely indefensible" the opinion of the anonymous German author of the "Natural History of Jesus of Nazareth," that Joseph of Arimathaea was the father of Jesus Christ. He mentions that "a more recent anonymous theorist, with greater plausibility, imagines that the acolytes employed in the Temple of Jerusalem were called by the names of angels, Michael, Raphael, Gabriel, accordingly as they were stationed behind, beside, or before, the mercy-seat; ...
— George Borrow - The Man and His Books • Edward Thomas
... occupied Constantinople on the swagger. His master was prepared promptly to reinforce him; Constantinople was perhaps nearer its fall in 1828 than in 1878, and certainly Diebitch was much smarter than were the Grand Duke Nicholas, his fossil Nepokoitschitsky, and his pure theorist Levitsky. ...
— Camps, Quarters, and Casual Places • Archibald Forbes
... consisted of observations of those parts of the vocal organs whose movements can be readily seen and felt. These are the lips, tongue, palate, and larynx. Garcia's Memoire, already cited, is mainly a record of observations of this kind. Nearly every vocal theorist since that time has also paid some attention to this phase of ...
— The Psychology of Singing - A Rational Method of Voice Culture Based on a Scientific Analysis of All Systems, Ancient and Modern • David C. Taylor
... be to be possessed by one of these Theories! All the experiences of the theorist's life tend to confirm his Theory. This is always so. Did you ever hear of a Theory ...
— Mince Pie • Christopher Darlington Morley
... fact of its existence. But this was scarcely Hazlitt's idea of criticism. Against universal suffrage in matters literary he would have been among the first to protest. We might almost imagine we were listening to some orthodox theorist of the eighteenth century when we hear him declaring that the object of taste "must be that, not which does, but which would please universally, supposing all men to have paid an equal attention to any subject and to have an equal relish for it, which can only be guessed at ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... west of us, at Little Missouri, are now being made happy by the presence among them of that rare bird, a political reformer. By his enemies he is called a dude, an aristocrat, a theorist, an upstart, and the rest, but it would seem, after all, that Mr. Roosevelt has something in him, or he would never have succeeded in stirring up the politicians of the Empire State. Mr. Roosevelt ...
— Roosevelt in the Bad Lands • Hermann Hagedorn
... and rule without bloodshed if that can be done. But it can't be! Unless Pertinax is man enough to strike the blow that shall restore the ancient liberties, then he is better dead before he tries to play the savior! We have a tyrant now. Shall we exchange him for a weak-kneed theorist?" ...
— Caesar Dies • Talbot Mundy
... good or bad fortune to be assailed from week to week, whether I write or not.... I am no theorist. I advocate no change in the Constitution of the Province. I have never written a paragraph the principles of which could not be carried out in accordance with the letter and spirit of the established Constitution. I desire nothing more than the free and impartial ...
— The Story of My Life - Being Reminiscences of Sixty Years' Public Service in Canada • Egerton Ryerson
... casual reader of this story conclude that Benezet was a mere theorist or pamphleteer. He ever translated into action what he professed to believe. Knowing that the enlightenment of the blacks would not only benefit them directly but would also disprove the mad theories as to the impossibility of their mental improvement, ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 2, 1917 • Various
... stick, bounded on the boy, clasped him to his bosom, and kissed him on both cheeks. "Admirable, admirable imp!" he cried. "What a morning, what an hour for a theorist of forty-two! No," he continued, apostrophising heaven, "I did not know such boys existed; I was ignorant they made them so; I had doubted of my race; and now! It is like," he added, picking up his stick, "like a lovers' meeting. I have bruised my favourite staff in that moment of enthusiasm. ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 6 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... always admirable," chuckled the theorist. "But yet I assure you, a man like you, with such a man as, say, Dr. Gotthold at your elbow, would be, for all practical ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 7 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... contrary appearances notwithstanding, might yet be shown to be "ready and easy." The use of these two words in the title of such a pamphlet at such a time is very characteristic. It was the public theorist, however, that ventured on them, rather than the secret and real man. Throughout the pamphlet there is a sad and fierce undertone, as of one knowing that what he is prophesying as easy ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson
... curly history of religion is apt to end in the endeavour to see how far the conclusions can be made to illustrate the faith of Israel. Thus, the theorist who believes in ancestor-worship as the key of all the creeds will see in Jehovah a developed ancestral ghost, or a kind of fetish-god, attached to a stone—perhaps an ancient sepulchral ...
