Explanations Quotes

1. "It was a masterly piece of work. But once you began admitting explanations in terms of purpose— well, you didn't know what the result might be. It was the sort of idea that might easily decondition the more unsettled minds among the higher castes—make them lose their faith in happiness as the Sovereign Good and take to believing, instead, that the goal was somewhere beyond, somewhere outside the present human sphere; that the purpose of life was not the maintenance of well-being, but some intensification and refining of consciousness, some enlargement of knowledge. Which was, the Controller reflected, quite possibly true. But not, in the present circumstance, admissible."
Author: Aldous Huxley

2. "Chance; pure chance. But chance was a dull explanation because it denied the possibility of the paranormal, and people were often disappointed by dull explanations. Mystery and the unknown were far more exciting because they suggested that our world was not quite as prosaic as we feared it might be. Yet we had to adjure those temptations because they lead to a world of darkness and fear."
Author: Alexander McCall Smith

3. "Moral beauty existed as clearly as any other form of beauty and perhaps that was where we could find the God who was so vividly, and sometimes bizarrely, described in our noisy religious explanations. It was an intriguing thought, as it meant that a concert could be a spiritual experience, a secular painting a religious icon, a beguiling face a passing angel."
Author: Alexander McCall Smith

4. "Call to mind a person you've lost that you will miss to the end of your days,and then imagine happening upon that person out in public. . . . You wouldn't question your sanity, because you couldn't bear to think this wasn't real. And you certainly wouldn't demand explanations, or alert anybody nearby, or reach out to touch this person, not even if you'd been feeling that one touch was worth giving everything up for. You would hold your breath. You would keep as still as possible. You would will your loved one not to go away again."
Author: Anne Tyler

5. "With you I'm jealous of what is obscure, unconscious, of something in which explanations are unthinkable, of something that cannot be puzzled out. I'm jealous of your toilet things, of the drops of sweat on your skin, of the infectious diseases borne on the air, which may affect you and poison your blood."
Author: Boris Pasternak

6. "It's like I am inside this ethereal sphere wherein exists no logic, no reasoning, no typicality, no explanations, no realism, no comparisons, nothing ordinary, and no normalcy. And then if you are to understand me, you have to step into my realm and leave all of those things behind. I'm not typical. I'm not ordinary. And I'm not normal. And I never will be ?. So I don't see the point of waking up in the morning and wishing to be so."
Author: C. JoyBell C.

7. "I have no routines or personal history. One day I found out that they were no longer necessary for me and, like drinking, I dropped them. One must have the desire to drop them and then one must proceed harmoniously to chop them off, little by little. If you have no personal history, no explanations are needed; nobody is angry or disillusioned with your acts. And above all no one pins you down with their thoughts. It is best to erase all personal history because that makes us free from the encumbering thoughts of other people. I have, little by little, created a fog around me and my life. And now nobody knows for sure who I am or what I do. Not even I. How can I know who I am, when I am all this?"
Author: Carlos Castaneda

8. "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."
Author: Chinua Achebe

9. "Science is objective. And in my view we cannot take any experimental results seriously except in the light of good explanations of them."
Author: David Deutsch

10. "In time, most children stop being puzzled in this way. They settle in. The world around them, as it becomes familiar and daily, becomes ordinary. But for writers, like children who have never quite grown up, life retains a quality of strangeness; it remains a matter of questions for which there are no satisfactory answers, of hidden motives, displaced explanations, subtle concealments and mysteries. Eavesdropping of one kind or another, keeping an eye open and an ear cocked, even in public places, for the giveaway facial expression or gesture, the revealing word, becomes a settled habit for the writer, a necessary part of his professional equipment: the laying down of small scraps of information, of observation or experience, for future use."
Author: David Malouf

11. "There are no explanations for human evil. Only excuses."
Author: Dean Koontz

12. "Many of the lost will be found, eventually, dead or alive. Disappearances, after all, have explanations."
Author: Diana Gabaldon

13. "The Ph.D is one of the chosen who know that some things can never be fathomed, no matter how hard you try. What good are explanations? There is no possibility of explaining how such a work [Mozart's Requiem, in the instance] could ever have come into being. (The same holds true for certain poems, which should not be analyzed either.)"
Author: Elfriede Jelinek

