"Theorist" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... 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 ...
— Popular Adventure Tales • Mayne Reid
... his 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. ...
— The Merry Men - and Other Tales and Fables • Robert Louis Stevenson
... 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 ...
— Psychology and Social Sanity • Hugo Muensterberg
... particularly fond of the 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 ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... here and there, that an irrelevant clause in the reasoning has been lopped off, or an unscientific remark expunged.—After all this has been done, I venture to say that the result will be the reverse of satisfactory, even to the theorist himself. He will infallibly exclaim secretly,—I seem to have gained wondrous little by this corrective process. Was it worth while, in order to achieve this, to tamper with the Divine Oracles? The great body of Scripture remains after all, in all its strangeness, all its perplexing individuality. ...
— Inspiration and Interpretation - Seven Sermons Preached Before the University of Oxford • John Burgon
... retreat there could not have been much difficulty in supplying the deficiency. But the great majority of these bodies lay buried under the falls of snow, others had been already despoiled; and besides, to loot a pair of breeches from a frozen corpse is not so easy as it may appear to a mere theorist. It requires time. You must remain behind while your companions march on. And Colonel D'Hubert had his scruples as to falling out. They arose from a point of honour, and also a little from dread. Once he stepped aside he could not be sure ...
— The Point Of Honor - A Military Tale • Joseph Conrad
... men butchered their fellows without mercy. The Social Contract became the textbook of the first revolutionary party, and none admired Rousseau more ardently than the ruthless wielder of tyranny who followed out the theorist's idea that in a republic it was necessary ...
— Heroes of Modern Europe • Alice Birkhead
... from which side the gale comes, and, to assure ourselves, we have merely to see how the reports of the Third-Estate are made up. The peasant is led by the man of the law, the petty attorney of the rural districts, the envious advocate and theorist. This one insists, in the report, on a statement being made in writing and at length of his local and personal grievances, his protest against taxes and deductions, his request to have his dog free of the clog, and his desire to own a gun to use against the wolves[5419]. ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... even now, a sublime theorist, who professes to have made feminine physiology his peculiar study. Sitting at his desk, or in his arm-chair, he will trace the motives, impulses, and sensations which a woman must necessarily have ...
— Sword and Gown - A Novel • George A. Lawrence
... of the west was its emphasis upon the worth and possibilities of the common man, its belief in the right of every man to rise to the full measure of his own nature, under conditions of social mobility. Western democracy was no theorist's dream. It came, stark and strong and full of life, from the American forest. [Footnote: P. J. Turner, "Contributions of the West to American Democracy," in Atlantic Monthly, XCL, 83, and "The Middle West," in International Monthly, ...
— Rise of the New West, 1819-1829 - Volume 14 in the series American Nation: A History • Frederick Jackson Turner
... 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 world. ...
— Gorgias • Plato
... practised, the fresh rich glory of the Renaissance spirit had irrevocably passed away. Already, early in the seventeenth century, the poetry of MALHERBE had given expression to new theories and new ideals. A man of powerful though narrow intelligence, a passionate theorist, and an ardent specialist in grammar and the use of words, Malherbe reacted violently both against the misplaced and artificial erudition of the Pleiade and their unforced outbursts of lyric song. His object was to purify the ...
— Landmarks in French Literature • G. Lytton Strachey
... relationship; and this is 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 ...
— Elementary Theosophy • L. W. Rogers
... The theorist continued, with perfect composure, "I don't undertake to account for it with any precision. How can I? Perhaps there is Moorish blood in your family, and here it has revived; you look incredulous, but there are plenty of examples, ay, and stronger than this: every child that is born resembles ...
— A Terrible Temptation - A Story of To-Day • Charles Reade
... Surely we have been abridged into a race of pigmies. For, truly, in those of the old discourses yet subsisting to us in print, the endless spinal column of divisions and subdivisions can be likened to nothing so exactly as to the vertebrae of the saurians, whence the theorist may conjecture a race of Anakim proportionate to the withstanding of these other monsters. I say Anakim rather than Nephelim, because there seem reasons for supposing that the race of those whose heads (though no giants) are constantly enveloped ...
— The Biglow Papers • James Russell Lowell
... I did I had a very good opportunity to see the hero of Ypres, philosopher, strategist and theorist, whose theories were then bearing the supreme test ...
— Kings, Queens And Pawns - An American Woman at the Front • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... intended for, and for the rough usage they receive from the animals themselves. A very pretty, and a very plausible arrangement of stabling, and feeding, and all the etceteras of a barn establishment, may be thus got up by an ingenious theorist at the fireside, which will work to a charm, as he dilates upon its good qualities, untried; but, when subjected to experiment will be utterly worthless for practical use. All this we, in our practice, have gone through; ...
— Rural Architecture - Being a Complete Description of Farm Houses, Cottages, and Out Buildings • Lewis Falley Allen
... 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 finds, ...
— Roosevelt in the Bad Lands • Hermann Hagedorn
... 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 ...
