Top 1200 Explaining Things Quotes & Sayings

The Darwinian theory is in principle capable of explaining life. No other theory that has ever been suggested is in principle capable of explaining life.

I'm writing a science book - a sort of compendium of all the ways I've found of explaining things to my artsy friends over the years.

Writing has been a way of explaining to myself the things I do not understand.

I tell my students that when you write, you should pretend you’re writing the best letter you ever wrote to the smartest friend you have. That way, you’ll never dumb things down. You won’t have to explain things that don’t need explaining. You’ll assume an intimacy and a natural shorthand, which is good because readers are smart and don’t wish to be condescended to.

I was reminding myself of the one basic rule for experts on females: confine yourself absolutely to explaining why she did what she has already done because that will save the trouble of explaining why she didn't do what you said she would.

Men love explaining things. But when he's explaining something and you already know that, it might be tempting to say 'I already know that.' Instead, have him explain it to you over and over again. It will make him feel useful and will give you some time to think about out how to avoid him in the future.

There's nothing cooler than someone explaining to you, as if it was easy, how they create antimatter. And they kept saying things like, "Well obviously you know that..."

A good traditional conceptual instruction is what I got from my better professors at MIT. They would be at a chalkboard, and they would literally be explaining something and working through a problem, but it wasn't rote. They were explaining the underlying theory and processes and intuition behind it.

I was focused on building things from an early age. When I was about 3, our toilet broke, and my mother was ready to call the plumber. I told her I would fix it and asked her to get my Richard Scarry book 'How Things Work in Busytown.' Between the picture of a toilet and the text she read to me explaining how the parts worked, I fixed it.

Designing is always on the mind of a designer, and as I was saying it's a sort of digestive process, so I usually keep it to myself unless I'm collaborating with someone because explaining all the things that are going on in your head can be quite exhausting, especially in the early stages of a project.

When I worked with David LaChappelle, I was stimulated... He was explaining how he does things, how he works. I realized what an artist is, so I thought that's what dancers should experience.

I can't understand these chaps who go round American universities explaining how they write poems: It's like going round explaining how you sleep with your wife.

The idea of tiny changes cumulated over many steps is an immensely powerful idea, capable of explaining an enormous range of things that would be otherwise inexplicable.

I would make a genuinely terrible guide. I can't remember things. I would get half way through telling a story or explaining something and I would get distracted. Oh, and I have absolutely no sense of direction at all.

The best and safest way of philosophising seems to be, first to enquire diligently into the properties of things, and to establish those properties by experiences [experiments] and then to proceed slowly to hypotheses for the explanation of them. For hypotheses should be employed only in explaining the properties of things, but not assumed in determining them; unless so far as they may furnish experiments.

Rather, although belief may be adequate for explaining the behavior of individual animals - an animal which believes that p will behave no differently from an animal which knows that p - talk of knowledge is necessary once one begins to look at explaining the cognitive capacities of a species.

You go to a protest, and you've got all these different groups saying things you don't necessarily agree with. If I went to a protest, my placard would have to be very long, explaining the ins and outs of my position.

I roughly draw the scene beforehand to be more confident on the set. Instead of talking and explaining certain things, I try to visually communicate the scene to my team with the story board. This is how I work.

I have a funny mental framework when I do physics. I create an imaginary audience in my head to explain things to - it is part of the way I think. For me, teaching and explaining, even to my imaginary audience, is part of the process.

Science is wonderful at explaining what science is wonderful at explaining, but beyond that it tends to look for its car keys where the light is good.

All the things you can talk about in anyone's work are the things that are least important.... You can describe all the externals of a performance - everything, in fact, but what really constitutes its core. Explaining something makes it go away, so to speak; what's important is what's left over after you've explained everything else.

One of the reasons I took up the guitar was I didn't want to speak to anybody. I really felt uncomfortable speaking to people, so I took the guitar up so I could hide behind it. I'm not comfortable explaining things, because my brain doesn't work that way.

History had its own way of explaining things. The way historians explain things is by telling a story.

One of the things I did in my book, I start off with, is explaining how great our grace was: the things we were able to accomplish after the first one-hundred years from slavery.

It saves trouble to be conventional, for you're not always explaining things.

As for explaining mathematical phenomena it opens the question: explaining to whom? humans?, other computers?

I like explaining things, and I believe that you can do very high-level explanation on basic cable news provided you are willing to work hard enough to be a good storyteller.

Mama always had a way of explaining things so I could understand them.

Here we have perhaps in Mike Pence someone uniquely capable of explaining [Donald] Trump and being Trump and explaining for people who Trump is and what he is. And defending against whatever predictable insults and assaults on Trump that [Tim] Kaine comes up with.

I can conceive few human states more enviable than that of the man to whom, panting in the foul laboratory, or watching for his life under the tropic forest, Isis shall for a moment lift her sacred veil, and show him, once and for ever, the thing he dreamed not of; some law, or even mere hint of a law, explaining one fact; but explaining with it a thousand more, connecting them all with each other and with the mighty whole, till order and meaning shoots through some old Chaos of scattered observations.

Men explain things to me, still. And no man has ever apologized for explaining, wrongly, things that I know and they don't. Not yet, but according to the actuarial tables, I may have another fortysomething years to live, more or less, so it could happen. Though I'm not holding my breath.

