Explanation Quotes - Page 23

• Existence is a mystery , and one should accept it as a mystery and not pretend to have any explanation .

  Rajneesh

  Mystery, Accepting, Should

  "Never Born, Never Died". Book by Osho, 2002.

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• Jesus doesn't give an explanation for the pain and sorrow of the world. He comes where the pain is most acute and takes it upon himself. Jesus doesn't explain why there is suffering, illness, and death in the world. He brings healing and hope. He doesn't allow the problem of evil to be the subject of a seminar. He allows evil to do its worst to him. He exhausts it, drains its power, and emerges with new life.

  N. T. Wright

  Death, Christian, Hope

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• I should say that, in addition to my tree-love (it was originally called The Tree), it arose from my own pre-occupation with the Lord of the Rings, the knowledge that it would be finished in great detail or not at all, and the fear (near certainty) that it would be 'not at all'. The war had arisen to darken all horizons. But no such analyses are a complete explanation even of a short story.

  J. R. R. Tolkien

  War, Tree, Details

  Letter to Caroline Everett, June 24, 1957.

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• I was instructed long ago by a wise editor, "If you understand something you can explain it so that almost anyone can understand it. If you don't, you won't be able to understand your own explanation." That is why 90% of academic film theory is bullshit. Jargon is the last refuge of the scoundrel.

  Roger Ebert

  Wise, Long Ago, Editors

  Roger Ebert (2009). “Roger Ebert's Movie Yearbook 2010”, p.583, Andrews McMeel Publishing

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• Any philosophic explanation of Quality is going to be both false and true precisely because it is a philosophic explanation. The process of philosophic explanation is an analytic process, a process of breaking something down into subjects and predicates. What I mean (and everybody else means) by the word 'quality' cannot be broken down into subjects and predicates. This is not because Quality is so mysterious but because Quality is so simple, immediate and direct.

  Robert M. Pirsig

  Mean, Simple, Broken

  "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance". Book by Robert M. Pirsig, 1974.

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• When we look to presumed sources of origin for competing evolutionary explanations of the giraffe's long neck, we find either nothing at all, or only the shortest of speculative conjectures. Length, of course, need not correspond with importance. Garrulous old Polonius , in a rare moment of clarity, reminded us that "brevity is the soul of wit" (and then immediately vitiated his wise observation with a flood of woolly words about Hamlet 's Madness.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Wise, Long, Soul

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• Novelists are people who have discovered that they can dampen their neuroses by writing make-believe. We will keep on doing that no matter what, while offering loftier explanations.

  Kurt Vonnegut

  Believe, Writing, Offering

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• Even if surrounded with explanations, Auschwitz can never be grasped.

  Gunter Grass

  Auschwitz, Ifs

  "The Boys' Crusade". Book by Paul Fussell (p. 15), September 9, 2003.

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• Man is even as steel, the essence of which is hidden: through admonition and explanation, good counsel and education, that essence will be brought to light. If, however, he be allowed to remain in his original condition, the corrosion of lusts and appetites will effectively destroy him.

  Bahá'u'lláh

  Men, Light, Essence

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• Historical science is not worse, more restricted, or less capable of achieving firm conclusions because experiment, prediction, and subsumption under invariant laws of nature do not represent its usual working methods. The sciences of history use a different mode of explanation, rooted in the comparative and observational richness in our data. We cannot see a past event directly, but science is usually based on inference, not unvarnished observation (you don't see electrons, gravity, or black holes either).

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Past, Law, Data

  "Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History". Book by Stephen Jay Gould, p. 279, 1989.

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• We injure mysteries, which are matters of faith by any attempt at explanation in order to make them matters of reason.

  Charles Caleb Colton

  Order, Matter, Mystery

  Charles Caleb Colton (1823). “Remarks on the Talents of Lord Byron and the Tendencies of Don Juan”

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• Science as we now understand the word is of later birth. If its germinal origin may be traced to the early period when Observation, Induction, and Deduction were first employed, its birth must be referred to that comparatively recent period when the mind, rejecting the primitive tendency to seek in supernatural agencies for an explanation of all external phenomena, endeavoured, by a systematic investigation of the phenomena themselves to discover their invariable order and connection.

  George Henry Lewes

  Agency, Order, Mind

  George Henry Lewes (1864). “Aristotle: a chapter from the history of science including analyses of Aristotle's scientific writings”, p.26, London : Smith, Elder and Company

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• Chicken exits are self-sabotage. They give you a false explanation for why you don't have something you want.

