Top 100 Quotes About Explaining
#1. It's hard talking about acting, in a way, because it's like explaining a joke: I do think it loses something in the telling.
Martin Freeman
#2. I cannot in good conscience ask my colleagues to expend precious time and energy defending or explaining my past. We need all hands on deck, fighting for the future.
Van Jones
#3. And this," cried Darcy, as he walked with quick steps across the room, "is your opinion of me! This is the estimation in which you hold me! I thank you for explaining it so fully.
Jane Austen
#4. Writing has been a way of explaining to myself the things I do not understand.
Rosario Castellanos
#5. Many years ago I remember a famous actress explaining to me with perfect seriousness that before making an entrance she always stood aside to allow God to go on first. I can also remember that on that particular occasion He gave a singularly uninspired performance.
Noel Coward
#6. The notion of getting under the hood and explaining how something works, that's fairly familiar territory to me.
Scott McCloud
#7. As I write, there is a craze for what is called psychoanalysis, or the cure of diseases by explaining to the patient what is the matter with him: an excellent plan if you happen to know what is the matter with him, especially when the explanation is that there is nothing the matter with him.
George Bernard Shaw
#8. If I use the word 'khichdi' in my novel, I don't have to get into the trouble of explaining that it is a dish of rice and lentils. My Indian readers know it.
Ashwin Sanghi
#9. Here is the worst possible way for you to try to figure out if your idea solves somebody's problem: Ask them. The vast majority of entrepreneurs seem to think that explaining their concept in detail to a few people and then asking whether it's a good idea constitutes validation. It does not.
Laura Klein
#10. Economics is a highly sophisticated field of thought that is superb at explaining to policymakers precisely why the choices they made in the past were wrong. About the future, not so much.
Ben Bernanke
#11. And that's the beginning of the primary conversation in African American literature, right there: the African descendant explaining to the European descendant about how white people's actions are affecting the lives of black people.* In
Mat Johnson
#12. I am alone in the midst of these happy, reasonable voices. All these creatures spend their time explaining, realizing happily that they agree with each other. In Heaven's name, why is it so important to think the same things all together.
Jean-Paul Sartre
#13. To feel the soul without explaining it, without vocabulary, and to represent this sensation.
Yves Klein
#14. The best way to solve a problem? Try explaining it to somebody outside your field.
Jonah Lehrer
#15. [It's Not About You, Mr. Santa Claus,] is a fun read and a twist on Christmas, because it does involve Santa Claus and Jesus, and it doesn't say that Santa Claus is bad, but it's the child explaining to Santa Claus the true reason for the season is Jesus.
Soraya Diase Coffelt
#16. Not only have past processes made us what we are-"modern" or "postmodern" selves, rather than "medieval" or "early modern" selves-but by explaining them we both account for and implicitly justify present realities.
Brad S. Gregory
#17. For human words are like shadows, and shadows are incapable of explaining light and between shadow and light there is the opaque body from which words are born..
Jose Saramago
#18. I furnished the body that was needed to sit in the defendant's chair.
[Explaining his role in the Scopes Monkey Trial.]
John T. Scopes
#19. Professor Manley begins his first day of Uglification class by explaining why villains must be ugly to succeed. Ugliness releases you from the surface - from the prison of vanity and youur own looks - and sets you free to embrace the soul within.
Soman Chainani
#20. Eisman was now explaining why the world was going to blow up, but his partners were only half-listening ... because the financial world was blowing up.
Michael Lewis
#21. Men explain things to me, still. And no man has ever apologized for explaining, wrongly, things that I know and they don't.
Rebecca Solnit
#22. ... and [thanks] to Ludmila Parks for explaining to me that the world is divided into two kinds of people: those who have read the Brothers Karamazov and those who have not.
Marci Shore
#23. A valuable qualification of a modern politician seems to be a capacity for concealing or explaining away the truth ...
Dorothy Nevill
#24. 5. Your kids will be so grateful if you label and organize your photos now and if you stick a note on keepsakes explaining their significance. We settle a lot of estates, and it's frustrating to the next generation when they don't understand why something was left to them.