14. "A frustrated friend once told me that I couldn't comment on a new traffic light at Maple and Arkansas without starting with the Magna Carta. Explanations do indeed seem to seep backward in all directions. The hard part is keeping them under control and giving them some focus."
Author: Elliott West

15. "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."
Author: Ernest Hemingway

16. "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."
Author: Ernest Nagel

17. "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."
Author: Fiddles McMonkeypants

18. "I've heard enough Potter explanations throughout the years to know the general shape of them, anyway."
Author: G. Norman Lippert

19. "Most people have some appreciation of mathematics, just as most people can enjoy a pleasant tune; and there are probably more people really interested in mathematics than in music. Appearances suggest the contrary, but there are easy explanations. Music can be used to stimulate mass emotion, while mathematics cannot; and musical incapacity is recognized (no doubt rightly) as mildly discreditable, whereas most people are so frightened of the name of mathematics that they are ready, quite unaffectedly, to exaggerate their own mathematical stupidity"
Author: G.H. Hardy

20. "The delay in the application of the policy to books has several explanations. For one thing, Blackshirts were not, nor have they yet become, bookworms; and the intellectual bread of Mussolini himself is made, usually, of clippings. They did not care too much about things which they could not hate since they usually did not know them...."
Author: Giuseppe Borgese

21. "Conversation! Supple sentences, with first and second meanings and overtones beyond, outrageous challenges with cleverly planned slip-points, rebuttals of elegant brevity; deceptions and guiles, patient explanations of the obvious, fleeting allusions to the unthinkable. As a preliminary, the conversationalist must gauge the mood, the intelligence and the verbal facility of the company. To this end, a few words of pedantic exposition often prove invaluable."
Author: Jack Vance

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."
Author: Jerry A. Coyne

23. "All three explanations—eternal life, reincarnation, and nothingness—are descriptions of the same reality."
Author: John K. Brown

24. "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."
Author: Julia Child

25. "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."
Author: Kirsty Eagar

26. "All time is all time. It does not change. It does not lend itself to warnings or explanations. It simply is."
Author: Kurt Vonnegut

27. "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."
Author: Kwame Anthony Appiah

28. "The art has to make it on its own, without explanations, and it's the same for poetry. If the poem or the painting has to be explained, then it's a failure in communication."
Author: Lawrence Ferlinghetti

29. "No, no! The adventures first, explanations take such a dreadful time."
Author: Lewis Carroll

30. "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."
Author: Lucretius

31. "Philosophers console themselves with explanations."
Author: Marty Rubin

32. "Science is not a game in which arbitrary rules are used to decide what explanations are to be permitted."
Author: Michael Behe

33. "In the abstract, it might be tempting to imagine that irreducible complexity simply requires multiple simultaneous mutations - that evolution might be far chancier than we thought, but still possible. Such an appeal to brute luck can never be refuted... Luck is metaphysical speculation; scientific explanations invoke causes."
Author: Michael J. Behe

34. "The green thumb is equable in the face of nature's uncertainties; he moves among her mysteries without feeling the need for control or explanations or once-and-for-all solutions. To garden well is to be happy amid the babble of the objective world, untroubled by its refusal to be reduced by our ideas of it, its indomitable rankness."
Author: Michael Pollan

35. "The black bird cocked its head to one side, and then said, in a voice like stones being struck, 'You shadow man.''I'm Shadow,' said Shadow. The bird hopped up onto the fawn's rump, raised its head, ruffled its crown and neck feathers. It was enormous and its eyes were black beads. There was something intimidating about a bird that size, this close.'Says he will see you in Kay-ro.' tokked the raven. Shadow wondered which of Odin's ravens this was: Huginn or Munnin, Memory or Thought.'Kay-ro?' he asked.'In Egypt.''How am I going to go to Egypt?''Follow Mississippi. Go south. Find Jackal.''Look,' said Shadow, 'I don't want to seem like I'm-- Jesus, look...' he paused. Regrouped. He was cold, standing in a wood, talking to a big black bird who was currently brunching on Bambi. 'Okay. What I'm trying to say is I don't want mysteries.''Mysteries,' agreed the bird helpfully.'What I want is explanations. Jackal in Kay-ro. This does not help me. It's a line from a bad spy thriller."
Author: Neil Gaiman

