Explanation Quotes

“I don't accept the currently fashionable assertion that any view is automatically as worthy of respect as any equal and opposite view. My view is that the moon is made of rock. If someone says to me 'Well, you haven't been there, have you? You haven't seen it for yourself, so my view that it is made of Norwegian Beaver Cheese is equally valid' - then I can't even be bothered to argue. There is such a thing as the burden of proof, and in the case of god, as in the case of the composition of the moon, this has shifted radically. God used to be the best explanation we'd got, and we've now got vastly better ones. God is no longer an explanation of anything, but has instead become something that would itself need an insurmountable amount of explaining. So I don't think that being convinced that there is no god is as irrational or arrogant a point of view as belief that there is. I don't think the matter calls for even-handedness at all.”
― Douglas Adams

“Love is an endless mystery, because there is no reasonable cause that could explain it.”
― Rabindranath Tagore

“To live on a day-to-day basis is insufficient for human beings; we need to transcend, transport, escape; we need meaning, understanding, and explanation; we need to see over-all patterns in our lives. We need hope, the sense of a future. And we need freedom (or, at least, the illusion of freedom) to get beyond ourselves, whether with telescopes and microscopes and our ever-burgeoning technology, or in states of mind that allow us to travel to other worlds, to rise above our immediate surroundings.

We may seek, too, a relaxing of inhibitions that makes it easier to bond with each other, or transports that make our consciousness of time and mortality easier to bear. We seek a holiday from our inner and outer restrictions, a more intense sense of the here and now, the beauty and value of the world we live in.”
― Oliver Sacks

“Everything is complicated if no one explains it to you.”
― Fredrik Backman, My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry

“Calling it lunacy makes it easier to explain away the things we don't understand.”
― Megan Chance, The Spiritualist

“The explanation requiring the fewest assumptions is most likely to be correct.”
― Franciscan friar William of Ockham

“A word is a lot.”
― Etgar Keret

“In ancient times people weren't just male or female, but one of three types: male/male, male/female, or female/female. In other words, each person was made out of the components of two people. Everyone was happy with this arrangement and never really gave it much thought. But then God took a knife and cut everybody in half, right down the middle. So after that the world was divided just into male and female, the upshot being that people spend their time running around trying to locate their missing other half.”
― Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

“There has to be new words
to explain new worlds.”
― Toba Beta [Betelgeuse Incident], Betelgeuse Incident: Insiden Bait Al-Jauza

“It was so easy to be wise in the explanation of an experience one has not personally witnessed.

("The Wendigo")”
― Algernon Blackwood, Monster Mix

“Someone responding to intuition, to chance and fortune, often can't explain himself well.”
― Alec Wilkinson, The Ice Balloon: S. A. Andrée and the Heroic Age of Arctic Exploration

“People who live with OCD drag a metal sea anchor around. Obsession is a break, a source of drag, not a badge of creativity, a mark of genius or an inconvenient side effect of some greater function.”
― David Adam, The Man Who Couldn't Stop: OCD and the True Story of a Life Lost in Thought

“People struggling with life in a fallen world often want explanations when what they really need is imagination.”
― Paul David Tripp, Instruments in the Redeemer's Hands: People in Need of Change Helping People in Need of Change

“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

“There are progressions in which the last step is sui generis - incommensurable with the others - and in which to go the whole way is to undo all the labour of your previous journey. To reduce the Tao to a mere natural product is a step of that kind. Up to that point, the kind of explanation which explains things away may give us something, though at a heavy cost. But you cannot go on ‘explaining away’ for ever: you will find that you have explained explanation itself away. You cannot go on ‘seeing through’ things for ever. The whole point of seeing through something is to see something through it. It is good that the window should be transparent, because the street or garden beyond it is opaque. How if you saw through the garden too? It is no use trying to ‘see through’ first principles. If you see through everything, then everything is transparent. But a wholly transparent world is an invisible world. To ‘see through’ all things is the same as not to see.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man

“If I die very young, hear this:
I was never anything but a kid playing.
I was a heathen like the sun and the water,
I had the universal religion only people don’t have.
I was happy because I didn’t ask for anything at all,
Or tried to find anything,
And I didn’t find any more explanation
Than the word explanation having no meaning at all.”
― Alberto Caeiro, The Collected Poems of Alberto Caeiro

“Right, you see that girl over there, the one in that group that keeps looking right at you?'...'Right, let's say I'm convinced she's wearing black knickers - she looks like a black knickers kind of gal to me - and I'm so sure that's what she's wearing, so positive of that sartorial fact, I want to bet a million dollars on it. The trouble is, if I'm wrong, I'm wiped out. So I also bet she's wearing knickers that aren't black, but are any one of a whole basket of colours - let's say I put nine hundred and fifty thousand dollars on that possibility: that's the rest of the market; that's the hedge. This is a crude example, okay, in every sense, but hear me out. Now if I'm right, I make fifty K, but even if I'm wrong I'm going to lose fifty K, because I'm hedged. And because ninety-five per cent of my million dollars is not in use - I'm never going to be called on to show it: the only risk is in the spread - I can make similar bets with other people. Or I can bet it on something else entirely. And the beauty of it is I don't have to be right all the time - if I can just get the colour of her underwear right fifty-five per cent of the time I'm going to wind up very rich...”
― Robert Harris, The Fear Index

“All this happened in much less time than it takes to tell, since I am trying to interpret for you into slow speech the instantaneous effect of visual impressions.”
― Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim

“Fred is staying with his mother these holidays. She's living in London for six months, in Chelsea, studying Georgian underwear at the National Art Library. It's a thesis, not a fetish.”
― Fiona Wood, Six Impossible Things

“What these young men feared and hated more than anything else was being spoken to by people they hadn't met, or having to explain themselves to people they didn't know.”
― Ryū Murakami, Popular Hits of the Showa Era

“The easiest explanations are often the right ones.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“So perhaps the very idea of explanation is an error of anthropomorphism when it is applied to things that do not involve human intention.”
― Marilynne Robinson

“Do not give explanation to anyone, everyone understands only what they want to understand.”
― Nitin Namdeo

“Explain why you're refusing to participate in an activity, or to accept an offer made to you.”
― Mitta Xinindlu

“Think of it like standing in a room with mirrors on every wall. Each mirror reflects the other, and you, and every reflection of every mirror reflects the reflection of you. You’re in one of those reflections now, and I’m standing in the room, except all my walls are covered by curtains.”
― Tony Del Degan, In River Cardinal

“There is one thing I enjoy about STEM: I love how words such as therefore, because, since, and thus can often be used to deeply comprehend a topic in math and science. These words all precede some form of logical deduction, and that is what makes STEM so beautiful: with math and science, you can always learn the logic behind everything. From quantum mechanics to biomedicine, science always finds a way to explain the universe.”
― Lucy Carter, For the Intellect

“If our existence were limited to the science that attempts to explain it, our existence wouldn’t exist.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough

“There's something you find interesting, for a reason hard to explain. It is hard to explain because you have never read it on any page; there you begin. You were made and set here to give voice to this, your own astonishment.”
― Annie Dillard

“Any negative feedback stings, but feedback that doesn’t align with who you are at your core can hurt even worse because you feel misunderstood. How you react to the feedback and what you do afterwards will impact your career trajectory at the company. Your first instinct may be to rebut, defend, or explain the behaviors that led to the feedback. But perceptions don’t change because of explanations or more information; they change over time after you adjust your actions and behaviors.”
― Marlo Lyons

“Sometimes only Art can explain things.”
― Mitta Xinindlu