Things We Can't Explain Quotes

#1. I believe in metaphysics. I don't believe in God because I think that is a human simplification of the things we can't explain. But I believe in a greater universe.

Jochen Zeitz

#2. Do we use models to help us find the truth? Or do we know the truth first, and then develop the mathematics to explain it?

Arthur C. Clarke

#3. Small-business customers are very conservative and very cheap. We don't have to explain ourselves for the most part.

Paul Graham

#4. The effectance motive helps explain the progress principle: We get more pleasure from making progress toward our goals than we do from achieving them because, as Shakespeare said, Joy's soul lies in the doing.

Jonathan Haidt

#5. History, human or geological, represents our hypothesis, couched in terms of past events, devised to explain our present-day observations.

M. King Hubbert

#6. I just tell you what happens. I don't explain it.

Dashiell Hammett

#7. It's hard to explain how this works, and I admit that it's fairly implausible or untenable as a way of life, but that seems to be how I go about my days: peaceably in person, fiercely on paper.

Katie Roiphe

#8. There's no shame with Park. Nothing is dirty. Because Park is the sun, and that's the best way she could think to explain it.

Rainbow Rowell

#9. Who can explain just how he became the person he is? It does not happen this day or that one. It is a gradual evolution that happens largely unheralded. He simply was who he now was.

David Anthony Durham

#10. The album requires a certain focus of mine that I can't really explain - let's just say it's all I can really do while I'm doing it.

Eminem

#11. A good hypothesis in science must have other properties than those of the phenomenon it is immediately invoked to explain, otherwise it is not prolific enough.

William James

#12. Will someone please explain to me the logic that says we can trust someone with a Boeing 747 in bad weather but not with a Glock 9 millimeter?

Zell Miller

#13. Every time I meet people working in radio, I'm a little embarrassed. It's all pre-programmed, rigidly formatted stuff. Time and time again, when I talk to jocks, they say how jealous they are of the freedom we have on WKRP. I sometimes have to explain to them that it's not a real radio station.

Howard Hesseman

#14. I realized that I was African when I came to the United States. Whenever Africa came up in my college classes, everyone turned to me. It didn't matter whether the subject was Namibia or Egypt; I was expected to know, to explain.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

#15. There are objects you may desire but cannot explain. There are objects that are not nouns, there are actions that are not verbs. There are things we want that exist at the edge of the forest, at the rim of the ocean, just over the hill, just out of sight.

Charles Yu

#16. If you're an artist, you're an artist; that's the only way I can explain it.

Malik Bendjelloul

#17. He doesn't understand that books don't get used up. I've tried to explain that they aren't like clothes or furniture - that we keep them because we might want to read them again. And because they remind us of how we felt when we read them.

Paula Marantz Cohen

#18. Some things You have to let be lost Some battles, some battles You have to leave unfought. Then the truth just wastes away In all we dare not say. And in all we can't explain But I faithfully remain.

Ben Harper

#19. Accept that there are things in this world we can never explain and life will be understandable. That is the irony of life. It is also the beauty of it.

Tan Twan Eng

#20. 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

#21. There are things which are without answers, and there is nobody who can explain them. Either we feel them and sense them, or not. Sometimes we just give up and carry on.

Andrey Zvyagintsev

#22. We ding to music, to poems, to quotes, to writing, to art because we desperately do not want to be alone. We want to know we aren't going crazy and someone else out there knows exactly how you're feeling. We want someone to explain the things we can't.

Unknown

#23. She touched his hand for the last time. "Oh, Karim, that we have already done. But always there was a problem between us. How can I explain? I wasn't me, and you weren't you. From the very beginning to the very end, we didn't see things. What we did
we made each other up." p. 382

Monica Ali

#24. There are things that science as presently conceived does not help us to understand, and which we can see, from the internal features of physical science, that it is not going to explain. They seem to call for a more uncompromisingly mentalistic or even normative form of understanding.

Thomas Nagel

#25. The inexplicable happens all the time. It makes more sense to simply accept things we observe but cannot understand. It is really more scientific to keep an open mind. Until we can understand and explain the things we now label miracles, let us accept them and try to create more of them.

Bernie Siegel

#26. The reasons why we do the things we do will not always be the ones others will remember. Sometimes I think we have children because we want to leave behind someone who can explain who we were to the world.

Ayobami Adebayo

#27. How can we assert and test hypotheses if there are no such things as assertions that can be evaluated as true or false? How can we design experiments if there is not such thing as design? How can we explain anything if we do not assert anything and if others cannot understand it?

Angus J.L. Menuge

#28. There's no way to explain to a child that the line between good and evil isn't nearly as black and white as a fairy tale would leave you to believe. That an ordinary person can turn into a villain, under the right circumstances. That sometimes we dragon slayers do things we aren't proud of.

Jodi Picoult

#29. Some things take so long
But how do I explain
When not too many people
Can see we're all the same
And because of all their tears
Your eyes can't hope to see
The beauty that surrounds them
Now, isn't it a pity

George Harrison

#30. As Christians we need to be patient, understanding, and kind. Instead of going on the attack, we can ask genuine questions. Instead of bristling when our narrative is summarily dismissed, we can carefully explain our way of seeing things. And when we are wrong, we won't be afraid to say so.

