Top 100 Quotes About Explanations
#1. What appear to us to be causal explanations are in fact just stories - descriptions of what happened that tell us little, if anything, about the mechanisms at work.
Duncan J. Watts
#2. The more I think about our species the more I think we just do stuff and make up explanations later when asked. But it's not true that I would rather write than read. I would rather read than write. To be honest I would rather hang upside down in a bucket than write.
Douglas Adams
#3. The whole world seemed full of hurt feelings and apologies, endless selfishness and explanations. Wasn't there anything that anyone could understand about each other? Weren't there some hurt feelings that mattered more? Or did it all matter just as much, interminably, wound after wound?
Aoibheann Sweeney
#4. The aim of the early Greek philosophers was to find natural, rather than supernatural, explanations for natural processes.
Jostein Gaarder
#5. superiority as superiority" - automatically denied to those who asked for explanations.
Ayn Rand
#6. Writing reminds you of how much there is in your life that stands outside your explanations. In that way, it's almost a journey into faith and doubt at once.
Pico Iyer
#7. All the explanations proposed seem to be
only partly satisfactory. They range from massive climatic change to mammalian predation to the extinction of a plant with apparent laxative properties, in which case the dinosaurs died of constipation.
Carl Sagan
#9. Unfortunately, in the field of evolution most explanations are not good. As a matter of fact, they hardly qualify as explanations at all; they are suggestions, hunches, pipe dreams, hardly worthy of being called hypotheses.
Norman Macbeth
#10. I didn't just see a future when I looked at Luke - I saw the explanations of my past.
Nicole Williams
#11. For the better part of two centuries, outsiders have been offering explanations that range from racist to learned-sounding - the supposed inferiority of blacks, the heritage of slavery, overpopulation - for why Haiti remains the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere.
Adam Hochschild
#12. I want to convince you that these kinds of personal explanations of success don't work. People don't rise from nothing ... It is only by asking where they are from that we can unravel the logic behind who succeeds and who doesn't.
Malcolm Gladwell
#13. A friend who offers help without asking for explanations is a treasure beyond price.
Robert A. Heinlein
#14. We would understand much more about life's complexities if we applied ourselves to an assiduous study of its contradictions, instead of wasting time
on identities and coherences, seeing as these have a duty to provide their own explanations.
Jose Saramago
#15. Optimists, by contrast, look for specific, limited, short-term explanations for bad events, and as a result, in the face of a setback, they're more likely to pick themselves up and try again.
Paul Tough
#17. mostly I saw her efforts to induct me into adulthood much as a calf might see its mother's explanations of veal: I was being recruited into the great death march of biology - be born, reproduce, die.
Barbara Ehrenreich
#18. Just because science so far has failed to explain something, such as consciousness, to say it follows that the facile, pathetic explanations which religion has produced somehow by default must win the argument is really quite ridiculous.
Richard Dawkins
#19. Give your children big truths they will grow into rather than light explanations they will grow out of.
Tedd Tripp
#20. There are no explanations, there are no answers.
Jessica Lange
#21. In these explanations it is presumed that an experiencing subject is one occasion of a sensitive reaction to an actual world.'
the rain falls
that had not been falling
and it is the same world
George Oppen
#22. Many self-help books give you these neat, tidy formulas that are really illusions. They dupe people into thinking, 'Well if I can just do that, then everything's going to be okay.' My work differs in that I don't offer quick solutions and simple explanations.
John Bradshaw
#24. We have, as human beings, a storytelling problem. We're a bit too quick to come up with explanations for things we don't really have an explanation for.
Malcolm Gladwell
#25. I'm not dating Balthazar. I'm pretend dating him. Which involves some not pretend hand-holding. And maybe some not pretend kissing. But it's all actually pretend, see?
I groaned. My explanations were making my head hurt already.
Claudia Gray
#26. I think that's the way people absorb television. All the explanations in Doctor Who are there if that's your bag, but they're not essential to your enjoyment of it. An awful lot of storytelling isn't really about making people understand - it's about making people care.
Steven Moffat
#27. There is no waste of time in life like that of making explanations.
Benjamin Disraeli
#28. Good explanations are like bathing suits, darling; they are meant to reveal everything by covering only what is necessary.
E.L. Konigsburg
#29. No, no! The adventures first, explanations take such a dreadful time.
Lewis Carroll
#30. If you eliminate all possible explanations, then the impossible is the answer.
J.R. Ward
#31. It [the Quit India Resolution] was very far from being the Gita, but like Gita it suffered from flood of explanations, commentaries, and interpretations.
R.P. Noronha
#32. Money is like a child - rarely unaccompanied. When it disappears, look to those who were supposed to be keeping an eye on it while you were at the grocery store. You might also look for someone who has a lot of extra children sitting around, with long, suspicious explanations for how they got there.
Lemony Snicket
#33. I go out to take a walk, I see something, I take a picture. I take photographs. I have avoided profound explanations of what I do.
