“Practice spoke its positive language to Theory whose word is always in the Future.”
Illusions perdues, part III. Ève et David (Ève and David), later Les Souffrances de l'inventeur (The Inventor's Sufferings).
Original: (fr) La Pratique parlait son langage positif à la Théorie dont la parole est toujours au Futur.
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Honoré de Balzac157
French writer 1799–1850Related quotes
“Men always say they didn't mean it that way. You would think they spoke a different language.”
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(15 October 1994)
“I dream of a language whose words, like fists, would fracture jaws.”
Emil M. Cioran (1911–1995) Romanian philosopher and essayist
The New Gods (1969)
Lotfi A. Zadeh (1921–2017) Electrical engineer and computer scientist
Variant: A linguistic variable is defined as a variable whose values are sentences in a natural or artificial language.
Source: 1970s, Outline of a new approach to the analysis of complex systems and decision processes (1973), p. 28
Michel Henry (1922–2002) French writer
Michel Henry, Marx I. une philosophie de la réalité, éd. Gallimard, coll. « Nrf », 1976, p. 353
Books on Economy and Politics, Marx. A Philosophy of Human Being (1976)
Original: (fr) Parce que la pratique est subjective, la théorie qui est toujours la théorie d’un objet, ne peut atteindre la réalité de cette pratique, ce qu’elle est en elle-même, sa subjectivité précisément, mais seulement se la représenter, de telle manière que cette représentation laisse hors d’elle l’être réel de la pratique, l’effectivité du faire. La théorie ne fait rien.
Mao Zedong (1893–1976) Chairman of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China
On Practice (1937)
Napoleon I of France (1769–1821) French general, First Consul and later Emperor of the French
Napoleon : In His Own Words (1916)
William Feller (1906–1970) Croatian-American mathematician
Introduction, The Nature of Probability Theory, p. 6.
An Introduction To Probability Theory And Its Applications (Third Edition)
“In theory there is no difference between theory and practice; in practice there is.”
Yogi Berra (1925–2015) American baseball player, manager, coach
Attributed in Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile - Things that Gain From Disorder (2012), p. 213.
The earliest known appearance of this quote in print is Walter J. Savitch, Pascal: An Introduction to the Art and Science of Programming (1984), where it is attributed as a "remark overheard at a computer science conference". It circulated as an anonymous saying for more than ten years before attributions to Jan L. A. van de Snepscheut and Yogi Berra began to appear (and later still to various others).
Disputed, Misattributed
“In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. But, in practice, there is.”
Jan L. A. van de Snepscheut (1953–1994) Dutch computer scientist
The earliest known appearance in print of this quote is Benjamin Brewster in the October 1881 - June 1882 issue of "The Yale Literary Magazine." Brewster asks, "What does his lucid explanation amount to but this, that in theory there is no difference between theory and practice, while in practice there is?" See page 202. https://books.google.com/books?id=iJ9MAAAAMAAJ&printsec=frontcover&vq=%22no+difference%22#v=onepage&q&f=false It has also been attributed by Doug Rosenberg and Matt Stephens (2007) Use Case Driven Object Modeling with UMLTheory and Practice p. xxvii as well as Walter J. Savitch, Pascal: An Introduction to the Art and Science of Programming (1984), where it is attributed as a "remark overheard at a computer science conference". It circulated as an anonymous saying for more than ten years before attributions to van de Snepscheut and Yogi Berra began to appear (and later still to various others).
Misattributed