Top 100 Explanation Quotes
#1. It is so easy to hide our ignorance under such expressions as the plan of
creation or unity of design, etc., and to think that we give an explanation
when we only restate a fact.
Charles Darwin
#2. There is a simple explanation for why men haven't found women funny. It's because men only ever experience women in relation to men: they never get to see what women are like with one another. Shows like ours started to let men in on the joke.
Magda Szubanski
#3. But when it's read another way, the explanation makes perfectly good sense: Man can never have the wisdom the gods use to rule the world, and if he tries to preempt that wisdom, the result won't be enlightenment, it will be death.
Daniel Quinn
#4. Anna ... envied Joan's deep connection with the human race. She was a member of the club. Anna was half convinced she'd been begotten by a passing alien life-form on a human woman. It was as good an explanation as any for the sense she had of being an outsider.
Nevada Barr
#5. The Dance: A minimum of explanation, a minimum of anecdotes - and a maximum of sensations.
Maurice Bejart
#6. I make no excuse for what happened. Drunkenness is never more than a symptom, not an absolute cause, and I realize that it would be wrong of me to try to defend myself. Nevertheless, there is at least the possibility of an explanation.
Paul Auster
#7. Faith requires no proof. No evidence. No explanation. Faith is entirely a matter of trust and belief. We cannot know, we can only believe.
Paula Brackston
#8. My most educated analysis, with all means of science and technology in mind, is that it's magic," Alex said. "There's no other possible explanation!" -Alex Bailey, The Land of Stories; The Wishing Spell
Chris Colfer The Land Of Stories
#9. Do not accept any explanation of the world either through chance or determinism. You are not responsible for your belief. It is not even you who decides that you are not responsible - and so on to infinity. You are not obliged to believe. There is no point of departure.
Rene Magritte
#10. The cry of "Traitor!" was not a local voice only, but a bewildered people's explanation of the inexplicable. It was the eternal cry of conspiracy, of stab in the back.
Barbara W. Tuchman
#11. Life may not always fall into neat chapters, and you may not always get the satisfying ending you're looking for, but sometimes a good explanation is all the rewrite you need.
Harlan Coben
#12. Coincidence. That's an explanation used by fools and liars.
Lionel
#13. You may not understand what all's happening in your life right now, but any possible explanation pales in comparison to what you do know because of your faith in God's goodness and assurance.
Priscilla Shirer
#14. To trade a childhood wonder for a plausible explanation - is there a worst trade one makes in life?
Robert Breault
#15. The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled. Each evening we see the sun set. We know that the earth is turning away from it. Yet the knowledge, the explanation, never quite fits the sight.
John Berger
#16. It is perhaps just dawning on five or six minds that physics, too, is only an interpretation and exegesis of the world (to suit us, if I may say so!) and not a world-explanation.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#17. And if there is anything that appears like a miracle, the only explanation is that a scientific reason for it has not been discovered as yet.
Amish Tripathi
#18. I was so grateful to see Lissa okay that I missed what Eddie had already noticed. "You guys, where are Victor and Robert?"
Lissa's face crumpled, and even Adrian looked grim. "Damn it," I said, needing no explanation.
Lissa nodded, eyes wide with distraught. "We lost them.
Richelle Mead
#19. I hate when there's a deleted scene on a DVD with no explanation, or you have to go out of your way to find an alternate audio track.
Peyton Reed
#20. The description and explanation is the best part of music reviewing. There is such a thing, and you know it too, as a gift for judgment. If you have it, you can say anything you like. If you haven't got it, you don't know you haven't got it.
Virgil Thomson
#21. How strange a scene is this in which we are such shifting figures, pictures, shadows. The mystery of our existence
I have no faith in any attempted explanation of it. It is all a dark, unfathomed profound.
Rutherford B. Hayes
#22. When I do things without any explanation, but just with spontaneity ... I can be sure that I am right.
Federico Fellini
#23. Break the glass, please, and free us from all these damned rules, from needing to find an explanation for everything, from doing only what others approve of.
Paulo Coelho
#24. Does somebody have an explanation why there's human flesh on the hall window upstairs?