36. "People struggling with life in a fallen world often want explanations when what they really need is imagination."
Author: Paul David Tripp

37. "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."
Author: Paulo Coelho

38. "Sometimes It is really important to explain how much love and care you have for someone. It doesn't mean that If you have lot and do not need to explain but it means that explanations make a relationship more strong."
Author: Pawan Mehra

39. "The point of departure is a lack of explanations."
Author: Phindiwe Nkosi

40. "When I knelt to kiss her hand, she sighed heavily. 'Ask me nothing,' she said. 'Life itself is too joyless to be more embittered by explanations. Let all rest between us as now. I will love coldly, you warmly, with no nearer approaching.'("The Basilisk")"
Author: R. Murray Gilchrist

41. "I agree with people like Richard Dawkins that mankind felt the need for creation myths. Before we really began to understand disease and the weather and things like that, we sought false explanations for them. Now science has filled in some of the realm – not all – that religion used to fill."
Author: Richard Dawkins

42. "IGNORANCEI didn't know love would make me thiscrazy, with my eyeslike the river Ceyhuncarrying me in its rapidsout to sea,where every bitof shattered boatsinks to the bottom.An alligator lifts its head and swallowsthe ocean, then the oceanfloor becomesa desert coveringthe alligator insand drifts.Changes dohappen. I do not know how,or what remains of whathas disappearedinto the absolute.I hear so many storiesand explanations, but I keep quiet,because I don't know anything,and because something I swallowedin the oceanhas made me completely contentwith ignorance."
Author: Rumi

43. "Don't try to steer the boat. Don't open shop for yourself. Listen. Keep silent. You are not God's mouthpiece. Try to be an ear, And if you do speak, ask for explanations."
Author: Rumi

44. "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."
Author: Sherrilyn Kenyon

45. "I flicked my eyes over to Steve again and saw him straighten. He would need a diversion just to start."Explanations?" I bellowed. "Explanations? There's your explanation…there!" I stabbed a finger dramatically towards the far corner of the room.Pathetic, really. I mean, talk about the oldest trick in the book. But it's a good book, and the trick would have been cut from subsequent editions if it didn't sometimes work."
Author: Stephen Fry

46. "We humans seem to be extremely good at generating ideas, theories, and explanations that have the ring of plausibility. We may be relatively deficient, however, in evaluating and testing our ideas once they are formed"
Author: Thomas Gilovich

47. "Children need explanations and they deserve explanations."
Author: Todd Bridges

48. "Living organisms were not independently created, but have descended and diversified over time from common ancestors. And thus, no other biological theory so elegantly explains this. Evolutionary theory has withstood the test of time—by way of vicarious experimentation, observation, analysis, and relentless criticism, though opposing viewpoints still cling to the concept of "design." As a person of the biological sciences, I cannot subscribe to such misguided notions that suggest static biological states. Clearly, proper examination of the natural world reveal evolutionary trajectories—some random, others nonrandom—and all having observable genetic implications. It is only when we apply evolutionary explanations to living systems that it becomes ever so clear. The world was not specifically designed with us in mind, but rather we long since adapted and conformed to our surroundings, only giving it the illusionary appearance of "design."
Author: Tommy Rodriguez

49. "We dislike talking about our experiences. No explanations are needed for those who have been inside, and the others will understand neither how we felt then nor how we feel now."
Author: Viktor E. Frankl

50. "Scientists rightly resist invoking the supernatural in scientific explanations for fear of committing a god-of-the-gaps fallacy (the fallacy of using God as a stop-gap for ignorance). Yet without some restriction on the use of chance, scientists are in danger of committing a logically equivalent fallacy-one we may call the "chance-of-the-gaps fallacy." Chance, like God, can become a stop-gap for ignorance."
Author: William A. Dembski

Explanations Quotes Pictures