Top 100 Explanations Of Sayings
#1. The source of magic in this world is more mysterious than all the explanations that sorcerers and wizards have given for it, and it is more prevalent than can be understood by those who live according to the constricted form of reason so prevalent in our time.
Dean Koontz
#2. Like so many other pathological personalities in positions of power a million years ago, he might do almost anything on impulse, feeling nothing much. The logical explanations for his actions, invented at leisure, always came afterwards.
Kurt Vonnegut
#3. [L]et my reader who is puzzled by my awkward explanations close his eyes for no more than two minutes, and see if he does not find himself suddenly not a compact human being at all, but only a consciousness on a sea of sound and touch ...
Shirley Jackson
#4. ... That little narrative is an example of the mathematician's art: asking simple and elegant questions about our imaginary creations, and crafting satisfying and beautiful explanations. There is really nothing else quite like this realm of pure idea; it's fascinating, it's fun, and it's free!
Paul Lockhart
#5. All three explanations - eternal life, reincarnation, and nothingness - are descriptions of the same reality.
John K. Brown
#6. Frazer is much more savage than most of his savages, for they are not as far removed from the understanding of spiritual matter as a twentieth-century Englishman. His explanations of primitive practices are much cruder than the meaning of these practices themselves.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
#7. Poetry is a series of explanations of life, fading off into horizons too swift for explanations.
Carl Sandburg
#8. Oh, where is the Fairy Godmother of explanations when you need her?
Allison Pearson
#9. I'm drawing a diagram of what time looks like if you're looking straight into it - like looking down a tunnel and seeing a circle, if the tunnel were an angry ten-dimensional crab, which is what, in vastly oversimplified terms, we mean by the human word time.
Austin Grossman
#10. After thee accumulation of too much history we have lost our innocence, we cannot easily believe in any explanations. We describe rather than feel, we touch rather than explore, we lust rather than adore.
Genesis P-Orridge
#11. We spent a few hours struggling to come up with better explanations, but each suggestion was shot down almost as soon as it was made. The suggestions became wilder, eventually to the point of silliness.
Donald G. Firesmith
#12. I don't believe in twisting yourself into knots of excuses and explanations over the food you make.
Julia Child
#13. Supernatural explanations always mean the end of inquiry: that's the way God wants it, end of story. Science, on the other hand, is never satisfied: our studies of the universe will continue until humans go extinct.
Jerry A. Coyne
#14. The purpose of all our explanations is not to have you understand anything, but for you to snap from the understanding of the intellect to the understanding of pure spirit. All our explanations work backwards.
Frederick Lenz
#15. Truth is truth, not the explanations of Truth. Truth is a living, moving process. Truth is constantly undulating and vibrating. You can become one with the Truth, but you cannot adequately explain it.
Ilchi Lee
#16. I understand what happens to the brain when people are near death, and I had always believed there were good scientific explanations for the heavenly out-of-body journeys described by those who narrowly escaped death.
Eben Alexander
#17. In one thing you have not changed, dear friend," said Aragorn: "you still speak in riddles."
"What? In riddles?" said Gandalf. "No! For I was talking aloud to myself. A habit of the old: they choose the wisest person present to speak to; the long explanations needed by the young are wearying.
J.R.R. Tolkien
#18. This is one of the difficulties and pleasures of studying the Inklings; Christians all, they offer, along with the expected 20th-century psychological explanations for behavior, unexpected spiritual ones.
Philip Zaleski
#19. Scientists - who prefer explanations subject to laboratory tests - figure that everything we see today was as inevitable as wrinkles, once the Big Bang established physics. Stars and planets were cooked up as huge clouds of matter collapsed and coalesced.
Seth Shostak
#20. Explanations take the mystery out of things, right?
Sarah Ockler
#21. If we could somehow end child abuse and neglect, the eight hundred pages of DSM (and the need for the easier explanations such as DSM-IV Made Easy: The Clinician's Guide to Diagnosis) would be shrunk to a pamphlet in two generations.
John Briere
#22. People need things like that to go on living - mental landscapes that have meaning for them, even if they can't explain them in words. Part of why we live is to come up with explanations with these things. That's what I think.
Haruki Murakami
#23. The human mind has a superglue-like quality: Once a viewpoint has been plucked from the swirling chaos of beliefs and explanations, then the mind quickly solidifies that view, resisting any future modification.
Charles Hugh Smith
#24. If you reject the infinite, you are stuck with the finite, and the finite is parochial ... the best explanation of anything eventually involves universality, and therefore infinity. The reach of explanations cannot be limited by fiat.