David Foster Wallace
#25. My greatest successes came from decisions I made when I stopped thinking and simply did what felt right. Even if there was no good explanation for what I did." He smiled wistfully. "Even if there were very good reasons for me not to do what I did." Bast
Patrick Rothfuss
#26. In fact, when you get right down to it, almost every explanation Man came up with for anything until about 1926 was stupid.
Dave Barry
#27. That is the explanation of war, an outrage by humanity upon humanity in despite of humanity.
Victor Hugo
#28. My explanation remains the same: It was an attempt to make the point that anyone who opposed the war can achieve their objective by working within their sphere of influence, whether their political party or community of faith.
James P. Moran
#29. If I have learned anything as a scientist, it is that one should not make things complicated when a simple explanation will do.
Ivar Giaever
#30. The longer I live, the more uninformed I feel. Only the young have an explanation for everything.
Isabel Allende
#31. To him who has had the experience no explanation is necessary, to him who has not, none is possible.
Ram Dass
#32. Some can do things others cannot, Nandera said, as if that was enough explanation.
Robert Jordan
#33. Before familiarity can turn into awareness the familiar must be stripped of its inconspicuousness; we must give up assuming that the object in question needs no explanation. However frequently recurrent, modest, vulgar it may be it will now be be labeled as something unusual.
Bertolt Brecht
#34. I think it laughable, frankly, that the physics community comes up with a theory for everything. There isn't one theory for everything. There is not one explanation. We may eventually have several theories that can tie things together nicely but there is not a single theory of everything.
Edgar Mitchell
#35. Religion has at one time or another been thought to fill four main roles in human life: explanation, exhortation, consolation and inspiration.
Richard Dawkins
#36. I have no explanation for complex biological design. All I know is that God isn't a good explanation, so we must wait and hope that somebody comes up with a better one.
Richard Dawkins
#37. At all times and in all fields the explanation by fire is a rich explanation.
Gaston Bachelard
#38. No matter what anyone says, no matter the excuse or explanation, whatever a person does in the end is what he intended to do all along.
Cus D'Amato
#39. The identification of any object in the first-person case is ruled out by the enterprise of scientific explanation. So science cannot tell me who I am, let alone where, when, or how.
Roger Scruton
#40. It remains, for me, the most powerful and elegant explanation of how we humans and our brains construct our very individual selves and worlds.
Oliver Sacks
#41. With all things being equal, the simplest explanation tends to be the right one.
William Of Ockham
#42. Life requires no future to complete itself nor explanation to justify itself. In this moment it is finished.
Alan W. Watts
#43. The idea of dependence is an explanation, whereas self-sufficiency is an unprecedented, nonanalogous concept in terms of what we know about life within nature. Is not self-sufficiency itself insufficient to explain self-sufficiency?
Abraham Joshua Heschel
#44. If the abstract rights of man will bear discussion and explanation, those of women, by a parity of reasoning, will not shrink from the same test.
Mary Wollstonecraft
#45. People wanted the explanation to be as big and flashy as the killings themselves, but the truth was far more terrifying: true terror doesn't come from giant monsters but from small, innocent-looking people.
Dan Wells
#46. What marks the transition from non-sentient to sentient beings? A model of increasing complexity based on evolution through natural selection is simply a descriptive hypothesis, a kind of euphemism for "mystery," and not a satisfactory explanation.
Dalai Lama XIV
#47. [ ... ]certainly not one of them would have known what to reply if they had been asked, Why are you holding hands as you go, it simply came about, there are gestures for which we cannot always find an easy explanation, sometimes not even a difficult one can be found.
Jose Saramago
#48. To fall in love is a legendary action that doesn't need any explanation.
Auliq Ice
#49. I wanted to believe in witches, wizards, ogres, giants, and enchanted spells. I didn't want all of the magic taken out of the world by scientific explanation.
V.C. Andrews
#50. But let the wise be warned against too great readiness at explanation: it multiplies the sources of mistake, lengthening the sum for reckoners sure to go wrong.
George Eliot
#51. It's an honest place to be if you don't understand someone else's experience, but there's no way for the other to understand if a conversation or an explanation isn't made.