— Great Sea Stories • Various
... wonderful if, under the pressure of all these difficulties, the convention should have been forced into some deviations from that artificial structure and regular symmetry which an abstract view of the subject might lead an ingenious theorist to bestow on a Constitution planned in his closet or in his imagination? The real wonder is that so many difficulties should have been surmounted, and surmounted with a unanimity almost as unprecedented as it must have ...
— The Federalist Papers • Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison
... outset—which may carry it as far as such sound 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 only probabilities to consider. What are these probabilities? What work will this hypothesis do to establish a claim to be adopted in ...
— Darwiniana - Essays and Reviews Pertaining to Darwinism • Asa Gray
... 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
... 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 same ...
— The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government • Jefferson Davis
... great cause of Democracy and to offer you as its militant and triumphant leader a scholar, not a charlatan; a statesman, not a doctrinaire; a profound lawyer, not a splitter of legal hairs; a political economist, not an egotistical theorist; a practical politician, who constructs, modifies, restrains, without disturbance and destruction; a resistless debater and consummate master of statement, not a mere sophist; a humanitarian, not a defamer of characters and lives; a man whose ...
— Public Speaking • Irvah Lester Winter
... 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 the author's name, by Martin, the printer to the Royal Society, in the year ...
— A Book About Lawyers • John Cordy Jeaffreson
... itself on that flaccid form of benevolence, and finds the mere repeal of the Licensing Act the smallest part of it. His pamphlets on divorce and on government have earned him the reputation of a theorist and dreamer. The shrewd practical man finds it easy to despise him. The genial tolerant man, whose geniality of demeanour towards others is a kind of quit-rent paid for his own moral laxity, regards him as a Pharisee. The ready humourist devises a pleasant and cheap entertainment ...
— Milton • Sir Walter Alexander Raleigh
... composer is seldom a great theorist; the theorist is never a great composer. Each is equally fatal to ...
— The Note-Books of Samuel Butler • Samuel Butler
... 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 truth, ...
— Imaginary Portraits • Walter Horatio Pater
... had the dangerous tendency, for an artist, of putting everything he did under the protection and direction of a theory—a course which invariably checks the fertility of technical resource, and which in his case had the unfortunate effect of causing him to be regarded as a mere theorist, whose work was done by line and rule. But I had good reason to know that Turner thought more highly of him than the English public, and I am convinced that as time goes on and his pictures acquire the mellowness of tone for which he carefully calculated in his method and choice of material, ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume I • Stillman, William James
... a man of practice and of facts, uncontrolled by principles and wise in ancestral experience, replied: "We must not listen to this dreamer, this theorist, this innovator, this Utopian, this political economist, this friend to N*w Y*rk. We would be entirely ruined if the embarrassments of the road were not carefully weighed and exactly equalized between N*w Y*rk and ...
— What Is Free Trade? - An Adaptation of Frederic Bastiat's "Sophismes Econimiques" - Designed for the American Reader • Frederic Bastiat
... have heard of your zealous exertions in the cause of Natural History. But I did not know that you had worked with high philosophical questions before your mind. I have an old belief that a good observer really means a good theorist (118/1. For an opposite opinion, see Letter 13.), and I fully expect to find your observations most valuable. I am very sorry to hear that your health is shattered; but I trust under a healthy climate it may be ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin
... commenced; but as I cannot recall that act, I must submit to the inconvenience by which it is attended, rather than expose the country to evils of greater magnitude." Let it be remembered, Sir, that these are not the sentiments of a theorist, nor the fancies of speculation; but the operative opinions of the first minister of England, acknowledged to be one of the ablest and most practical statesmen of ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster
... strongly the danger threatened to Calabria by the impending landing, not only of the British, but of all Cardinal Ruffo's banditti levies, who had acquired consequence in 1799, that he ordered a militia to be raised throughout the country." By Dumas, the young theorist, whose predictions, however, were not ill-founded, was presented to King Joseph, of whom he speaks in no very favourable terms. He admits him to have been courteous and affable, not deficient in information, and to have established many ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCLXXVI. February, 1847. Vol. LXI. • Various
... of no capacity, as everyone is now compelled to admit; but let that pass, I say nothing of that. A visionary, a theorist, an unbalanced mind, with whom affairs seemed to succeed as long as he had luck on his side. And there's no use, don't you see, sir, in attempting to work on our sympathies and excite our commiseration by telling us that he was deceived, that the opposition refused him the necessary grants ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... theory as that of evolution, and 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 it were, within the interstices of its web. Those ...
— Talks To Teachers On Psychology; And To Students On Some Of Life's Ideals • William James
... bureaus and departments. That good old political freebooter, Andrew Jackson, merely put into words what his predecessors had put into practice: "To the victors belong the spoils." And since his time, more than one upright and intelligent theorist on government has supported the Party System even to the point where the enjoyment of the spoils by the victors seems justified. The "spoils" were the salaries paid to the lower grade of placemen and women—salaries usually not very large, but often ...
— Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography, • William Roscoe Thayer
... 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 ...
— Art • Clive Bell
... 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, "a third of the total height of the figure, ...
— Penguin Island • Anatole France
... Charles was a fine strategic theorist, in his age second only to Napoleon. After the fatal division of his army before Landshut, he had wonderfully retrieved his strength in seizing Ratisbon, crossing the Danube, and standing at Cham eighty thousand strong, as he did ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. III. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... 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 ...
— George Borrow - The Man and His Books • Edward Thomas
... qualities. Because this man held very firmly an abstract and reasoned theory of the State, could define and defend it with extraordinary lucidity and logic, and avowedly guided his public conduct by its light, there has been too much tendency to regard him as a mere theorist, a sort of Girondia, noble in speculation and rhetoric, but unequal to practical affairs and insufficiently alive to concrete realities. He is often contrasted unfavourably with Hamilton in this respect: and yet he had, as events proved, by far the acuter sense of the trend of American ...
— A History of the United States • Cecil Chesterton
... he had been a theorist, and might have wasted his fine powers by further indulgence in dazzling generalizations, as so many boys do when not called to test their hypotheses by experience. Henceforward he was removed from this temptation. A plan for an elective council in Corsica to replace that ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. I. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... limitations. Touch, see, listen, eat freely of all the trees of the 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, or obsolete for him, presently departed. A sonnet, expressive of the joy with ...
— Giordano Bruno • Walter Horatio Pater
... death of his patron Tycho moved to Germany, where, as good luck would have it, he came in contact with the youthful Kepler, and thus, no doubt, was instrumental in stimulating the ambitions of one who in later years was to be known as a far greater theorist than himself. As has been said, Tycho rejected the Copernican theory of the earth's motion. It should be added, however, that he accepted that part of the Copernican theory which makes the sun the centre of all the planetary ...
— A History of Science, Volume 2(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... his 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 ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 6 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... we have taken the government from the capable few and given it to the people, speak of universal suffrage as a quack panacea of this "era of progress." But it is not the manufactured panacea of any theorist or philosopher whatever. It is the natural result of a diffused knowledge of human rights and of increasing intelligence. It is nothing against it that Napoleon III. used a mockery of it to govern France. It is not a device of the closet, but ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... not so important as it might seem to the theorist. Japanese students of our life make many strange deductions from such phenomena as the extensive manufacture of new titles of nobility. But whether they are right or wrong in their far-drawn conclusions it must be admitted that so much honour bestowed in ...
— Europe—Whither Bound? - Being Letters of Travel from the Capitals of Europe in the Year 1921 • Stephen Graham
... 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, and grown ...
— Plato and Platonism • Walter Horatio Pater
... 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, ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, Issue 2, February, 1864 • Various
... speculation lagging far behind; the improvement once conceived is in operation by such time as the opposing theorist has satisfactorily demonstrated its impracticability; and the dream of to-day is the ...
— Impressions of America - During The Years 1833, 1834, and 1835. In Two Volumes, Volume II. • Tyrone Power
... practice of plowing up lea ground and laying other land to grass are so incidental as to be good evidence of the fact that this was not merely the recommendation of a theorist, but a common practice, the details of which were familiar to those for whom he intended his book. A passage in which he refers to the laying to grass of land in need of rest has already been quoted.[106] In discussing the date at which plowing should take place he mentions the plowing up ...
— The Enclosures in England - An Economic Reconstruction • Harriett Bradley
... rolled on, by 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 ...
— Health and Education • Charles Kingsley
... apprehending the first principles of ethics and natural religion, which, in comparison with the complicated and obscure ratiocinations of Boodhism, are clear as water, and lucid as atmospheric air? In other connections, this theorist does not speak in this style. In other connections, and for the purpose of exaggerating natural religion and disparaging revealed, he enlarges upon the dignity of man, of every man, and eulogizes the power of ...
— Sermons to the Natural Man • William G.T. Shedd
... Lessing calls the best critic of the French. In opposition to this opinion I should be disposed to affirm that he was no critic at all. I will not lay any stress on his mistaking the object of poetry and the fine arts, which he considered to be merely moral: a man may be a critic without being a theorist. But a man cannot be a critic without being thoroughly acquainted with the conditions, means, and styles of an art; and here the nature of Diderot's studies and acquirements renders his critical capabilities extremely questionable. This ingenious sophist deals out his blows with such ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... assumption that every appreciation is made valid by the very 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 ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... is the explanation of his transformed life. He was a doubter, a falterer, a failure; he has become a believer, a fighter, a conqueror. You miss his significance completely when you take him for a theorist. The theorist propounds a view to which he must convert the world; the philosopher has a rule of life to immediately put into practice. His spirit flashes with a swiftness that can be encircled by no theory. It is his glory to have over and above ...