David Deutsch
#25. Afterlife is no less implausible than anything else,' I said. 'All explanations of existence are equally incredible.' 'So you might as well believe something that makes you feel good as not,
Robert B. Parker
#26. From 15 to 18 is an age at which one is very sensitive to the sins of others, as I know from recollections of myself. At that age you don't look for what is hidden. It is a sign of maturity not to be scandalized and to try to find explanations in charity.
Flannery O'Connor
#27. There is no way back. No other explanations have been offered, in two thousand years of sneering skepticism toward the Christian witness, that can satisfactorily account for how the tomb came to be empty, how the disciples came to see Jesus, and how their lives and worldviews were transformed.
N. T. Wright
#28. He reached up and traced her cheek with the outside of his fingers. "Guys like me look for reasons. We look for explanations. I've been trying for hours to make sense out of this, and I only know two things. When it comes to you and Santa Claus, 'sense' doesn't work. And I love you.
Sierra Donovan
#29. Southerners had a long tradition of looking for religious significance in even the most humble forms of nature, and I always preferred the explanations of folklore to the icy interpretations of science.
Pat Conroy
#30. Though she teased at explanations of sorcery in both her life and in her art (an early dust-flap biography called her "a practicing amateur witch," and
Shirley Jackson
#31. People suffering nervous breakdowns often do a lot of research, to find explanations for what they are undergoing. the research, of course fails.
Philip K. Dick
#32. But faced with this great wrinkled paw, neither ignorance nor knowledge was important: the world of explanations and reasons is not the world of existence.
Jean-Paul Sartre
#33. Science usually operates in sort of three modes, things that are well established, we know what we're talking about, more highly confident. There are competing explanations, we have a pretty good idea, but we're not sure. And then things are speculative.
Stephen Schneider
#34. Such are the lives of those who haven't the courage to risk: solutions are generously provided by God, but people always seek complicated explanations, and end up doing nothing.
Paulo Coelho
#35. Of God in my life. I surrender my mind, my heart, my need for safety, and my need for rational explanations and orderly instructions to God's will for me. I trust that all that is in my life is as it should be. I release
Caroline Myss
#36. Oh, stop it, I tell myself. Stop looking for links and meaning and explanations. What did De Chirico say? The world is a museum of strangeness.
Kirsty Eagar
#37. By thus rending the veil of monotony and showing that everything is in constant need of and obedient to His Lordship, He dispels heedlessness and turns humanity and jinn from (natural) causes to Himself as the Creator of causes. This basic principle is evident in the Qur'anic explanations.
Bediuzzaman Said Nursi
#38. We are living a life full of first experiences, from a first kiss, to the first time giving blood, to conceptual and philosophical explanations of humanity's firsts.
Kat Lahr
#39. An important consequence of giving highest priority to the metaphor of Moral Strength is that it rules out any explanations in terms of social forces or social class.
George Lakoff
#40. The old man laughed. Now that I did find unsettling. They always laugh right before they kill you. After the long explanation of their evil deeds and right before they kill you. Always. They must have been too rushed for explanations.
Iain Rowan
#41. Stories are not explanations of the world we live in. Science does that, and math does that. Our obligation as fiction writers is to enhance the mysteries.
Tim O'Brien
#42. The message, which one fall or another of the coin would eventually give him, was how to get himself out of his chamber and into Nepenthe's, so that he could tell her why he had not come to tell her why he had not come.
Patricia A. McKillip
#43. There are three kinds of explanation in science: explanations which throw a light upon, or give a hint at a matter; explanations which do not explain anything; and explanations which obscure everything.
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
#44. With the destruction of history, contemporary events themselves retreat into a remote and fabulous realm of unverifiable stories, uncheckable statistics, unlikely explanations and untenable reasoning.
Guy Debord
#45. But the stupidity which is common to all such "explanations" is, of course, simply that of proceeding as though the merits of a theory - such things as truth, or probability, or explanatory power - could not possibly be among the reasons for its currency.
David Stove
#46. Some explanations of a crime are not explanations: they're part of the crime.
Olavo De Carvalho
#47. Freud 's fanciful pseudo-explanations (precisely because they are brilliant) perform a disservice. (Now any ass has these pictures available to use in "explaining" symptoms of an illness.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
#48. We are all getting tired of the Village Explainers. Explanations don't seem to be explaining very much anymore. Authoritative accounts have a way of looking like official lies, which in their solemnity start to sound funny.
David Shields
#49. And the actual achievements of biology are explanations in terms of mechanisms founded on physics and chemistry, which is not the same thing as explanations in terms of physics and chemistry.