Anonymous
#25. Mama was always saying I was a brain snob, that I didn't like people who didn't think. I didn't know if that was snobby. Who wanted to walk around explaining everything to people all the time?
Jacqueline Woodson
#26. I stopped explaining myself when I realized other people only understand from their level of perception.
Anonymous
#27. I met a lot of hackers, and some of them were very arrogant. They thought I was stupid because I couldn't follow what they were talking about. But then I met this great guy whom companies hire to find their security holes, and he was very good about explaining so I could understand.
David Lagercrantz
#28. If you have a dream to fulfill,
don't waste your energies explaining how and why.
Paulo Coelho
#29. After explaining how a pearl is made she said: It's how we survive the hurts in life that brings us strength and give us our beauty.
Beth Hoffman
#30. Although to penetrate into the intimate mysteries of nature and thence to learn the true causes of phenomena is not allowed to us, nevertheless it can happen that a certain fictive hypothesis may suffice for explaining many phenomena.
Leonhard Euler
#31. [The Many-worlds interpretation is the] only completely coherent approach to explaining both the contents of quantum mechanics and the appearance of the world.
Hugh Everett III
#32. I was on the point of explaining to Gerald that the world has always laughed at its own tragedies, that being the only way in which it has been able to bear them. And that, consequently, whatever the world has treated seriously belongs to the comedy side of things.
Oscar Wilde
#33. And the venality of those Judaized is incapable of explaining anti-Semitism as a social phenomenon, we will call it the anti-Semitic theory.
A. C. Cuza
#34. They put it like that?' said Glenda, wide-eyed.
'Oh, you know the sort of thing if you read the papers a lot,' said Ponder. 'I seriously think they think that it is their job to calm people down by first of all explaining why they should be overexcited and very worried.
Terry Pratchett
#35. I really can't do a good job, any job, of explaining magnetic force in terms of something you're more familiar with, because I do not understand it in terms of something you are more familiar with.
Richard Feynman
#36. Ayn Rand more than anyone else did a fantastic job of explaining the morality of capitalism, the morality of individualism.
Paul Ryan
#37. I was already dozing off in the shade, dreaming that the rustling trees were my many selves explaining themselves all at the same time so that I could not make out a single word. My life was a beautiful mystery on the verge of understanding, always on the verge! Think of it!
Charles Simic
#38. If a theory purports to explain everything, then it is likely not explaining much at all.
Massimo Pigliucci
#39. I have always enjoyed explaining physics. In fact it's more than just enjoyment: I need to explain physics.
Leonard Susskind
#40. Maybe there's no such thing as real truth, just lots and lots of different ways of explaining the same thing.
Keren David
#41. And another way of explaining it is to say that shit happens, and there's no space too small, too dark and airless and fucking hopeless, for people to crawl into.
Nick Hornby
#42. The sole purpose of business is service. The sole purpose of advertising is explaining the service which business renders.
Leo Burnett
#43. In short, competition has to shoulder the responsibility of explaining all the meaningless ideas of the economists, whereas it should rather be the economists who explain competition.
Karl Marx
#44. Neither need we fear to diminish a miracle by explaining it.
Christopher Wren
#45. You do not interrupt a man when he is explaining his master plan after having been soundly defeated. Don't you watch any James Bond Movies?
Katie MacAlister
#46. Rowing was not simple for me. I nodded whenever the instructor made a point, as if I understood, but I could as easily have assembled the space shuttle as have repeated the moves she was explaining.
Barry S. Strauss
#48. Point taken. Thank you for explaining these things to me. Please continue to do so in the future." "I
Kresley Cole
#49. The Republican Party is terrific at determining how a program will impact the federal budget, but we're not nearly as good as the Democrats in explaining to people how our agenda will directly benefit them and their families.
J. C. Watts
#50. Explaining that I'm faced with a choice between being with the love of my life, or saving four lives that were never meant to end.
Alyson Noel
#51. He wasn't sure he liked everything that was happening, but a lot of it was "cultural," apparently, and you couldn't object to that, so he didn't. "Cultural" sort of solved problems by explaining that they weren't really there.