— The Making of Religion • Andrew Lang
... insisted upon the existence of a practically unlimited bank of force, on which the theorist might draw; and it has cherished the idea of development of the earth from a state in which its form, and the forces which it exerted, were very different from ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley; A Sketch Of His Life And Work • P. Chalmers Mitchell
... to drop everything for the purpose of rustling wood, while the coffee chilled, the rice cooled, the bacon congealed, and all the provisions, cooked and uncooked, gathered entomological specimens. At the last, the poor bedeviled theorist made a hasty meal of scorched food, brazenly postponed the washing of dishes until the morrow, and coiled about his hummocky couch to dream the nightmares ...
— The Forest • Stewart Edward White
... dreamer, that theorist, that innovator, that economist; that Stultomaniac. We shall all be undone if the stoppages of the road are not equalized, weighed, and balanced between Fooltown and Babytown. There would be greater difficulty in going than in coming, in exporting than in importing. ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... of the humanists—to see in the story of a people nothing but a political lesson—is carried to its extreme by Machiavelli. [Sidenote: Machiavelli] Writing with all the charm that conquers time, this theorist altered facts to suit his thesis to the point of composing historical romances. His Life of Castruccio is as fictitious and as didactic as Xenophon's Cyropaedia; his Commentary on Livy is as much a treatise on politics as is The Prince; the History ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... students of human society. To ward them off, theory after theory has been put on paper, especially in France, which deserve high praise for their ingenuity, less for their morality, and, I fear, still less for their common-sense. For the theorist in his closet is certain to ignore, as inconvenient to the construction of his Utopia, certain of those broad facts of human nature which every active parish priest, medical man, or poor-law guardian has to face every day of ...
— Health and Education • Charles Kingsley
... escrutoire to arrange his papers. It was in the month of January; the streets were covered with snow. While thus settling his affairs the fever abated, a sensation of freshness and comfort diffused itself throughout his frame. Amazed at this result, Broussais, like a bold theorist as he was, converted his casual forgetfulness into an experience. He boldly threw open the window, and for some time inspired the cold winter air that blew in upon him. Finding himself greatly benefited, he concluded ...
— The International Monthly Magazine - Volume V - No II • Various
... born by the new development of humanity, into harmony with the result of the work of past ages?" His Confidential Letters on Schlegel's Lucinda have made the Protestant pastor Schleiermacher the philosopher of the third stage of eroticism, as the chaplain Andreas was the theorist of the second. The third stage gained its first footing amongst the German romanticists. Women were largely instrumental in achieving its victory. I will not go into detail but will confine myself to mentioning in passing the names of Jean Paul, Henrietta Herz, Brentano, ...
— The Evolution of Love • Emil Lucka
... fancies he has led astray. Strangely enough, considering the dedication of the Ring and the Book, he is likely to give most conspicuous place among these witnesses to Browning. Like passages of Holy Writ, lines from Browning have been used as the text for whatever harangue a new theorist sees fit to give us. In Youth and Art, the non-lover will point out the characteristic attitude of young people who are "married to their art," and consequently have no capacity for other affection. ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... But the purblind theorist went on his way: "I hae seen bonnier faces, but no mair takin', Jess, than yours. It's no aye beauty that tak's a man, Jess, ye see, an' the lassies that hae dune best hae been plain-favoured lassies that ...
— The Lilac Sunbonnet • S.R. Crockett
... interest in a wide and diversified range of subjects. But the latter had little patience with Jefferson. He may have respected him as the best rider and pistol shot in Virginia; but in politics he thought him a theorist and doctrinaire imbued with the abstract notions of the French philosophical deists and democrats. Jefferson, he thought, knew nothing and cared nothing about military affairs. He let the army run down and preferred ...
— Four Americans - Roosevelt, Hawthorne, Emerson, Whitman • Henry A. Beers
... unreasonably, because it was a liking for which I could not account even to myself, as he was neither especially prepossessing in appearance nor gifted with any too great amiability of character. He was, however, a brilliant theorist and an unquestionably trustworthy practitioner, and for these reasons probably I entertained for him a profound respect, and as I have already said ...
— The Old Stone House and Other Stories • Anna Katharine Green
... that we probably take simple varieties for distinct species. His discoveries will, I suppose, leave traces strongly marked enough in the history of science. But Mr. Darwin is not merely an observer; he is a theorist, dominated evidently by a disposition to systematize. Now minds of this character, which render, no doubt, signal services to the sciences of observation, are all like Pyrrhus, who, gazing on Andromache as he walked by ...