Michael Polanyi
#50. That's the way of all good explanations. The better they are, the more questions they raise.
John Brockman
#51. There was no denying the reality of this situation. The exquisite ecstasy of having an honest-to-God, flesh-and-blood c#ck inside. Dream symbolisms and explanations be damned. This was bliss.
Jess Dee
#52. The one man who should never attempt an explanation of a poem is its author. If the poem can be improved by it's author's explanations it never should have been published, and if the poem cannot be improved by its author's explanations the explanations are scarcely worth reading.
Archibald MacLeish
#53. So called art films. Movies like that never explained what was going on. Explanations were rejected as some kind of evil that could only destroy the films "reality".
Haruki Murakami
#54. Sorting out what's good and bad is the province of ethics. It is also what keeps priests, pundits, and parents busy. Unfortunately, what keeps children and philosophers busy is asking the priests, pundits and parents, Why?
Thomas Cathcart
#55. Any philosophy is a sacrilege against creation. It just gives people the kinds of explanations that they want to hear.
Sadghuru
#56. I'm not very good at giving people orderly explanations of things.
Haruki Murakami
#57. [A certain class of explanations in science are] analgesics that dull the ache of incomprehension without removing the cause.
Peter Medawar
#58. The notion must be put aside that emotions are irrational and we must see emotions for their true function. This will not rob the emotional content, it will merely explain it. Some things when more deeply explained provide greater sources of personal and corporate pleasure, not less.
Leviak B. Kelly
#59. Bigotry has always been the poison of America, and we oughta do everything to eradicate it with no excuses or explanations.
Chuck Schumer
#60. One of the things I found is that the things we want to say for well-intentioned motives often cause more harm than good. People don't need our words. They mainly need our presence, they need our love. And if you come in too quickly with explanations, you may do more harm than good.
Philip Yancey
#61. We do not live in a world that mainly suffers bad policies due to lack of ideas about better ones, or lack of elegant explanations supporting good policies, but one that suffers bad policies due to system and meta-system level incentives.
Patri Friedman
#62. The traces of our life here will lie cold and still, dreaming, like the brittle eyes of dolls in an abandoned cabin, and the last men will look to them for explanations, or apologies.
Tim Cahill
#63. And in declaring true every theory that does not contravene the evidence of the senses, Epicurus does not blink the fact that the philosopher may arrive at more than one explanation for a given phenomenon - in some cases, even at explanations that are mutually exclusive or contradictory.
Titus Lucretius Carus
#64. You see, when a tragedy like this strikes, it is part of our nature to demand explanations - to try to impose some order on the chaos, and make sense out of that which seems senseless.
Barack Obama
#65. fallacies and not the correct explanations. But here follows a refutation of their reasonings independently of the texts. This is the difference.
With regard to this the Sathkhyas
Sankaracarya
#66. A great man always knows better than to explain unless an explanation is demanded. To rush into explanations and excuses is always a sign of weakness.
Agatha Christie
#67. However much I might try to expound or explain Love, when I come to Love itself, I am ashamed of my explanations ... Love alone can explain the mysteries of love and lovers.
Rumi
#68. God doesn't owe us an explanation for everything and actually what I've found is that explanations don't comfort. What comforts is the presence of God, not the explanation of God.
Rick Warren
#69. I found that the recipes in most - in all - the books I had were really not adequate. They didn't tell you enough ... I won't do anything unless I'm told why I'm doing it. So I felt that we needed fuller explanations so that if you followed one of those recipes, it should turn out exactly right.
Julia Child
#70. Religion is not God himself or herself. It is a system of teaching about God, an explanation of God's way to human minds. But God doesn't need explanations to exist.
Ilchi Lee
#71. They questioned us but they were polite because we had passports and money. I do not think they believed a word of the story and I thought it was silly but it was like a law-court. You did not want something reasonable, you wanted something technical and then stuck to it without explanations.
Ernest Hemingway,
#72. The explanations race through my mind, but before I can think of any more, I see a giant, grayish-purple body coming through the doors. The jewels, the gaudy clothing, the styled-up trunk ornament, the fancy giant-sized shoes. Make no mistake, Two Van Faye has walked into the building.
Andrew Vu
#73. Science is not a thing. It's a verb. It's a way of thinking about things. It's a way of looking for natural explanations for all phenomena.
Michael Shermer
#74. To prevent discussion of any other explanations of human origins is hardly what I would expect from open-minded educators.
Tony Campolo
#75. Anything that we can destroy but are unable to make is, in a sense sacred, and all our 'explanations' of it do not really explain anything.