— Principles of Freedom • Terence J. MacSwiney
... arguments over works almost exactly similar. Olivier, who usually took a lively share in these disputes, being quick in repartee and clever in disconcerting attacks, besides having a reputation as an ingenious theorist of which he was proud, tried to urge himself to take an active part in the debates, but the things he said interested him no more than those he heard, and he longed to go away, to listen no more, to understand no more, knowing beforehand as he did all that anyone could say on those ...
— Strong as Death • Guy de Maupassant
... not escape our theorist that his hard-won criterion of beauty was after all, apparently, an idea of the reason. He was however prepared to meet this difficulty and promised to do so in a future letter. But the aesthetic correspondence with Koerner was not continued beyond February. The project ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... depended upon within half a degree, which is sufficient for all nautical purposes. If, therefore, observing and calculating were considered as necessary qualifications for every sea officer, the labours of the speculative theorist to solve this problem might be remitted, without much injury to mankind: Neither will it be so difficult to acquire this qualification, or put it in practice, as may at first appear; for, with the ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 13 • Robert Kerr
... to the plainest of plain prose, I am not a theorist on these subjects, nor do I dabble in small fruits as a rich and fanciful amateur, to whom it is a matter of indifference whether his strawberries cost five cents or a dollar a quart. As a farmer, milk must be less expensive than champagne. I could not afford ...
— Success With Small Fruits • E. P. Roe
... the countryman of Saewulf and Willibald, is still more the herald of Roger Bacon and of Neckam. He is a theorist far more than a traveller, and his journey through Egypt and Arabia (c. 1110-14) appears mainly as one of scientific interest. "He sought the causes of all things and the mysteries of Nature," and it was with "a rich spoil of letters," especially of Greek and Arab manuscripts, ...
— Prince Henry the Navigator, the Hero of Portugal and of Modern Discovery, 1394-1460 A.D. • C. Raymond Beazley
... grouping around those three great divinities, which are supposed to be emblematical of the superior natural forces, their numerous progeny, that of Odin especially, together with an incredible number of malicious giants and good- natured ases—a kind of fairy—any skilful theorist, gifted with the requisite imagination, may extract from the whole an almost perfect system of cosmogony and ethics. Then the disgusting legends of the Edda and the sagas are straightway transformed into interesting myths, offsprings of ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud
... the generation of children whom he loved so well. What it was that he did propose is best seen by looking at his life; for, if he was not a very practical man in the sense of wisely conducted affairs, he was still less of a theorist. He knew very well what he meant and what he wanted; but he had no compact system to propose, grounded on any new theory of the human faculties. The foremost man in the educational revolution of modern times, he obeyed ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 4 of 8 • Various
... another fortune the size of both 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 five ...
— The Iron Trail • Rex Beach
... only 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 ...
— Yeast: A Problem • Charles Kingsley
... none of them represented the least divergence from his course as a whole, which has always been honestly bent in a certain plain direction. He never hesitated to be in a minority and never dodged a fight. He is an innocent theorist, who frequently goes wrong because of the simplicity of his mental processes; but he acts upon his theories, right or wrong, with an intrepidity and a whole-hearted courage in which the ordinary man sees the qualities he himself would like to have, and ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 4, July, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... A German 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 for instance, ...
— An Old Sailor's Yarns • Nathaniel Ames
... the least infidelity in the statement of an author's meaning, it is in the denial that Marsilius, the imperial theorist, and the creator with Ockam of the Ghibelline philosophy that has ruled the world, was a friend of religious liberty. Marsilius assuredly was not a Whig. Quite as much as any Guelph, he desired to concentrate power, not to ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... Max Stirner pursues an end entirely opposed to this. He laughs at "Virtue," and, far from desiring its triumph, he sees reasonable men only in egoists, for whom there is nothing above their own "Ego." Once again, he is the theorist par excellence ...
— Anarchism and Socialism • George Plechanoff
... 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
... subjunctive an indicative ending which never belonged to it? And how can a needless "auxiliary" be "understood," on the principle of equivalence, where, by awkwardly changing a mood or tense, it only helps some grammatical theorist to convert good English into bad, or to pervert a text? The phrases above may all be right, or all be wrong, according to the correctness or incorrectness of their application: when each is used as best it may be, there is no exact equivalence. ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... critical and theoretical writing I wish to be as little abstract as possible, and to study first principles, not so much as they exist in the brain of the theorist, but as they may be discovered, alive and in effective action, in every achieved form of art. I do not understand the limitation by which so many writers on aesthetics choose to confine themselves to the study of artistic principles as ...
— Plays, Acting and Music - A Book Of Theory • Arthur Symons
... Scriptures, define dogmas, refute heresies. At the same time, he means to neglect nothing of his material work. He has mouths to feed, property to look after, law-cases to examine. He will labour at all that. For this mystic and theorist it means a ...
— Saint Augustin • Louis Bertrand
... One theorist loudly called for a massacre of sea-birds, especially shags and gannets. Others (and these were the majority) demanded protection from steam trawlers, whom they accused of scraping the sea-bottom, to the wholesale sacrifice of immature fish—sole ...