Regina King
#52. Was it possible that perhaps the most plausible explanation was being offered by someone who anyone with an ounce of sanity would have long ago consigned to the realm of the insane?
Tim Horvath
#53. Existence is a mystery , and one should accept it as a mystery and not pretend to have any explanation .
Rajneesh
#54. Ever since the first day I'd seen Drew, none of my thoughts made sense. My entire world had turned upside-down, and I had no explanation why.
Michelle Madow
#55. There were seven thermonuclear devices? queried Parks, who had latched on to Jack's outlandish explanation without too much difficulty, as should you.
Jasper Fforde
#56. Naturally, since [the Sumerians] didn't know what caused the flood anymore than we do, they blamed the gods. (That's the advantage of religion. You're never short an explanation for anything.)
Isaac Asimov
#57. A Mr. (save, perhaps, some half dozen in the nation,) always needs a note of explanation.
Jane Austen
#58. Derangement is the only possible explanation for owning a cat, an animal whose preferred mode of communication is to sink its claws three-quarters of an inch into your flesh.
Dave Barry
#59. Any decision I make is based on myself, and the only person I have to give an explanation to is God.
Solange Knowles
#60. Science, for me, gives a partial explanation for life. In so far as it goes, it is based on fact, experience and experiment.
Rosalind Franklin
#61. The Scots language is a mark of the distinctive identity of the Scottish people; and as such we should be concerned to preserve it, even if there were no other reason, because it is ours. This statement requires neither explanation nor apology.
J.Derrick McClure
#62. If anything is a mystery to you and it is coming in between you and God, never look for the explanation in your intellect, look for it in your disposition, it is that which is wrong.
Oswald Chambers
#63. They want explanation, not faith; God gives them faith as the explanation.
Geoffrey Wood
#64. In Hollywood, imitation is the most profitable form of flattery. That is the only plausible explanation ...
Desson Thomson
#65. If so, we might be able to use them for rapid travel around the galaxy or travel back in time. Of course, we have not seen anyone from the future (or have we?) but I discuss a possible explanation for this.
Stephen Hawking
#67. The feature of living matter that most demands explanation is that it is almost unimaginably complicated in directions that convey a powerful illusion of deliberate design.
Richard Dawkins
#68. He is the only man she has ever loved, and he has dumped her like ballast. She needs to find an explanation that does not make her a fool and him an animal, but every thought of him is a knife turning in the wound love made.
Mark Haddon
#69. Remember that we sometimes demand explanations for the sake not of their content, but of their form. Our requirement is an architectural one; the explanation a kind of sham corbel that supports nothing.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
#70. For those who understand, no explanation is needed. For those who do not understand, no explanation is possible.
Ziad K. Abdelnour
#71. Human lives are hard, even those of health and privilege, and don't make much sense. This is the message of the Book of Job: Any snappy explanation of suffering you come up with will be horseshit.
Anne Lamott
#72. Hopefully my music is medicine, some type of antidote for something or some kind of explanation or just to feel good.
Erykah Badu
#73. By an incredible coincidence, Gamow and Edward Condon, who had discovered simultaneously and independently the explanation of radioactivity (one in Russia, the other in this country), came to spend the the last ten years of their lives within a hundred yards of each other in Boulder.
Stanislaw Ulam
#74. The combination of mental and physical practice leads to greater performance improvement than does physical practice alone, a phenomenon for which our findings provide a physiological explanation. - Alvaro Pascual-Leone
Oliver Sacks
#75. Wonder is the sense, which comes in a flash but won't go away, that things are not as straightforward as they seem, that the ordinary way, or explanation and argument leaves you with unbearable contradictions and impossibilities.
Eva Brann
#76. Clarity! Accuracy! Think of your words as a key to fit into the lock of your meaning. Cast them with precision. That key should then be swift and perfect in achieving its aim. Well shaped talk is a release from the indefinite. It is explanation. Preparation. Nothing more.
Jane Borodale
#77. It from Bit symbolizes the idea that every item of the physical world has at bottom an immaterial source and explanation ... that all things physical are information-theoretic in origin and that this is a participatory universe.
