A Quote by Carl Sagan

For a long time the human instinct to understand was thwarted by facile religious explanations. — © Carl Sagan
For a long time the human instinct to understand was thwarted by facile religious explanations.
For the first time in a long time, our leaders in Washington understand what Americans of all religious backgrounds have long held to be true: through faith, all things are possible.
With our human limitations we're not always able to understand the explanations.
No, I'm not religious, I'm sorry to say. But I was once and shall be again. There is no time now to be religious." "No time. Does it need time to be religious?" "Oh, yes. To be religious you must have time and, even more, independence of time. You can't be religious in earnest and at the same time live in actual things and still take them seriously, time and money and the Odéon Bar and all that.
Instinct must be thwarted just as one prunes the branches of a tree so that it will grow better.
There is no instinct that has been so maligned, suppressed, abused, and distorted by religious teaching as the instinct of sex.
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.
The purpose of all our explanations is not to have you understand anything, but for you to snap from the understanding of the intellect to the understanding of pure spirit. All our explanations work backwards.
One thing that I would like to get across is that even the most horrible events do have explanations that we can understand. And it's not always comfortable for us to understand, because in order to understand, we have to see how we're not so far away from the people in question.
Human beings want to be free and however long they may agree to stay locked up, to stay oppressed, there will come a time when they say 'That's it.' Suddenly they find themselves doing something that they never would have thought they would be doing, simply because of the human instinct that makes them turn their face towards freedom.
There are many aspects of time we just do not understand. That’s the thing about writing a popular book: You realize the things you understand because for those you can give a really simple explanation. But some things about time I just don’t know how to give simple explanations for, even though I can tell you mathematically what’s going on.
There are three kinds of explanation in science: explanations which throw a light upon, or give a hint at a matter; explanations which do not explain anything; and explanations which obscure everything.
My instinct about a human being is paramount. For me, when a director has walked into my room or an assistant that I have hired, who has later gone on to become a director, is purely based on human instinct, be it Ayan Mukerji, Karan Malhotra, Punit Malhotra or Tarun Mansukhani. I am very susceptible to human energy and energy of spaces.
All the religious wars that have caused blood to be shed for centuries arise from passionate feelings and facile counter-positions, such as Us and Them, good and bad, white and black.
The short lesson that comes out of long experience in political agitation is something like this: all the motive power in all of these movements is the instinct of religious feeling. All the obstruction comes from attempting to rely on anything else. Conciliation is the enemy.
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.
Market bashers ... might understand the claim that in some particular field, markets required no intervention--though they'd be skeptical--but the notion that, on general principle, complex systems ran themselves just fine without benign intervention seemed like it could only be the product of a quasi-religious faith. ... Of course, this gets things almost precisely backwards. It is the idea that all order must be explained by a functioning mind at the helm, not its denial, that has the closet affinity to the religious instinct.
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