— Nicky-Nan, Reservist • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch (Q)
... last flight of stairs he had to seize and half 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
... established the fame of Toland, as well as formed the groundwork for persecution, which hunted him even on his death-bed. In the year 1699 Toland collected, edited, and published, from the original MSS., the whole of the works of James Harrington, prefixed by a memoir of this extraordinary theorist. In his preface he says that he composed this work "in his beloved retirement at Cannon, near Bansted, in Surrey." From this, along with other excerpts scattered through his works, we cannot but infer that at the outset of his ...
— Ancient and Modern Celebrated Freethinkers - Reprinted From an English Work, Entitled "Half-Hours With - The Freethinkers." • Charles Bradlaugh, A. Collins, and J. Watts
... early, even in the nursery. Without the mountebank pretence, that miracles can be performed by the turning of a straw, or the dictatorial anathematizing tone, which calls down vengeance upon those who do not follow to an iota the injunctions of a theorist, we may simply observe, that parents would save themselves a great deal of trouble, and their children some pain, if they would pay some attention to their early education. The temper acquires habits much earlier than is usually apprehended; ...
— Practical Education, Volume I • Maria Edgeworth
... world would not have had so rapid and general an effect on the public mind to disabuse it of the idea that a drug is a good thing in itself, instead of being, as it is, a bad thing, as was produced by the trick (system) of this German charlatan (theorist). Not that the wiser part of the profession needed him to teach them; but the routinists and their employers, the "general practitioners," who lived by selling pills and mixtures, and their drug-consuming ...
— The Professor at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes (Sr.)
... such possible and proposed changes must be confined to specific details. They should not raise any question as to the fundamental desirability of a system of checks and balances or of the other principles upon which the Federal political organization is based. Much, consequently, as a political theorist may be interested in some ideal plan of American national organization, it will be of little benefit under existing conditions to enter into such a discussion. Let it wait until Americans have come to think seriously and consistently about fundamental political problems. The Federal Constitution ...
— The Promise Of American Life • Herbert David Croly
... thing above another that I revel in, it is science. I have devoted much of my life to scientific research, and though it hasn't made much stir in the scientific world so far, I am positive that when I am gone the scientists of our day will miss me, and the red-nosed theorist will come and shed the scalding ...
— Remarks • Bill Nye
... I saw it wasn't there and I searched everywhere. I saw it with my own eyes," said Tootsie incoherently, and between rage and tears she repeated her account in a manner to be completely unintelligible. Mr. Bedelle was a theorist afflicted with indigestion. He carefully selected his diet with due regard for starch values and never ate a raw tomato without first carefully removing the seeds. He was likewise particularly careful never to sit down to a process of digestion in an agitated mood. His irritation therefore considerably ...
— Skippy Bedelle - His Sentimental Progress From the Urchin to the Complete - Man of the World • Owen Johnson
... cultivated naturalist, acquainted also with everything known in his day, more prudent metaphysician than Plato but without his depth, a precise and sure logician and the founder of scientific logic, a clear and dexterous moralist, an ingenious and pure literary theorist; Xenophon, who commanded the retreat of the ten thousand, moralist and Intelligent pedagogue displaying much attractiveness in his Cyropoedia, the sensible, refined, and delightful master of familiar and practical life in his Economics; Theophrastus, ...
— Initiation into Literature • Emile Faguet
... this vice, which is now spreading like a subtle poison through all grades of society, that the present work is directed. The author is not a mere theorist. He speaks from experience—dark and bitter experience. The things he has seen he tells; the words he has heard he speaks again. Some of these scenes curdle the blood in the veins, even when remembered; some of these words, whenever whispered, recall incidents of ...
— Secret Band of Brothers • Jonathan Harrington Green
... 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 ...
— Stories Of Ohio - 1897 • William Dean Howells
... getting out at the wrong station. That the 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 ...
— Ponkapog Papers • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... which I have quoted begins with an indignant retort upon a member who had applied to him Burke's phrase about a perfect-bred metaphysician exceeding the devil in malignity and contempt for mankind. Huskisson frequently protested even against the milder epithet of theorist. He asserted most emphatically that he appealed to 'experience' and not to 'theory,' a slippery distinction which finds a good exposure in Bentham's Book of Fallacies.[48] The doctrine, however, was a convenient ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume II (of 3) - James Mill • Leslie Stephen
... infringing some rule of the old text-books, there is, to say the least, a strong presumption, not that the composer is wrong, but that the rule needs modifying. The great composer goes first and invents new effects: it is the business of the theorist not to cavil at every novelty, but to follow modestly behind and make his rules conform to the practice of the master. [Compare ...
— Haydn • J. Cuthbert Hadden
... Convention, where the present German party was founded, that "every step of the real movement is of more importance than a dozen programs," while Wilhelm Liebknecht said, "Marx is dear to me, but the party is dearer."[1] What was this movement that the great theorist put above theory and his leading ...