Terry Pratchett
#52. Know what makes a sentence more than a random list, practice constructing sentences and explaining what you have done, and you will know how to make sentences forever and you will know too when what you are writing doesn't make the grade because it has degenerated into a mere pile of discrete items.
Stanley Fish
#53. She gave a little delicate sniff. "You're supposed to be explaining yourself. When one's lifemate refuses to claim his woman, there should be a reasonable explanation."
"You have no desire for me to claim you," he pointed out.
"That's beside the point."
Dark Lycan, Christine Feehan
Christine Feehan
#54. In his second Inaugural Address, on March 5, 1821, Monroe admitted at last to a general depression of prices, but only as a means of explaining the great decline in the federal revenue. Despite this, he asserted that the situation of America presented a 'gratifying spectacle.'
Murray Rothbard
#55. The fat Russian agent was cornering all the foreign refugees in turn and explaining plausibly that this whole affair was an Anarchist plot. I watched him with some interest, for it was the first time that I had seen a person whose profession was telling lies - unless one counts journalists.
George Orwell
#56. Think ... of the world which you carry within yourself ... and set it above everything that you notice about you. Your inmost happening is worth your whole love, that is what you must somehow work at, and not loose too much time and too much courage in explaining your attitude to people.
Rainer Maria Rilke
#57. The less explaining you do the less people speculate.
M. V. Heberden
#58. In politics, if you're explaining, you're loosing.
Rick Perlstein
#59. I was always explaining why my term papers were never on time. I think that's where I got my acting training!
Greg Kinnear
#60. And the little prince said to the man, 'Grownups never understand anything for themselves, and it is tiresome for children to be always explaining things to them.
Antoine De Saint-Exupery
#61. Writing is the main gig and teaching and performing are sidelines, an excuse for not writing more. Working on a novel and on an opera make me seriously want to retire and find a volunteer job as a docent at the zoo explaining to schoolchildren where frogs go in the winter.
Garrison Keillor
#62. There is no explaining anything by reasoning and so it is useless to reason.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#63. You aren't explaining it very well." "Maybe," I said. "Or maybe you aren't learning it very well.
Jim Butcher
#64. Mystification has little to do with the vocabulary used. Mystification is the process of explaining away what might otherwise be evident
John Berger
#65. As a philosopher, you define constraints for any good theory explaining what you are interested in, then you go out and search for help in other disciplines.
Thomas Metzinger
#66. The dark and the light, they exist side by side,
Sometimes overlapping, one explaining the other.
The darkened path is as illuminated as the lightened,
Only the fear of the dark keeps us from seeing our way.
Raven Davies
#67. I like writing in an illustrative, descriptive way. I prefer describing to rather than explaining.
Iron & Wine
#68. He is not in the habit of explaining himself. He is not in the habit of discussing his successes. But whenever good fortune has called on him, he has been there, planted on the threshold, ready to fling open the door to her timid scratch on the wood.
Hilary Mantel
#69. I think that I was too self-centered to ever develop good skills as a peacemaker. In my younger days, I assumed that it was because I was smarter than everyone else, with no patience for explaining things in short words for mouthbreathers who just didn't get it.
Cory Doctorow
#70. It is actually the neuroscientists and evolutionists who do the best job of explaining the reasons behind the most unreasonable behavior.
Nancy Gibbs
#71. Fiction is often a much-needed step back that gives you the distance to see things more clearly; it's very often better at explaining why events happened as opposed to just what happened.
Kathleen Rooney
#72. Faking a smile is easier than explaining whay you are sad
Anonymous
#73. Too often we think we can act without explaining and take decisions without justifying them.
Peter Mandelson
#74. Philosophy is not in the business of explaining anything. Actual occasions explain what happened, not philosophy.
Bruno Latour
#75. I've never been particularly good at explaining or even understanding what this sort of rage is that is so accessible to me. I'm not an out-of-control person, but I can access in my work very easily a feeling of real fury. Thank goodness I've channeled it into my work, I guess.
Jason Robert Brown
#76. Using cold facts and figures, leaders throughout the West must become more transparent with their citizens in explaining their decisions and their choices in global markets.
