A Quote by Mark Twain

The more you explain it, the more I don't understand it.

Mark Twain

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Explain More Understand

Quote Author

Mark Twain
American - Writer
November 30, 1835 - April 21, 1910

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

I suspect the reason is that most people [...] have a residue of feeling that Darwinian evolution isn't quite big enough to explain everything about life. All I can say as a biologist is that the feeling disappears progressively the more you read about and study what is known about life and evolution. I want to add one thing more. The more you understand the significance of evolution, the more you are pushed away from the agnostic position and towards atheism. Complex, statistically improbable things are by their nature more difficult to explain than simple, statistically probable things.

Richard Dawkins

The older I get, the more I believe in what I can't explain or understand, even more than the things that are explainable and understandable.

Lillian Gish

Everyone wants to understand art. Why not try to understand the song of a bird? Why does one love the night, flowers, everything around one, without trying to understand them? But in the case of a painting people have to understand. If only they would realize above all that an artist works of necessity, that he himself is only a trifling bit of the world, and that no more importance should be attached to him than to plenty of other things which please us in the world, though we can't explain them. People who try to explain pictures are usually barking up the wrong tree.

Pablo Picasso

What I mean is that if you really want to understand something, the best way is to try and explain it to someone else. That forces you to sort it out in your mind. And the more slow and dim-witted your pupil, the more you have to break things down into more and more simple ideas. And that's really the essence of programming. By the time you've sorted out a complicated idea into little steps that even a stupid machine can deal with, you've learned something about it yourself... The teacher usually learns more than the pupils. Isn't that true?

Douglas Adams

We achieve more than we know. We know more than we understand. We understand more than we can explain.

Claude Bernard

There is nothing that can help you understand your beliefs more than trying to explain them to an inquisitor.

Frank Howard Clark

There's nothing that can help you understand your beliefs more than trying to explain them to an inquisitive child.

Frank A. Clark

The greater the scientist, the more he is impressed with his ignorance of reality, and the more he realizes that his laws and labels, descriptions and definitions, are the products of his own thought. They help him to use the world for purposes of his own devising rather than understand and explain it.

Alan Watts

No more painters, no more scribblers, no more musicians, no more sculptors, no more religions, no more royalists, no more radicals, no more imperialists, no more anarchists, no more socialists, no more communists, no more proletariat, no more democrats, no more republicans, no more bourgeois, no more aristocrats, no more arms, no more police, no more nations, an end at last to all this stupidity, nothing left, nothing at all, nothing, nothing.

Louis Aragon

I don't understand a thing about this world: about people, and why they do the things they do. The more I find out, the more I uncover, the more I know, the less I understand.

Craig Silvey

The more I try to explain myself, the less I understand myself.

Eugene Ionesco

It is important to communicate to children about what we are going through. We often speak in half truths. We don't frame the truth or explain our experience in terms they can understand. We need to take time to do this. What has to happen is that more people have to get involved with more children. Focus energy on the child. Children are raising themselves these days in all sorts of strange ways.

James Redfield

It is obvious that we can no more explain a passion to a person who has never experienced it than we can explain light to the blind.

T. S. Eliot

One day scientists will more fully understand the chemistry and neuro-circuitry that differentiates love from lust. I couldn't begin to explain the mechanics, but I know that they feel differently.