Susan Sontag Quotes

An ounce of application is worth a ton of abstraction.

One ounce of practice is worth a thousand pounds of theory.

I'm not satisfied sitting in just the world of abstract work.

Those who are enamoured of practice without science are like a pilot who goes into a ship without rudder or compass and never has any certainty of where he is going. Practice should always be based upon a sound knowledge of theory.

You can't run a business or anything else on a theory.

You know what's better than building things up in your imagination? Building things up in real life.

Theoretical approaches have their place and are, I suppose, essential but a theory must be tempered with reality.

Theory is good for the intellect, but action is good for the soul. It's also good for your mental health, your physical health, and your pocketbook.

Learning cannot be disassociated from action.

Action without study fatal. Study without action is futile.

Knowing isn't doing; doing isn't knowing. Nothing but the knowing and the doing gets it done.

...operational proof...it's all theory until you see for yourself whether or not something works.

There are those who spend their lives studying it and those who spend their lives doing it.

An ounce of practice is worth a ton of theory!

The facts and techniques or whatever they teach you in class isn't going to be veryuseful in the real world, that's for sure.

But the best demonstration by far is experience, if it go not beyond the actual experiment.

You can't write about things without doing them. You just have to live that same way.

A man who is all theory is like "a rudderless ship on a shoreless sea." ... Theories and speculations may be indulged in with safety only as long as they are based on facts that we can go back to at all times and know that we are on solid ground.

Theory can leave questions unanswered, but practice has to come up with something.

You must bring out of each word its practical cash-value, set it at work within the stream of your experience.

It is unnecessary to understand electromagnetic theory before wiring a lamp or to study physics in order to repair a pump. We count on our fingers and give no heed to the proliferating implications of the act.

One important idea is that science is a means whereby learning is achieved, not by mere theoretical speculation on the one hand, nor by the undirected accumulation of practical facts on the other, but rather by a motivated iteration between theory and practice.

Where are these rational practices to be taught and acquired? Not within the four walls of a bare building, in which formality predominates... But in the nursery, play-ground, fields, gardens, workshops, manufactures, museums and class-rooms. ...The facts collected from all these sources will be concentrated, explained, discussed, made obvious to all, and shown in their direct application to practice in all the business of life.

Laboratories are useful, but reflection for us must always start from experience.

For what one has to learn to do, we learn by doing.