— The Heavenly Father - Lectures on Modern Atheism • Ernest Naville
... evolutionist ("Encyclopaedia Americana," vol. ii.) who considers that the question of teleology, or of purpose in nature, is not really touched by the special principle of natural selection, nor by the general doctrine of evolution. The mechanical theorist may, consistently with these doctrines, maintain that every event takes place without a purpose; while the teleologist, or believer in purpose, may no less consistently maintain that the more orderly and uniform we find the succession of events, the more reason is there to presume that ...
— Life of Charles Darwin • G. T. (George Thomas) Bettany
... are his sure victim: yet his work is not all to your hurt— only part of it; for he is like your family physician, who comes and cures the mumps, and leaves the scarlet-fever behind. If your man is a Lake-Borgne-relief theorist, for instance, he will exhale a cloud of deadly facts and statistics which will lay you out with that disease, sure; but at the same time he will cure you of any other of the five theories that may have ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... Anarchists, though he was touched by the idyllic dream, the humanitarian hope, whose germs lay beneath their passion for destruction. And, like Barthes, he also flew into a passion with Mege, who since entering the Chamber had become, said he, a mere rhetorician and theorist, dreaming of dictatorship. Meantime Janzen, still erect, his face frigid and his lips curling ironically, listened to all three of them, and vented a few trenchant words to express his own Anarchist faith; the uselessness of drawing distinctions, ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... theorist, yet no controversialist. He states his facts, and draws his conclusions, as if no ideas different from his own had ever been promulgated. He never attempts to show the fallacies of any other author, but readily understands that if he establishes his system of philosophy, all contrary ones ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No 3, September, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... all hot-headed enthusiast—hot-hearted theorist. But I remember that she did take the white veil once. And, as I tell you, I shall try to keep her within range of my uneasy vision. Because," she added, "she's really a ...
— The Crimson Tide • Robert W. Chambers
... majority of elderly persons are early risers is due to the simple fact that they cannot sleep mornings. After a man passes his fiftieth milestone he usually awakens at dawn, and his wakefulness is no credit to him. As the theorist confined his observations to the aged, he easily reached the conclusion that men live to be old because they do not sleep late, instead of perceiving that men do not sleep late because they are old. He moreover failed to take into account the numberless young ...
— Ponkapog Papers • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... instructions, with as few conveniences and with less leisure than the meanest brother.[5308] Over and above the austerities of ordinary discipline this or that superior imposed on himself additional mortifications which were so great as to astonish as well as edify his monks. Such is the ideal State of the theorist, a Spartan republic, and for all, including the chiefs, an equal ration of the same black broth. There is another resemblance, still more profound. At the base of this republic lies the corner-stone designed in anticipation by Rousseau, then hewn ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 6 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 2 (of 2) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... but what goes on in the socialist's mind. No doubt the motives have gone through deep changes even in the mind of the cultured leaders. When Karl Marx laid the foundations of socialism, he was moved solely by the desire to recognize a necessary development. It was the interest of the theorist. He showed that the things which the socialist depicted simply had to come. He did not ask whether they are good or bad. They were for him ultimately natural events which were to be forestalled. The leaders to-day see it all in a new light. The socialistic state is to them a goal to the attainment ...
— Psychology and Social Sanity • Hugo Muensterberg
... and experienced naturalists as Pictet allow that it may be true,—perhaps as far as Darwin himself unfolds it in the introductory proposition cited at the beginning of this article,—we may now inquire after the motives which impel the theorist so much farther. Here proofs, in the proper sense of the word, are not to be had. We are beyond the region of demonstration, and have duly probabilities to consider. What are these probabilities? What work will this hypothesis do to establish a claim to be adopted ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 34, August, 1860 • Various
... a delicious old theorist, Sue! But somehow you believe in yourself, and you always do me good!" Anna said laughing. "I share with Mother the conviction that you're rather uncommon—one watches you to see ...
— Saturday's Child • Kathleen Norris
... been settled months before in a conference between Livingstone and the Premier, although feeling was cold and almost hostile between the two governments. Lord Constantine described the position with the accuracy of a theorist in despair. ...
— The Art of Disappearing • John Talbot Smith
... are intended, and for the rough usage which they experience from the animals themselves. A very pretty and plausible arrangement of stabling, feeding, and all the other requirements of a barn establishment may be thus got up by an ingenious theorist at the fireside, which will work charmingly as he dilates upon its good qualities, untried; but, which, when subjected to experiment, will be utterly worthless for practical use. There can be no doubt that ...