Kevin DeYoung

#31. We had literary references, so we knew what we were talking about. We could quote things, talk about books we'd read; you can say something, you don't have to explain it.

Kevin Ayers

#32. When catastrophe strikes, we look for a signal in the noise - anything that might explain the chaos that we see all around us and bring order to the world again.

Nate Silver

#33. I am decidedly of the opinion that in very many instances we can trace such a necessary connexion, especially among birds, and often with more complete success than in the case which I have here attempted to explain.

Alfred Russel Wallace

#34. The existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement, explain American development.

Frederick Jackson Turner

#35. It's so nice to be insane, no one asks you to explain.

Helen Reddy

#36. A man driving a wagonload of children in a cage doesn't have to state his business. A farmer whose flesh lies sunken around his bones, and whose eyes are the colour of hunger, doesn't have to explain himself if he walks up to such a man. Hunger lies beneath all of our ugliest transactions.

Mark Lawrence

#37. Explain to the mothers and fathers of American servicemen that may come home in body bags why their son or daughter have to give up their life?

Sean Hannity

#38. You'll attract the employees you need if you can explain why your mission is compelling: not why it's important in general, but why you're doing something important that no one else is going to get done.

Peter Thiel

#39. I can't explain chemistry. I really can't. I haven't got a clue what it's all about. It just happens. It's like falling in love. You can't explain why you fall in love or explain why it's this particular person.

Elaine Stritch

#40. There's a power in words. There's a power in being able to explain and describe and articulate what you know and feel and believe about the world, and about yourself.

Tracy Chapman

#41. You don't get it." "No, I don't. You've attempted to explain and I still don't. Mostly because I never got the concept of bullshit and I still don't, even when a beautiful woman is trying to feed it to me.

Kristen Ashley

#42. His face contained for me all possibilities of fierceness and sweetness, pride and submissiveness, violence, self-containment. I never saw more in it than I had when I saw it first, because I saw everything then. The whole thing in him that I was going to love, and never catch or explain.

Alice Munro

#43. If you have to explain your sense of humor, then you are performing for the wrong crowd.

Shannon L. Alder

#44. That Mitt Romney, he is a master campaigner. This week he was introducing his wife, and he said, 'She is the heavyweight champion of my life. Which may explain why on the ride home, he was strapped to the roof of the car.

Bill Maher

#45. But many researchers operate as if it is their responsibility to demonstrate that video violence has a direct effect on the behaviour of young children, because that will help to explain why society is becoming more violent.

Hugh Mackay

#46. Death and vulgarity are the only two facts in the nineteenth century that one cannot explain away.

Oscar Wilde

#47. I realize you don't understand you shouldn't argue with me, and so I'll explain it to you. Don't argue with me.

Julie Garwood

#48. Like her father, he wasn't comfortable sharing his thoughts and feelings. She tried to explain that she needed to be closer to him, but it had never seemed to make a difference.

Nicholas Sparks

#49. I went through a period when I felt my film characters were having more fun than I was. It might partly explain why I ended up tattooed or doing certain extreme things in my life.

Angelina Jolie

#50. Just as it is impossible to explain childbirth to a woman who has never given birth, it is impossible to explain child loss to a person who has never lost a child.

Lynda Cheldelin Fell

#51. To be a true poet is to become God.
I tried to explain this to my friends on Heaven's Gate. 'Piss, shit,' I said. 'Asshole motherfucker, goddamn shit goddamn. Cunt. Pee-pee cunt. Goddamn!'
They shook their heads and smiled, and walked away. Great poets are rarely understood in their own day.

Dan Simmons

#52. It may be important to great thinkers to examine the world, to explain and despise it. But I think it is only important to love the world, not to despise it, not for us to hate each other, but to be able to regard the world and ourselves and all beings with love, admiration and respect.

Hermann Hesse

#53. It is not my intention to explain Turkey, its culture and its problems. My literature has a universal concern: I want to bring people and their emotions closer to my readers, not explain Turkish politics.

Orhan Pamuk

#54. We do not need to explain how the Aryans entered and settled in the Dravidian country, and subjugated and oppressed the Dravidians. Nor do we need to explain how before the Aryans entered the Dravidian country, the Dravidian country had a civilization and arts of the highest rank.

Periyar E.V. Ramasamy

#55. Magic is magic as long as humans can explain it logically!

Asse Sauga

#56. It's too hard to explain. I can't say why I love the book. I just do. You don't pick the books you fall in love with any more than you pick the people you fall in love with. It just happens, and when it happens, you know. Who's to say where love comes from?

Sarah Combs

#57. If you can explain a poem, it is not a poem. Poetry has to be inexplicable.

Luis Gonzalez

#58. Such labor follows in the steps of Freud, who has become the Ptolemy of psychology, for now, with him, anyone can explain human phenomena, raising epicycles upon epicycles ...

Stanislaw Lem

#59. When I play sports, when I dance, when I teach mysticism, I cannot explain, even to myself, how I do what I do.

Frederick Lenz

#60. God - but a word invoked to explain the world.

Alphonse De Lamartine