Saul Leiter
#34. Whereas a religion of many gods posits many myths to describe the human condition, a religion of one god tends to be monomythic; it not only rejects all other gods, it rejects all other explanations for God.
Reza Aslan
#35. Their explanations might have been completely legitimate, or they might have been sesquipedalian bushwa.
Orson Scott Card
#36. Science has not been successful by making up explanations of things that fit with the current social fabric.
Kary Mullis
#37. Coincidences are the explanations of lazy and cowardly people for what they don't understand.
Patricia Nedelea
#38. Simpler explanations are, other things being equal, generally better than more complex ones.
William Of Ockham
#39. Introspection and preserved writings give us far more insight into the ways of past humans than we have into the ways of past dinosaurs. For that reason, I'm optimistic that we can eventually arrive at convincing explanations for these broadest patterns of human history.
Jared Diamond
#40. When you add love to sex, it feels as if your soul is being drawn from the chains of gravity into the core of the infinite. New feelings come to life, emotions without explanations that we try to name with that perplexing little word we avoid using as if the word is sacred or sacrilegious.
Chloe Thurlow
#41. Due to personal issues, I have been let go from the cast of Glee. Explanations will come shortly,
Chris Colfer
#42. Don't waste your time with explanations: people only hear what they want to hear.
Paulo Coelho
#43. Even good excuses, really good ones, don't help very much.
Explanations, on the other hand, are both scarce and useful.
And accurate forecasts and insightful intuition are priceless.
Seth Godin
#44. Many of the lost will be found, eventually, dead or alive. Disappearances, after all, have explanations.
Diana Gabaldon
#45. All time is all time. It does not change. It does not lend itself to warnings or explanations. It simply is.
Kurt Vonnegut
#46. I decided then and there never to become someone who told jokes when explanations were impossible.
Jonathan Safran Foer
#47. No amount of wordy explanations will ever lead us into the nature of our own selves. The more you explain, the further it runs away from you. It is like trying to get hold of your own shadow. You run after it and it runs with you at the identical rate of speed.
D.T. Suzuki
#48. Doing mathematics should always mean finding patterns and crafting beautiful and meaningful explanations.
Paul Lockhart
#49. What I don't like so much is to give explanations about people's behaviour ... I'm not interested in making conclusions. I would never think about myself or anyone else, 'Well, this happened, this happened, this happened, so this must be the result.' It doesn't work like that with me.
Claire Denis
#50. You don't get explanations in real life. You just get moments that are absolutely, utterly, inexplicably odd.
Neil Gaiman
#51. It was a bunch of explanations but not an excuse. The bottom line is that no matter why I did the things I did, I always had a choice in doing them.
Jana Deleon
#52. Apologetic explanations do not develop unless there is a reality that has to be explained and defended. Jesus was undeniably a figure of history.
John Shelby Spong
#53. 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.
Chinua Achebe
#54. Watching a whole cluster of friends, and my own mother, die over quite a short space of time convinced me that purely materialist 'explanations' for our mysterious human existence simply won't do - on an intellectual level.
A. N. Wilson
#55. One reason we desire explanations is that they separate us and make us feel safe.
Rabih Alameddine
#56. Only professional mathematicians learn anything from proofs. Other people learn from explanations.
Ralph P. Boas Jr.
#57. I'm not interested in the words or the meaning of the words. I'm interested in disappearing in it completely, to not be aware of yourself at all. That's the way music works for me. It's purely emotional. It goes straight to the heart. There are no explanations. That's just it.
Karl Ove Knausgard
#58. They tear each other apart. Sometimes there aren't any happy endings or logical explanations and we just have to accept that and move on. Sometimes it really is that simple.
Sarah Ockler
#59. We don't need answers and explanations as much as we need God's presence in and through the suffering.
Tullian Tchividjian
#60. The mistake of all the religions is to look outside the world for explanations of the world, rather than rethinking the world itself, so that it offers up its own explanations for itself. The world itself must be self-explanatory.
Rebecca Goldstein
#61. Like most of us, Joe Biden has had moments when he's led the league in mistakes or verbal gaffes. The difference is his were on a public stage where explanations are almost always made out by pundits to be excuses.
Mike Barnicle
#62. Reality is far more complex and messy than many of the grander themes and explanations would have us believe.
Peter Dicken
#63. There are chemical and other explanations for addictions, but speaking from my own observations (and I am a shamanic type), there is always some sort of disembodied spirit causing some of the addiction, riding your energy field, trying to impose their needs and addictions onto you.
Robert Moss
#64. I should have thought of this years ago.
But that was the problem with being sane. Sane people played by the rules. They looked for rational explanations and solutions in an insane universe.
Sherrilyn Kenyon
#65. There is absolutely no reason to believe that those things for which science does not yet have natural explanations will turn out to be of supernatural origin, any more than volcanoes or earthquakes or diseases turn out to be caused by angry deities, as people once believed they were. Of
Richard Dawkins
#66. If we had to accept the idea of an independent creator, the explanations given in [several Buddhist texts] which completely refutes the existence per se of all phenomena, would be negated.
