And theories are no more than fictions which help us to make sense of experience and which are subject to disconfirmation when their explanations are no longer adequate.

How empty is theory in the presence of fact!

It's hard to observe without imposing a theory to explain what we're seeing, but the trouble with theories, as Einstein said, is that they explain not only what is observed but what CAN BE observed. We start to build expectations based on our theories. And often those expectations get in the way.

To hell with facts! We need stories!

Theories without facts may be barren, but facts without theories are meaningless.

Experience arises together with theoretical assumptions not before them, and an experience without theory is just as incomprehensible as is (allegedly) a theory without experience.

Though the theory is worthless without the well-observed facts, the facts are useless without the frame of the theory to receive them.

The facts have to be determined by empirical evidence, and our thinking has then to conform to the facts, not the facts to our thinking

When we meet a fact which contradicts a prevailing theory, we must accept the fact and abandon the theory, even when the theory is supported by great names and generally accepted.

Experience without theory is blind, but theory without experience is mere intellectual play.

The pathetic superstition prevails that by knowing more and more facts one arrives at knowledge of reality. Hundreds of scattered and unrelated facts are dumped into the heads of students; their time and energy are taken up by learning more and more facts so that there is little left for thinking. To be sure, thinking without a knowledge of facts remains empty and fictitious; but “information” alone can be just as much of an obstacle to thinking as the lack of it.

I need hardly stay to demonstrate that facts are valueless unless connected and explained by a correct theory; that analogies are very dangerous grounds of inference, unless carefully founded on similar conditions; and that experience misleads if it be misinterpreted.

On fact, the whole machinery of our intelligence, our general ideas and laws, fixed and external objects, principles, persons, and gods, are so many symbolic, algebraic expressions. They stand for experience; experience which we are incapable of retaining and surveying in its multitudinous immediacy. We should flounder hopelessly, like the animals, did we not keep ourselves afloat and direct our course by these intellectual devices. Theory helps us to bear our ignorance of fact.

through some fictions we find fact; in some fantasies we discover ourselves & then some.