— Socialism As It Is - A Survey of The World-Wide Revolutionary Movement • William English Walling
... de la Geologie," 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 ...
— Scientific American Suppl. No. 299 • Various
... A theorist who believes that the Homeric poems are the growth of four changeful centuries, must present a definite working hypothesis as to how they escaped from certain influences of the late age in which much of them is said to have been composed. We must first ask to what manner ...
— Homer and His Age • Andrew Lang
... which was never an uncompleted arch or turret, in whose circling wall was never a ragged breach, that theory I should know but to avoid: such gaps are the eternal windows through which the dawn shall look in. A complete theory is a vault of stone around the theorist—whose very being yet depends ...
— Malcolm • George MacDonald
... its imperfections, this is no ordinary history. The speculation, it is true, is not always of the kind we wish; it excludes more moving or enlivening topics, and sometimes savours of the inexperienced theorist who had passed his days remote from practical statesmen; the subject has not sufficient unity; in spite of every effort, it breaks into fragments towards the conclusion: but still there is an energy, a vigorous beauty in the work, which ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... The theorist of the Revolution is Locke; and it was his conscious effort to justify the innovations of 1688. He sought, as he said, "to establish the throne of our great Restorer, our present King William, and make good his title ...
— Political Thought in England from Locke to Bentham • Harold J. Laski
... 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 ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey—Vol. 1 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... Frontenac was no theorist, and probably would have written a poor treatise on the relations of Church and State. At the same time, he knew that the king claimed certain rights over the Church, and he was the king's lieutenant. Herein ...
— The Fighting Governor - A Chronicle of Frontenac • Charles W. Colby
... 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 ...
— The Zincali - An Account of the Gypsies of Spain • George Borrow
... 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 the best Constitutions to be those in which the popular element is ...
— Studies in Literature • John Morley
... the curious mood changed, but I did not venture to talk any more about music, and before very long we repaired to the eating-room, where, for the next two or three hours, we occupied ourselves very agreeably with those processes which, some new theorist informs us, constitute our chief ...
— A Crystal Age • W. H. Hudson
... seriousness lighting up his face. At what point he began to see something more than amusement in his dreams and theories, I never knew; but the serious beginning of the thing took shape in an incident which not even the most fervent theorist could have created for the sake ...
— Shapes that Haunt the Dusk • Various
... of music can be emphasized further by a simple statement that, with the exception of a few names like Lowell Mason, Louis Moreau Gottschalk, Stephen A. Emery (a graceful writer as well as a theorist), and George F. Bristow, practically every American composer of even the faintest importance is ...
— Contemporary American Composers • Rupert Hughes
... because of her previous entire ignorance, partly because of her extreme receptiveness, she soon outstripped her comrades, and before long, was one of the most skilful improvisers of the group: a dexterous theorist: a wicked little adept ...
— The Getting of Wisdom • Henry Handel Richardson
... wholly negligible. To this I can only reply that the experience of the artist and the teacher is always more reliable, more susceptible to finer appreciations of artistic values than that of the pure theorist, who views his problems through material rather than spiritual eyes. Every observing pianist is familiar with the remarkable influence upon the nerves of the voice-making apparatus that any emotion makes. Is it not reasonable ...
— Great Pianists on Piano Playing • James Francis Cooke
... American 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, ...
— Life of Charles Darwin • G. T. (George Thomas) Bettany
... 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 ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... 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, Benezet became one of the most aggressive ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 2, 1917 • Various
... of the talk about music by the Greek writers, musical theory, in an exact form, occupies but a small place in the volume of their works. The earliest theorist of whom we have any account was Pythagoras, who lived about 580 B.C. He was one of the first of the Greek wise men to avail himself of the opening of Egypt to foreigners, which took place by Psammeticus I in the year 600 B.C. Pythagoras lived there twenty ...
— A Popular History of the Art of Music - From the Earliest Times Until the Present • W. S. B. Mathews
... contributors to medical literature from among the Arabs, with the single exception of Avicenna, were born in Spain. They are Albucasis or Abulcasis, the surgeon; Avenzoar, the physician, and Averroes, the philosophic theorist in medicine. Besides, it may be recalled here that Maimonides, the great Jewish physician, was born and educated at Cordova, in Spain. It might very well be a surprise that these distinguished men among ...
— Old-Time Makers of Medicine • James J. Walsh
... views (vues d'ensemble). These, again, require an habitual abstraction from details, which unfits the mind for judging well and rapidly of individual cases. The same person cannot be both a good theorist and a good practitioner or ruler, though practitioners and rulers ought to have a solid theoretic education. The two kinds of function must be absolutely exclusive of one another: to attempt them both, is inconsistent with fitness for either. But as men may mistake their vocation, up to the ...
