Top 100 Quotes About Explanations
#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. Passion impels our deeds; ideology supplies the explanations.
Mason Cooley
#5. When we walk by faith, we live on promises, not on explanations.
Warren W. Wiersbe
#6. ... 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
#7. All three explanations - eternal life, reincarnation, and nothingness - are descriptions of the same reality.
John K. Brown
#8. With no one to confide in, she'd held the argument inside her own head and naturally found a way to dissolve facts into concepts and concepts into explanations that in the end explained nothing at all.
Vincent H. O'Neil
#9. Children need explanations and they deserve explanations.
Todd Bridges
#10. Simply having the courage to say senseless things made me euphoric. I was free, with no need to seek or to give explanations for what I was doing. This freedom lifted me to the heavens - where greater love, one that forgives everything and never allows you to feel abandoned, once again enveloped me.
Paulo Coelho
#11. We crave explanations for most everything, but innovation and progress happen when we allow ourselves to embrace uncertainty.
Simon Sinek
#12. 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
#13. For a long time the human instinct to understand was thwarted by facile religious explanations.
Carl Sagan
#14. Poetry is a series of explanations of life, fading off into horizons too swift for explanations.
Carl Sandburg
#15. Asking questions, demanding explanations - these things always led to trouble
Jennifer Donnelly
#16. Oh, where is the Fairy Godmother of explanations when you need her?
Allison Pearson
#17. 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
#18. This life journey has led me to love mystery and not feel the need to change it or make it un-mysterious. This has put me at odds with many other believers I know who seem to need explanations for everything.
Richard Rohr
#19. 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
#20. 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
#21. I don't believe in twisting yourself into knots of excuses and explanations over the food you make.
Julia Child
#22. 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
#23. Having words and explanations for things is too modern
E.L. Konigsburg
#24. 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
#25. Sometimes people need reasons for things, even when there are no reasons. That's what makes people believe in conspiracies or religions - if there is any difference. The world is just too complicated, so they need simple explanations.
Tad Williams
#26. With our human limitations we're not always able to understand the explanations.
Madeleine L'Engle
#27. If you can't explain it better leave it... (Dexter Season 2....)
Deyth Banger
#28. 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
#29. 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
#30. 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
#31. People struggling with life in a fallen world often want explanations when what they really need is imagination.
Paul David Tripp
#32. Explanations comfort us by giving the impression that there is an order in things.
Mason Cooley
#33. If you can't understand it without an explanation, you can't understand it with an explanation.
Haruki Murakami
#34. Explanations don't comfort. You won't feel better if you know why. It won't hurt any less.
Rick Warren
#35. 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
#36. Those that know, do not need explanations, and those that do not, would not understand any explanations. (Biru)
Michelle Frost
#37. 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
#38. But the explanations fell apart in her hands. Everything true was too hard to write
he was too much to lose. Everything she felt for him was too hot to touch.
Rainbow Rowell
#39. I loved Sherlock Holmes as a kid, but I remember being disappointed when he'd come up with these simple explanations for these complex mysteries.
Peter Weir
#40. Explanations take the mystery out of things, right?
Sarah Ockler
#41. 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
#42. 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
#43. God has ordained that His people live by promises and not by explanations.
Warren W. Wiersbe
#44. 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
#45. 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
#46. now and it mustn't be broken under any circumstance. There was so much yet to be said, but it would all come in good time. So many meaningless apologies. So many strained explanations. Promises
Stefan Ahnhem
#47. 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
#48. I love it," I say. "So I learned it." It's an explanation that leaves a lot out. But I learned a long time ago that people don't really want explanations.
Jael McHenry
#49. 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
#50. 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
#51. 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
#52. 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
#53. 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
#54. 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
#55. Rather than looking for explanations for why all people deserve to be treated with compassion and respect, we ought to be working at creating a world in which people are treated with compassion and respect. Human rights aren't lying around waiting to be discovered. They're made, not found.
David Livingstone Smith
#56. 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
#57. The Left has always sought single, non-values-based explanations for human behavior.
Dennis Prager
#58. 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
#59. 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
#60. As children we all possess a natural uninhabited curiosity, a hunger for explanations, which seems to die slowly as we age
suppressed, I suppose by the need not to appear ignorant.
Mahlon Hoagland
#61. The truth is that when it comes to suffering, if we do not go to our graves in confusion, we will not go to our graves trusting. Explanations are a substitute for trust.
Tullian Tchividjian
#62. While political and cultural factors are important as explanations for differences in national technology policy and industrial practices, emergent trends in science, engineering and management are leading to new paradigms for high-technology innovation in both Japan and the United States.
Lewis M. Branscomb
#63. Moths don't need to explain why their attracted to the light.
Marty Rubin
#64. We tolerate, even promote, many things we once regarded as evil, wrong, or immoral. And then we seek "explanations" for an act that seems beyond comprehension. Remove societal restraints on some evils and one can expect the demons to be freed to conduct other evil acts.
Cal Thomas
#65. Freemasonry is a Jewish establishment, whose history, grades, official appointments, passwords, and explanations are Jewish from beginning to end
Isaac Mayer Wise
#66. 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
#67. 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
#68. 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
#69. Historians are presumed to be unable to "do psychology," which is "mystical" anyway, so they are forced to accept the most "rational" explanations ... "and it is on these that history is built.
Lloyd DeMause
#70. 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
#71. ...the more we do for a child the less he will do for himself. If we give him watered-down material, many explanations, much questioning, if we over-moralize, depend on the work book to work the mind, what thinking is left for the child to do?
Karen Andreola
#72. 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
#74. 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
#75. The most important training, though, is to experience life as a writer, questioning everything, inventing multiple explanations for everything. If you do that, all the other things will come; if you don't, there's no hope for you.
Orson Scott Card
#76. 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
#77. 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
#78. 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
#79. I think you can have 10,000 explanations for failure, but no good explanation for success.
Paulo Coelho
#80. Do you ever think that there used to be more sensible explanations about things than there are now?
Alice Munro
#81. I live my life as I deem appropriate and fitting; I offer no apologies, no explanations.
Aaron Burr
#82. Lisa, love is magical," Rema said. "Scientists give such simplified explanations for it, and they're wrong, because love isn't something that happens in your brain. Love happens in your soul.
Monique Snyman
#83. 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
#84. 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
#85. Some explanations of a crime are not explanations: they're part of the crime.
Olavo De Carvalho
#86. When multiple explanations exist, the simplest is usually correct.
Dan Brown
#87. 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
#88. 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
#89. 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
#90. Fisher just stood there lost in thought, without saying anything. There is always a rational explanation for everything in this world - whether it's the true one or not. Maybe it is better so. ("I'm Dangerous Tonight")
Cornell Woolrich
#91. One explains things until things have no meaning anymore.
Marty Rubin
#92. That's the way of all good explanations. The better they are, the more questions they raise.
John Brockman
#93. Asking questions is what brains were born to do, at least when we were young children. For young children, quite literally, seeking explanations is as deeply rooted a drive as seeking food or water.
Alison Gopnik
#94. 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
#95. God wants to free us from ourselves, and there's nothing like suffering to show us that we need something bigger than our abilities and our strength and our explanations.
Tullian Tchividjian
#96. 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
#97. 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
#98. Failure has a thousand explanations. Success doesn't need one.
Alec Guinness
#99. 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
#100. Good metaphors are "generative."13 The psychologist Donald Schon introduced this term to describe metaphors that generate "new perceptions, explanations, and inventions." Many
Chip Heath