John Archibald Wheeler
#78. While about one-third of Americans believe in ghosts, you won't find many exhibits on these spooky beings down at the local science museum. Why? Well, one explanation that you might consider, ghosts are just figments of our highly fertile imaginations!
Seth Shostak
#79. One basic explanation for depression is that it is anger turned inward.
Candace R.M. Gorham
#80. For a person who grew up in the '30s and '40s in the segregated South, with so many doors closed without explanation to me, libraries and books said, 'Here I am, read me.' Over time I have learned I am at my best around books.
Maya Angelou
#81. We injure mysteries, which are matters of faith, by any attempt at explanation in order to make them matters of reason. Could they be explained, they would cease to be mysteries; and it has been well said that a thing is not necessarily against reason because it happens to be above it.
Charles Caleb Colton
#82. who probably didn't know any better; to Louise Simonson & Brent Eric Anderson, for "God Loves, Man Kills"; to Eleanor Wood, for reasons that need no explanation; to Betsy Mitchell, for having faith; and Steve Saffel, for keeping both book
Chris Claremont
#83. Prediction and explanation are exactly symmetrical. Explanations are, in effect, predictions about what has happened; predictions are explanations about what's going to happen.
John Rogers Searle
#84. Most Amazonians don't want to give others the power to threaten them with physical injury if they don't do as they are told. Maybe we should better be asking what it says about ourselves that we feel this attitude needs any sort of explanation.
David Graeber
#85. Changing ideas is a strain not to be lightly incurred, particularly when these ideas are intimately related to one's self-esteem ... men have elaborated an explanation for their situation in life ... Their rationales are endowed with moral qualities.
Robert E Lane
#86. Those last few years were really hard. Miranda's death
it changed her.' 'That's not an excuse,' Neily said. 'No, but it's an explanation.
Anna Jarzab
#87. The whole motley confusion of acts, omissions, regrets and hopes which is the life of each one of us finds in death, not meaning or explanation, but an end.
Octavio Paz
#88. It is not. Mom loves me, and she would not leave me without any explanation.
And then her father began to cry.
Sharon Creech
#89. I was pretty sure the only possible explanation would involve parallel world theory. That sounded fun!
Otaro Maijo
#90. It just takes the faith of a little seed to make a way through what might to be impossibility, and the ability will match the occasion. The outcome will defy explanation. The liberation will not be televised when it arrives like lightning in the skies.
Josh Garrels
#91. [On Archimedes mathematical results:] It is not possible to find in all geometry more difficult and intricate questions, or more simple and lucid explanation ... No investigation of yours would succeed in attaining the proof, and yet, once seen you immediately believe you would have discovered it.
Proclus
#92. Any explanation or logic that explains everything so easily has a hidden trap in it. I'm speaking from experience. Somebody once said if it's something a single book can explain, it's not worth having explained. What I mean is don't leap to any conclusions.
Haruki Murakami
#93. We prefer to find an explanation for why things are not perfect, and these rarely stand up to close scrutiny.
Charlie Campbell
#94. The five steps in teaching an employee new skills are preparation, explanation, showing, observation and supervision.
Bruce Barton
#95. He is not stubborn, not narrow-minded, not lazy, not stupid. There was just no easy explanation. So it was left up in the air, a kind of mystery that one gives up on because there is no sense in just going round and round and round looking for an answer that's not there.
Robert M. Pirsig
#96. With that discouraging explanation many felt that they had been the victims of some new and showy gypsy business and they decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
#97. But the things in the batteries couldn't be spiders. It just wasn't possible. There had to be another explanation. But of what kind?
A. Ashley Straker
#98. When you write it, don't write it in the manner of a spooky story. Don't try to give an explanation. Just say that I don't know what to make of it, just write it like I tell it, so the reader can make up his own mind.
David Mitchell
#99. The ride does not require an explanation, just participants.
Sonny Barger
#100. He was never rash or hurried, but he was always read. It was the secret, no doubt, of the extraordinary political career he threw away for my sake; it was also the explanation of his belief in me and devotion to my mission. When I came, he was ready. Nobody else on Winter was.
Ursula K. Le Guin