Explaining belief has alwayas been difficult. How do you explain a love and a logic at the heart of the universe when the world is so out of whack? Explaining faith is impossible - vision over visibility - instinct over intellect - a songwriter plays a chore with the faith that he will hear the next one in his head.

I am alone in the midst of these happy, reasonable voices. All these creatures spend their time explaining, realizing happily that they agree with each other. In Heaven's name, why is it so important to think the same things all together.

And then you've got President Clinton who made the case as only he can. After he spoke, somebody sent out a tweet- they said, you should appoint him secretary of explaining stuff. I like that- secretary of explaining stuff. Although, I have to admit, it didn't really say stuff. I cleaned that up a little bit.

I would like the Labour Party to issue a pamphlet to all its members explaining what antisemitism is. The pamphlet could go through each way that antisemitism manifests itself, point by point, explaining what each means.

When people say, well, they disapprove, I'd like to know what the specifics are, because sometimes - and the president [Barack Obama] has admitted this - they may not feel like he's really explaining and understanding the emotion behind some of these fears [about Iran]. And that's a perfectly legitimate question for people to ask. But if you look at the results of where we are, I think there are some things I agree with and some things I don't agree with, and I think that's absolutely fair game.

I don't really like to work with a large team and assistants, because then I lose so much time explaining things, which I don't like.

I am strictly against making cuts in the current budgetary period for things such as research funding and investments as a reaction to Brexit. I think that we can do an excellent job of explaining this to the German people.

Talent is important, and some background as well. This really is not beginner's school. I want to work with people that have achieved a certain level and with whom i can easily communicate, which means you don't have to do too much explaining so you won't waste precious time. I don't do much explaining during rehersals and we are just adjusting minor details. Simply, there is no space nor time for one to learn and each of them has to do their homework on time. That means practising, transitioning from a level to level.

Religion can have psychological and social roles, but in terms of really explaining how things work, science works differently. Science is based on material elements at the core.

I'm not very good at explaining things," she said. "But I think you have beautiful eyes. I love the gold in them. I love that they're different from my eyes- I see mine all the time and I'm bored with them.

I do believe in hell. Jesus spoke more about hell than heaven - I trust him as the authority, not you, me or anybody else. If hell is not real, then Jesus was a liar and God has a lot of explaining to do on His justice and things like that.

Time, among all concepts in the world of physics, puts up the greatest resistance to being dethroned from ideal continuum to the world of the discrete, of information, of bits.... Of all obstacles to a thoroughly penetrating account of existence, none looms up more dismayingly than 'time.' Explain time? Not without explaining existence. Explain existence? Not without explaining time. To uncover the deep and hidden connection between time and existence ... is a task for the future.

With novels, you're representing things. You're not explaining.

I think of my job on television as explaining things.

Ezra Pound still lives in a village and his world is a kind of village and people keep explaining things when they live in a village.... I have come not to mind if certain people live in villages and some of my friends still appear to live in villages and a village can be cozy as well as intuitive but must one really keep perpetually explaining and elucidating?

A recently reprinted memoir by Frederick Douglass has footnotes explaining what words like 'arraigned,' 'curried' and 'exculpate' meant, and explaining who Job was. In other words, this man who was born a slave and never went to school educated himself to the point where his words now have to be explained to today's expensively under-educated generation.

I like doing movies with kids in them, and you're explaining things. They're teaching you and you're teaching them, and the audience can loop through that.

Fiction is often a much-needed step back that gives you the distance to see things more clearly; it's very often better at explaining why events happened as opposed to just what happened.

I believe things happen that can't be explained, but so many people seem intent on explaining them. Everyone has an answer for them. Either aliens or things from the spirit world.

There are a lot of things that I really question - the legality of the drone strikes, these NSA revelations. Jimmy Carter came out and said we don’t live in a democracy. That’s a little intense when an ex-president says that. So you know, he’s got some explaining to do, particularly for a constitutional law professor.

I had to resign myself, many years ago, that I'm not too articulate when it comes to explaining how I feel about things. But my music does it for me, it really does.

Hypotheses should be subservient only in explaining the properties of things but not assumed in determining them, unless so far as they may furnish experiments.

It's not about having things figured out, or about communicating with other people, trying to make them understand what you understand. It's about a chicken dinner at a drive-in. A soft pillow. Things that don't need explaining.

The more everybody knows about all aspects of the problems we face, the better off all of us will be. Less time spent explaining things means more time for coming up with creative solutions.

Humor is a terrific tool for explaining things, especially when what you're explaining is frightening or dull and complicated.

Einstein's theory of relativity does a fantastic job for explaining big things. Quantum mechanics is fantastic for the other end of the spectrum - for small things.

There's so much I wish for these days, but most of all, I wish you were here. It's strange, but before I met you, I couldn't remember the last time that I cried. Now, it seems that tears come easily to me...but you have a way of making my sorrows seem worthwhile, of explaining things in a way that lessens my ache. You are a treasure, a gift, and when we're together again, I intend to hold you until my arms are weak and I can do it no longer. My thoughts of you are sometimes the only things that keep me going.

Grown-ups never understand anything for themselves, and it is tiresome for children to be always and forever explaining things to them.

... I think that I was too self-centered to ever develop good skills as a peacemaker. In my younger days, I assumed that it was because I was smarter than everyone else, with no patience for explaining things in short words for mouthbreathers who just didn't get it.