  Ali Vincent

  Self, Giving, Want

  Ali Vincent (2009). “Believe It, Be It: How Being the Biggest Loser Won Me Back My Life”, p.109, Rodale

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• Christian apologists who argue that a story about an empty tomb is convincing evidence of a resurrected body are likely unfamiliar with Occam’s razor, which states that among competing hypotheses, the hypothesis with the fewest assumptions should be selected. They assume that the most likely explanation is miraculous resurrection through some unproven divine connection, but more likely scenarios include a stolen body, a mismarked grave, a planned removal, faulty reports, creative storytelling, edited scriptures, etc. No magic required.

  David G. McAfee

  Christian, Convincing Evidence, Creative

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• In truth, the best long-term explanations about our ancient counterparts can be found in the paintings, sculpture, crafts, tools of utility, language and architecture left behind. These are the building blocks of civilization we call culture. These are what we call 'the arts.

  Edward J. Fraughton

  Art, Block, Civilization

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• Where two factions see vividly each its own aspect, and contrive their own explanations of what they see, it is almost impossible for them to credit each other with honesty.

  Walter Lippmann

  Honesty, Two, Credit

  Walter Lippmann (2012). “Public Opinion”, p.69, Courier Corporation

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• The spontaneous tendency to invoke a Final Cause in explanation of every difficulty is characteristic of metaphysical philosophy. It arises from a general tendency towards the impersonation of abstractions which is visible throughout History.

  George Henry Lewes

  Philosophy, Finals, Causes

  George Henry Lewes (1864). “Aristotle: a chapter from the history of science including analyses of Aristotle's scientific writings”, p.86, London : Smith, Elder and Company

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• The nature of Christ is, I grant it, from one end to another, a web of mysteries; but this mysteriousness does not correspond to the difficulties which all existence contains. Let it be rejected, and the whole world is an enigma; let it be accepted, and we possess a wonderful explanation of the history of man.

  Napoleon Bonaparte

  Men, Doe, World

  "Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers" by Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, p. 423, 1895.

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• I don't really have an explanation. I'm struggling myself to comprehend what has happened and find a reason for it.

  Paula Radcliffe

  Struggle, Reason, Happened

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• 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

  Spiritual, Practice, Understanding

  Ludwig Wittgenstein, James Carl Klagge, Alfred Nordmann (1993). “Philosophical Occasions, 1912-1951”, p.131, Hackett Publishing

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• The painter's portrait and the physicist's explanation are both rooted in reality, but they have been changed by the painter or the physicist into something more subtly imagined than the photographic appearance of things.

  Jacob Bronowski

  Reality, Portraits, Appearance

  Jacob Bronowski (1965). “Science and Human Values”, HarperCollins Publishers

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• Explanations are clear but since no one to whom a thing is explained can connect the explanations with what is really clear, therefore clear explanations are not clear.

  Gertrude Stein

  Clear

  Gertrude Stein (2013). “Everybody's Autobiography”, p.188, Vintage

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• The application of psychoanalysis to sociology must definitely guard against the mistake of wanting to give psychoanalytic answers where economic, technical, or political facts provide the real and sufficient explanation of sociological questions. On the other hand, the psychoanalyst must emphasize that the subject of sociology, society, in reality consists of individuals, and that it is these human beings, rather than abstract society as such, whose actions, thoughts, and feelings are the object of sociological research.

  Erich Fromm

  Real, Mistake, Hands

  "Psychoanalyse und Soziologie". "Critical Theory and Society : A Reader" by S. E. Bronner, 1989.

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• The teacher does best, not when he explains, but when he impels his pupils to seek themselves the explanation.

  John Lancaster Spalding

  Teacher, Doe, Pupils

  John Lancaster Spalding (1901). “Aphorisms and Reflections: Conduct, Culture and Religion”

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• In his anti-Darwinian book... (and eponymously named The Neck of the Giraffe ), Francis Hitching tells the story... "The need to survive by reaching ever higher for food is, like so many Darwinian explanations of its kind, little more than a post hoc speculation." Hitching is quite correct, but he rebuts a fairy story that Darwin was far too smart to tell - even though the tale later entered our high school texts as a "classic case" nonetheless.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Smart, Book, School

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