E.F. Schumacher
#76. Fourier's theorem has all the simplicity and yet more power than other familiar explanations in science. Stated simply, any complex pattern, whether in time or space, can be described as a series of overlapping sine waves of multiple frequencies and various amplitudes.
Bruce Hood
#77. Of two equivalent theories or explanations, all other things being equal, the simpler one is to be preferred.
William Of Ockham
#78. Science is the process of obscuring the marvelous with explanations.
James Rozoff
#79. The reason people turn to supernatural explanations is that the mind abhors a vacuum of explanation. Because we do not yet have a fully natural explanation for mind and consciousness, people turn to supernatural explanations to fill the void.
Michael Shermer
#80. It is the desire for explanations that are at once systematic and controllable by factual evidence that generates science; and it is the organization and classification of knowledge on the basis of explanatory principles that is the distinctive goal of the sciences.
Ernest Nagel
#81. As the ancient Greeks replaced myth-based explanations with mechanistic models of the Solar System, their emphasis shifted from asking why to asking how.
Max Tegmark
#82. It's time we stand up and demand more of the fathers of this world. It's time we stop buying into their rationalizations and their sorry explanations. It's time we give our kids a fighting chance.
Dan Pearce
#83. Every articulate family ... generates its own stories, explanations and myths to illuminate the differences in temperament and talent among its children, the lines of allegiance and influence between parent and child.
Elizabeth Fishel
#84. It is human nature to concoct explanations to fill the great void of the unknown.
Rae Carson
#85. Belief is like that, a circle, and often I find that the seemingly simplistic explanations from childhood for the unexplainable have merit, maybe more so than all the educated and contrived answers of adulthood.
Frances A. Washburn
#87. ...the absence of certainty does not mean that one interpretation is as valid as any other. Probabilities and plausibilities matter; and when the evidence is less precise or less tangible than we would like it to be, some explanations are still more likely than others.
Mary Lefkowitz
#88. [Modern scientific] theories can necessarily never be more than hypothetical, since their starting-point is wholly empirical, for facts in themselves are always susceptible of diverse explanations and so never have been and never will be able to guarantee the truth of any theory.
Rene Guenon
#89. Personal Construct Therapy was the pioneer of a fully constructivist psychology, emphasizing that people are essentially like scientists in continually developing meanings and explanations of the world, which are employed to guide action and decision making.
Jacqui Stedmon
#90. THE MISCONCEPTION: When you can't explain something, you focus on what you can prove. THE TRUTH: When you are unsure of something, you are more likely to accept strange explanations.
David McRaney
#91. For all live births, the mean pregnancy length is 38.6 weeks, the standard deviation is 2.7 weeks, which means we should expect deviations of 2-3 weeks to be common.
Allen B. Downey
#92. With Jesus, however, the device of parabolic utterance is used not to explain things to people's satisfaction but to call attention to the unsatisfactoriness of all their previous explanations and understandings.
Robert Farrar Capon
#93. The challenge of elucidating living processes
including consciousness and all its baggage which we bundle together as 'the human spirit'
is only one example of a challenge where hard work is paying off and science does not need to accept the false explanations peddled by religions.
Peter Atkins
#94. Pooh! Grown-ups are always thinking of uninteresting explanations.
C.S. Lewis
#95. Set aside the many competing explanations of the Big Bang; something made an entire cosmos out of nothing. It is this realization-that something transcendent started it all-which has hard-science types ... using terms like 'miracle.'
Gregg Easterbrook
#96. In truth, the best long-term explanations about our ancient counterparts can be found in the paintings, sculpture, crafts, tools of utility, language and architecture left behind. These are the building blocks of civilization we call culture. These are what we call 'the arts.
Edward J. Fraughton
#97. [The aim of science is] to explain what so far has taken to be an explicans, such as a law of nature. The task of empirical science constantly renews itself. We may go on forever, proceeding to explanations of a higher and higher universality ...
Karl Popper
#98. Visigoth and Gaul, politics and plague. She fought on, struggling in tandem with antiquated interpretations and outmoded explanations, wondering at the senselessness of something so strong, so powerful, so immovable fading from history, disappearing, once and for all time, into shadow and dust.
Fiddles McMonkeypants
#99. The dead have a claim on us even heavier than that of the living, for they cannot hear our explanations, and we cannot ask their forgiveness.
Laurie R. King
#100. Naturalism by its purpose engineers the displacement of the miracle and puts in its place explanations that defy reason. Those who smirk at His walking on water have forgotten the miracle He has already performed in the very composition of water. Think
Ravi Zacharias