Victor Ponta
#77. You are capable of explaining everything you feel. Why don't you go to the Emperor and talk to him?
Paulo Coelho
#78. Most good evangelical Study Bibles have more in common than people sometimes realize. All of them are committed to explaining the Bible to lay readers.
D. A. Carson
#79. It is better to be devoured by lions than to be eaten by dogs. Explaining why his Northwestern teams played difficult schedules.
Alex Agase
#80. Anna took a knife and fork in her beautiful, white, ring-adorned hands and began to demonstrate. She obviously could see that her explanation could not make anything understood, but, knowing that her speech was pleasant and her hands were beautiful, she went on explaining.
Leo Tolstoy
#81. Don't bother explaining - I've heard all the excuses and the trouble is most of them are true.
John Brunner
#82. The past wasn't dead, nor past. She herself was black, and was explaining the demographic of the Black Belt today by referring to slavery, still a visitable memory because of the persistence of its effects.
Paul Theroux
#83. The system becomes more coherent as it is further extended. The elements which we require for explaining a new class of facts are already contained in our system. In false theories, the contrary is the case.
William Whewell
#84. I'm sure you know by now, Jesse Jackson was overheard saying, and I'll put this more delicately, that he wanted to cut Barack Obama's testicles off. And Jesse has been on several news programs the last couple of days, explaining what he meant by those comments. Do you need to explain that?
Jay Leno
#85. It is because I believe that it is in the power of such nations to lead the world back into the paths of peace that I propose to devote myself to explaining what, in my opinion, can and should be done to banish the fear of war that hangs so heavily over the world.
Arthur Henderson
#86. We need people out talking about the President, explaining, agreeing with and praising his actions.
Robert Teeter
#87. [M]y favorite teacher was explaining that you don't say but however. These are pleonasms: the use of more words than necessary to express an idea. There are times in life that are very but however.
Stefano Benni
#88. Trey, I thought that the Znou was beautiful and I wanted to keep it," I say, explaining myself to him. "I wasn't trying to kill myself. If I get suicidal, you'll know 'cuz I'll be dead. The only thing I'm feeling right now is homicidal, so watch your back.
Amy A. Bartol
#89. Well, it just figures, Younger told him, like a man explaining his religion.
Richard Stark
#91. I wonder now whether it isn't dangerous to assign significance to that which is essentially vacant, but we can't seem to avoid it. We cover up the holes with our speech, explaining away the emptiness until we forget it is there.
Siri Hustvedt
#92. Three things, then. Escape, and finding work, and then explaining himself adequately. It was just those areas he had trouble with. Everything else, he was all right about.
Alan Moore
#93. Out of Dostoevsky: Kafka. Out of Tolstoy: Margaret Mitchell.
(in conversation, explaining his dislike for Tolstoy)
Joseph Brodsky
#94. Playing music well is difficult, yet the world has an abundance of fine performers. Explaining a little about music is easier, yet few do it well. Those who can do both supremely form a tiny club, whose honorary chairman is the conductor Michael Tilson Thomas.
Justin Davidson
#95. The receptionist xeroxed my insurance card while explaining that chromotherapy isn't covered by insurance.
Miranda July
#96. Religion. A daughter of Hope and Fear, explaining to Ignorance the nature of the Unknowable.
Ambrose Bierce
#97. Two weird people sitting weirdly explaining weird bits of deduction was, Misora worried, a scene of overwhelming weirdosity.
(pg. 87, DEATHNOTE: Another Note, The Los Angeles BB Murder Cases)
NisiOisiN
#98. In explaining any puzzling Washington phenomenon, always choose stupidity over conspiracy, incompetence over cunning. Anything else gives them too much credit.
Charles Krauthammer
#99. It is a total mystery how we evolved minds capable of piloting cars through wild maneuvers using a wrist to steep while shouting at a cell phone. The creationists are fools for focusing on animal evolution. Darwin explains nature! He has more difficulty explaining us.
David Brin
#100. If you wish to fault the administration, it is that we didn't have a clear picture and we probably didn't do as clear a job explaining that we did not have a clear picture until days later ...
Hillary Clinton
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