— Auguste Comte and Positivism • John-Stuart Mill
... idealism, non-existent—it is abundantly clear that the effort to distinguish fact from theory cannot be successful, so long as the psychological way of thinking prevails; for a theory, psychologically considered, is a bare fact in the experience of the theorist, and the other facts of his experience are so many other momentary views, so many scant theories, to be immediately superseded by other "truths in the plural." Sensations and ideas are really distinguishable only by reference ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... Achilles Tatius, Tatian Pollux, and many more, may be consulted to advantage by the man of taste and letters, and probably may be neglected without much loss by the student." "Of modern writers on art Vasari leads the van; theorist, artist, critic, and biographer, in one. The history of modern art owes, no doubt, much to Vasari; he leads us from its cradle to its maturity with the anxious diligence of a nurse; but he likewise has her derelictions: for more loquacious than ample, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 54, No. 338, December 1843 • Various
... first put to trial was that of President Lincoln. It was a definite plan designed to meet actual conditions and, had he lived, he might have been able to carry it through successfully. Not a theorist, but an opportunist of the highest type, sobered by years of responsibility in war time, and fully understanding the precarious situation in 1865, Lincoln was most anxious to secure an early restoration of solidarity with as little friction as possible. Better than most Union leaders he appreciated ...
— The Sequel of Appomattox - A Chronicle of the Reunion of the States, Volume 32 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Walter Lynwood Fleming
... 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 Protestant, ...
— A Vanished Arcadia, • R. B. Cunninghame Graham
... apologies of rebellious colonies in a strait—then we submit that a prima facie case for woman's right to vote has already been made out. To declare that a voice in the government is the right of all, and then give it to less than half, and that to the fraction to which the theorist himself happens to belong, is to renounce even ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... ought to mention a peculiar Banffshire theorist who addressed me in the following words: "Give me an old set of Blackwood in the Kit North days, and I can easily forego your pinchbeck stories and propagandist novels of to-day. I put the most interesting period for reading at sixty years ago, and I think Scott ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes
... more one examines Dreiser, either as writer or as theorist of man, the more his essential isolation becomes apparent. He got a habit of mind from Huxley, but he completely missed Huxley's habit of writing. He got a view of woman from Hardy, but he soon changed it out of all resemblance. He got a certain ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... 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
... 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
... 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 ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. II • Charles C. F. Greville
... the well-known theorist, who was one of those engaged in the dispute as to the genuineness ...
— Beethoven's Letters 1790-1826 Vol. 2 • Lady Wallace
... as well as with the person of the artist. Wagner tried to help the comprehension of his question by writing about it; but this only led to fresh confusion and more uproar, —for a musician who writes and thinks was, at that time, a thing unknown. The cry arose: "He is a theorist who wishes to remould art with his far-fetched notions—stone him!" Wagner was stunned: his question was not understood, his need not felt; his masterpieces seemed a message addressed only to the deaf and blind; his people— an hallucination. He staggered ...
— Thoughts out of Season (Part One) • Friedrich Nietzsche
... 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 previously got into ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... you by way of Letter, a while ago, styled himself Philobrune. Dear Sir, as you are by Character a profest Well-wisher to Speculation, you will excuse a Remark which this Gentleman's Passion for the Brunette has suggested to a Brother Theorist; 'tis an Offer towards a mechanical Account of his Lapse to Punning, for he belongs to a Set of Mortals who value themselves upon an uncommon Mastery in the more humane and polite Part of Letters. A Conquest by one of this Species of Females gives a very odd Turn to the Intellectuals ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... we find in the text; but in the clear intellect of this man of genius a vast number of intervening difficulties started up, and in a copious note the numerous exceptions show that the assumed theory requires no other refutation than what the theorist has himself so abundantly and so judiciously supplied. There is something ludicrous in the result of a theory of genius which would place HOBBES and ERASMUS, those timid and learned recluses, to open a campaign with the ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... prodigious power of work, Turner's earlier works show us an unconscious development and a healthy oblivion of his own personality. But later the fatal modern fever entered his blood, ending in something very like delirium. From a painter he became a theorist, contaminated by a rush of criticism alike indiscriminate in praise and injudicious in blame. We shall see the baleful effects of modern methods if we look, in the wonderful series at the National Gallery, first at the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December 1878 • Various
... 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 issues, my ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 7 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... a note, which does not bear reference to anything that occurred at this time. Men, in the midst of their hard earnest toil, perceive great truths with a sharpness of outline and a depth of conviction which is denied to the mere idle theorist: he says:—] ...
— The Last Journals of David Livingstone, in Central Africa, from 1865 to His Death, Volume II (of 2), 1869-1873 • David Livingstone
... said contritely. "If Peter had been here he'd have throttled me. I deserve it. I'm a theorist, pure and simple, and theorists are the anarchists of society. There's only one comfort about us—we never live up to our convictions. Now forget all ...
— The Street of Seven Stars • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... nascent class of industrial wage-workers. In the early 'eighties this class was so small in Russia that it seemed to many of the best and clearest minds of the revolutionary movement quite hopeless to rely upon it. Plechanov was derided as a mere theorist and closet philosopher, but he never wavered in his conviction that Socialism must come in Russia as the natural outcome of capitalist development. By means of a number of scholarly polemics against the principles and tactics of the ...