— Cattle and Their Diseases • Robert Jennings
... think that Lamar was the biggest brained of all the men I have met in Washington. He possessed the courage of his convictions. A doctrinaire, there was nothing of the typical doctrinaire, or theorist, about him. He really believed that cotton was king and would compel England to espouse the cause ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson
... end of the 18th century, about the year 1787—he the first who had investigated the mind! This was not arrogance so much as it was insanity. Had he said—I, first, upon just principles, or with a fortunate result, investigated the human understanding, he would have said no more than every fresh theorist is bound to suppose, as his preliminary apology for claiming the attention of a busy world. Indeed, if a writer, on any part of knowledge, does not hold himself superior to all his predecessors, we are entitled to say—Then, why do you presume to trouble us? It may look like ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey—Vol. 1 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... convince me that he had dreamt by inspiration. Add, too, the gross inconsistency of resorting to an immaterial influence in order to complete a system of materialism, by the exclusion of all modes of existence which the theorist cannot in imagination, at least, finger and peep at! Each of the preceding gradations, as above defined, might be represented as they exist, and are realised in Nature. But each would require a work for itself, co-extensive with the science of metals, ...
— Hints towards the formation of a more comprehensive theory of life. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... (1832-1888).—Writer of juvenile and other tales, dau. of Amos Bronson Alcott, an educational and social theorist, lecturer, and author, was b. in Pennsylvania. During the American civil war she served as a nurse, and afterwards attained celebrity as a writer of books for young people, of which the best is Little Women (1868). Others are Little ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin
... not satisfied his craving for adventure. With the results of two years of professional lectures, he was now imbibing continental experiences, and plotting a bicycle "scientific tour of the world." Hard-headed, fearless, devoted, and sincere, he was a mad theorist in all his mental processes, and had tried, proved, and rejected free love, anarchy, Christian science, and a dozen other feverish fads, which for a time jangled his mental bells out of tune. A cranky tracing of the lost Ten Tribes of Israel down to the genial scalpers of the American ...
— A Fascinating Traitor • Richard Henry Savage
... with him. The former might excel in the knowledge—if we can dignify it by that name—of the laws of scansion, or in the composition of Greek idylls; but in all that constitutes real knowledge he would prove but an idle theorist, a dreamy imbecile, alongside our practical young scholar of ...
— Popular Adventure Tales • Mayne Reid
... decided, Sieyes was recalled to Paris in May, 1799, by the news of his election to the place in the Directory vacated by Rewbell. The other Directors had striven, but in vain, to prevent his election: they knew well that this impracticable theorist would speedily paralyze the Government; for, when previously elected Director in 1795, he had refused to serve, on the ground that the constitution was thoroughly bad. He now declared his hostility to the Directory, and looked around for some complaisant military chief who should act as ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... asked the naturalist. 'They are newts, little lizards,' answers a learned pandit. 'They are spirits of the bog, myths, that hold their carnival in the early grass of the marshy pools,' says the theorist and poet, who believes in the idealities of a poetic fancy. 'They are frogs,' says a third, who is ready to chop any amount of logic in favor of his system of frogology, and hereupon columns of argument, and pages of learned discussion, have been ...
— Wild Northern Scenes - Sporting Adventures with the Rifle and the Rod • S. H. Hammond
... called suddenly, and with only half knowledge, to the settlement of great and complex questions, but as proofs of a conspiracy to fetter and impede the action of the Crown. The Commons on the other hand listened to the king's hectoring speeches, not as the chance talk of a clever and garrulous theorist, but as proofs of a settled purpose to change the character of the monarchy. In a word, James had succeeded in some seven years of rule in breaking utterly down that mutual understanding between the Crown ...
— History of the English People, Volume V (of 8) - Puritan England, 1603-1660 • John Richard Green
... too often reacts upon the actual ideas of the educational theorist, who tends to lose sight of the variety of concrete boys and girls in his abstract reasonings, necessary as these are. We are apt to forget that what is sauce for the goose may not be sauce for the gander, and still more perhaps that what is sauce for the swan may not be sauce for either ...
— Cambridge Essays on Education • Various
... academic studies; so, in much less than half the time-allotment, he advances in his academic studies about half as fast as the day-school student. This schedule did not spring full-fledged from the seething brain of any theorist; it is no fatuous imitation of the educational practise of some remote and presumptively dissimilar institution; it has, so to say, elaborated itself in adjustment to the actual needs of the particular situation. This provision ...