Dalai Lama
#68. A key issue in developmental biology at that time was the problem of how cells underwent differentiation, with most workers concentrating on explanations in terms of changes in enzyme and gene regulation.
Paul Nurse
#69. Hopefully we are emerging from an era of fantasy explanations for real phenomena. The authors certainly have to face a community of therapists who are obsessionally committed to explanations for disease and for therapy unsupported by a scrap of evidence except for their claimed therapeutic success.
Patrick David Wall
#70. We don't always have the explanations for certain events and acts of God. He is sovereign. He owes us no explanation. He purposes to teach us to walk by faith and not by sight. When Scripture records an event or judgment
Beth Moore
#71. It has been a long time since I believed in Reality. I prefer the loveliness and the terror of my subjective experiences to those coldly scientific explanations which in the long run turn out to be no more real, and far less fun, than my own fantasies and musings.
Sheldon B. Kopp
#72. There are alternate explanations for everything.
James Cook
#73. For explanations, they did not look in the pages of the visitor's book to see if others likewise found that ghostly happenings abound.
Eric Russell
#74. You like to demand explanations and then tell everyone why their explanations are crap.
Rainbow Rowell
#75. A writer should give direct certainty; explanations are so much water poured into the wine.
Virginia Woolf
#76. In short - to overstate the point only slightly - because people don't really know why they do what they do, they give explanations of their own behavior that are about as reliable as anyone else's, and in many circumstances actually less so.
Kwame Anthony Appiah
#77. I'm lying, yes, but why do you force me to give a linear explanation; linear explanations are almost always lies.
Elena Ferrante
#78. And let me take one of the explanations most commonly given: Analysts were pressured to reach conclusions that would fit the political agenda of one or another administration. I deeply think that is a wrong explanation.
David Kay
#79. I'd prefer a debriefing by the professional," Matthias said. "Rather than one of the idiot's exhausting, million-words-in-one-breath babbling explanations." "Hey," I said. "That is a rare talent." "Maybe your only talent.
A&E Kirk
#80. I usually become a ghost to
those who no longer deserve
my time. I've never seen a point
in explaining my absence to
someone who failed to
appreciate my presence. You
don't owe any explanations to
those who hurt you.
R H Sin
#81. The truly privileged theories are not the ones referring to any particular scale of size or complexity, nor the ones situated at any particular level of the predictive hierarchy, but the ones that contain the deepest explanations.
David Deutsch
#82. 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
#83. Try to live with the same intensity as a child. He doesn't ask for explanations; he dives into each day as if it were a new adventure and, at night, sleeps tired and happy.
Paulo Coelho
#84. Success requires no explanations. Failure permits no alibis.
Napoleon Hill
#85. 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
#86. Philosophers console themselves with explanations.
Marty Rubin
#87. We are led into philosophical confusion, thought Wittgenstein, by seeking explanations at times when we should instead simply stop and say, "This is how things are.
Carl Elliott
#88. Life is bigger than our explanations of it. To be in touch with life, go beyond your explanations.
Julio Olalla
#89. The past has no wholeness, it has been etiolated by revised explanations of it, trampled over by hindsight - all their lives.
Nadine Gordimer
#90. Genetically influenced behavior is not necessarily good and not necessarily unchangeable. Explanations of bad behavior that appeal to genes do not absolve a person any more than do explanations that appeal to upbringing.
Steven Pinker
#91. As far as I am concerned, a painting speaks for itself. What is the use of giving explanations, when all is said and done? A painter has only one language.
Pablo Picasso
#92. La mer is so much greater, so much grander than any petty human passion. It is itself, with no apologies and no explanations." Rosalind
Elaine Leclaire
#93. Emotions are wild horses. It is not explanations that carry us forward, but our will to go on.
Paulo Coelho
#94. Facts are aligned on shelves as well, necessarily chosen and arranged, assigned value by explanations neatly stuck where prices might have been.
Leslie Jamison
#95. It is an immutable law in business that words are words, explanations are explanations, promises are promises-but only performance is reality.
Harold S. Geneen
#96. The words she wanted to say burned her throat and tongue, explanations and declarations that would only cause more pain because the end would only be the same.
Sylvia Day
#97. When DEATH stares in our faces..
We can just 'stare' back at it!
'All' falls flat in the deathly moments!
No explanations, no reasons, no justifications sound good enough!! Acceptance alone stands out as the truth!
Abha Maryada Banerjee
#98. It's very common to say that Star Wars in the late '70s, that was kind of perfect for Cold War culture and the aftermath of Vietnam in the '60s to have an upbeat, hopeful, cartoonish tale of a hero's journey. I think those explanations are easy to offer and almost always wrong.
Cass Sunstein
#99. Whereas many philosophers and theologians appear to possess an emotional attachment to their theories and ideas ... scientists feel no qualms about suggesting different but mutually exclusive explanations for the same phenomenon.
Frank J. Tipler
#100. Long prayers either consist of repetitions or of unnecessary explanations which God does not require.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
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