— Bolshevism - The Enemy of Political and Industrial Democracy • John Spargo
... off to Prince Sulkouski, who had just been appointed ambassador to the Court of Louis XV. The prince was the elder of four brothers and a man of great understanding, but a theorist in the style of the Abbe St. Pierre. He read the letter, and said he wanted to have a long talk with me; but that being obliged to go out he would be obliged if I would come and dine with him at four ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... medicine, and pursued his researches at ease under the baron's roof. They all loved him, and laughed at his occasional reveries, in the days of prosperity; and now, in one great crisis, the protege became the protector, to their astonishment and his own. But it was an age of ups and downs. This amiable theorist was one of the oldest verbal republicans in Europe. And why not? In theory a republic is the perfect form of government: it is merely in practice that it is impossible; it is only upon going off paper into reality, and trying ...
— White Lies • Charles Reade
... book in forty years. Naturally, therefore, Pestalozzi was always an experimenter, profiting by his failures but always failing in his first attempts, and hitting upon his most characteristic principles by accident; while Froebel was a theorist, elaborating his ideas mentally before putting them in practice, and never satisfied till he had properly located them in ...
— Autobiography of Friedrich Froebel • Friedrich Froebel
... their peers. It must also be admitted that a large number of false lights, popular will o' the wisps, have been ruthlessly extinguished with the same breath. For instance, Karl Marx, the socialist theorist and agitator, finds in Croce an exponent of his views, in so far as they are based upon the truth, but where he blunders, his critic immediately reveals the origin and nature of his mistakes. Croce's ...
— Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic • Benedetto Croce
... time trying to devise more perfect units of voting, in the hope that somehow he would, as Mr. Cole says, "get the mechanism right, and adjust it as far as possible to men's social wills." But while the democratic theorist was busy at this, he was far away from the actual interests of human nature. He was absorbed by one interest: self-government. Mankind was interested in all kinds of other things, in order, in its rights, in ...
— Public Opinion • Walter Lippmann
... no man shall be imprisoned or otherwise punished except after lawful trial by his peers.[20] Consider also the magazines of explosive materials which lie hidden in the constitutional prerogatives of the Crown, if they could only be ignited by the match of an ingenious theorist. The Crown, as Lord Sherbrooke once somewhat irreverently expressed it, "can turn every cobbler in the land into a peer," and could thus put an end, as the Duke of Wellington declared, to "the Constitution of this country."[21] "The Crown is not bound by Act of Parliament unless named therein by ...
— Handbook of Home Rule (1887) • W. E. Gladstone et al.
... upon the rocks, among which geology has been so long delving? 'What are the peepers?' 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 ...
— Wild Northern Scenes - Sporting Adventures with the Rifle and the Rod • S. H. Hammond
... 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 ...
— Cambridge Essays on Education • Various
... that 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 than there is for ...
— La-bas • J. K. Huysmans
... it something far 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 ...
— Milton • John Bailey
... I must be called an extravagant theorist if I insinuate that all these good things would have resulted from having history well written and poetry well conceived. No man will doubt however that such would have been the tendency; nor can we deny that the contrary has resulted, at least in some degree, from ...
— The Columbiad • Joel Barlow
... he is very familiar, and is ever interesting and instructive in discoursing upon the advantages and pleasures to be enjoyed by its study. Indeed, at such times one is in doubt whether to admire him most as a performer or as a theorist; for as the latter he is remarkably proficient, and in treatment delightfully eloquent. As may be inferred from the foregoing, Mr. Lewis is in his manners extremely affable and easy. He charms his visitor by his simplicity, modesty, and freedom from that conceit ...
— Music and Some Highly Musical People • James M. Trotter
... became one of the most learned and skilful contrapuntists of his age. After being employed as organist at Raab and Maria-Taferl, he was appointed in 1772 organist to the court of Vienna, and in 1792 Kapellmeister of St Stephen's cathedral. His fame as a theorist attracted to him in the Austrian capital a large number of pupils, some of whom afterwards became eminent musicians. Among these were Beethoven, Hummel, Moscheles and Josef Weigl (1766-1846). Albrechtsberger ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... arbitrary and despotic spirit characteristic of the relentless theorist. I need not here inquire what relation may be borne by Rousseau's theories to any which could now be accepted by intelligent thinkers. It is enough to say that there would be, to put it gently, some slight difficulty in settling the details of this pure creed common to ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... those—if such there are—who more than guess, Atone for each impostor's wild mistakes, And mend the blunders pride or folly makes ? What thought so wild, what airy dream so light, That will not prompt a theorist to write? What art so prevalent, what proof so strong, That will convince him his attempt is wrong? One in the solids finds each lurking ill, Nor grants the passive fluids power to kill; A learned friend some subtler reason brings, Absolves the channels, but ...
— The Library • George Crabbe |