— Tuskegee & Its People: Their Ideals and Achievements • Various
... famous theorist, who is not generally known to have been an Ohioan, was Delia Bacon, who first maintained that the plays and poems of Shakespeare were written, by Sir Francis Bacon. She was born in Portage County at Tallmadge, where her father ...
— Stories Of Ohio - 1897 • William Dean Howells
... of course, is very far from merely academic, monastic. Baroja, though his career has not been as dramatic as Blasco's, has at all events taken a hand in the life of his time and country and served his day in the trenches of the new enlightenment. He is anything but a theorist. But there is surely no little significance in his final retreat to his Basque hillside, there to seek peace above the turmoil. He is, one fancies, a bit disgusted and a bit despairing. But if it is despair, it is surely not the despair of one ...
— Youth and Egolatry • Pio Baroja
... have meant originally it has come to mean fiendish treatment of women, the savage murder and mutilation of men and the wanton destruction of the accumulated labors of generations. The Bolshevik is a Socialist, not the armchair theorist dreaming fantastic fancies. The Bolshevik is the real ...
— The Red Conspiracy • Joseph J. Mereto
... drag, half carry her to his wife. Mrs. Fyne waited at the door with her quite unmoved physiognomy and her readiness to confront any sort of responsibility, which already characterized her, long before she became a ruthless theorist. Relieved, his mission accomplished, Fyne closed hastily the door of ...
— Chance • Joseph Conrad
... less impressive, a political theorist instead of a statesman, a student of the balance of power instead of a soldier, a casuistical disputant about culture and morals in place of a devil venturing all for empire and revenge. It is as if Alexander were exchanged for Aristotle: almost as if St. George were replaced by Mr. Worldly ...
— Milton • John Bailey
... statesman is he who brings order out of disorder; who first organizes and then administers the government of his own country; and having made a nation, seeks to reconcile the national interests with those of Europe and of mankind. He is not a mere theorist, nor yet a dealer in expedients; the whole and the parts grow together in his mind; while the head is conceiving, the hand is executing. Although obliged to descend to the world, he is not of the ...
— Gorgias • Plato
... facts will soon cluster and cling to him like grapes to their stem. Their relations to the theory will hold them fast; and, the more of these the mind is able to discern, the greater the erudition will become. Meanwhile the theorist may have little, if any, desultory memory. Unutilizable facts may be unnoted by him, and forgotten as soon as heard. An ignorance almost as encyclopedic as his erudition may coexist with the latter, and hide, as ...
— Talks To Teachers On Psychology; And To Students On Some Of Life's Ideals • William James
... theorists, and how almost apologetically he himself referred at the end to his own deliberate breaking of the rules. But now, it appears, the musical theorists are beginning to realise that theory must be based on practice and not practice on theory. The artist takes precedence of the theorist, who learns his theories from observation of the artist, and when in his turn he teaches, the artist is apt to prove dangerous. "In matters of art," says Lenormand in his recent book on harmony, "it is dangerous to learn to ...
— Impressions And Comments • Havelock Ellis
... at any rate, the working man has shown himself a being of the most limited and practical outlook. His narrowness of imagination, his lack of general ideas, has been the despair of the Socialist and of every sort of revolutionary theorist. He may have struck before, but only for definite increments of wages or definite limitations of toil; his acceptance of the industrial system and its methods has been as complete and unquestioning as his acceptance of earth and sky. Now, with ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... Leon Giraud, that profound philosopher and bold theorist, turning all systems inside out, criticising, expressing, and formulating, dragging them all to the feet of his idol—Humanity; great even in his errors, for his honesty ennobled his mistakes. An intrepid toiler, a conscientious scholar, he became the ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... styled HISTORIA DE LOS GITANOS, by J. M-, published at Barcelona in the year 1832; it consists of ninety- three very small and scantily furnished pages. Its chief, we might say its only merit, is the style, which is fluent and easy. The writer is a theorist, and sacrifices truth and probability to the shrine of one idea, and that one of the most absurd that ever entered the head of an individual. He endeavours to persuade his readers that the Gitanos are the descendants of the Moors, and the greatest part of his work is a history of those Africans, ...
— The Zincali - An Account of the Gypsies of Spain • George Borrow
... garden of Paradise with the voice of the Lord God literally everywhere: here was the final counsel of perfection. The world was even larger than youthful appetite, youthful capacity. Let theologian and every other theorist beware how he narrowed either. The plurality of worlds! how petty in comparison seemed the sins, to purge which was the chief motive for coming to places like this convent, whence Bruno, with vows broken, ...
— Giordano Bruno • Walter Horatio Pater |
