Top 350 Explanations Quotes & Sayings

Establish enigmas, not explanations.

We all want explanations for why we behave as we do and for the ways the world around us functions. Even when our feeble explanations have little to do with reality. We’re storytelling creatures by nature, and we tell ourselves story after story until we come up with an explanation that we like and that sounds reasonable enough to believe. And when the story portrays us in a more glowing and positive light, so much the better.

I think it is an immutable law in business that words are words, explanations are explanations, promises are promises, but only performance is reality

There are no explanations, there are no answers.

All scientists should be skeptics. The reason why is that, even with the best of scientific measurements, we can come up with all kinds of explanations of what those measurements mean in terms of cause and effect, and yet most of those explanations are wrong. It's really easy to be wrong in science ... it's really hard to be right.

Poetry is a series of explanations of life, fading off into horizons too swift for explanations.

We live by promises not by explanations.

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.

If you eliminate all possible explanations, then the impossible is the answer.

Metaphor for the night sky: a trillion asterisks and no explanations.

To rush into explanations is always a sign of weakness.

If you look at the history of unexplained phenomena that was first explained by spiritual, mystical forces, the track record is not very good for the mystical, magical explanations to survive against more quote "mundane" physical explanations.

I don't owe any explanations for anybody I'm fighting.

Pooh! Grown-ups are always thinking of uninteresting explanations.

There is no waste of time in life like that of making explanations.

Some explanations of a crime are not explanations: they're part of the crime.

When multiple explanations exist, the simplest is usually correct.

I'm not satisfied with the explanations I get from tv or from school.

Mystical explanations are thought to be deep; the truth is that they are not even shallow.

In evolution, as in all areas of science, our knowledge is incomplete. But the entire success of the scientific enterprise has depended on an insistence that these gaps be filled by natural explanations, logically derived from confirmable evidence. Because "intelligent design" theories are based on supernatural explanations, they can have nothing to do with science.

Explanations are a substitute for trust.

I love you is unsubtle. It removes explanations, facilities, degrees, scruples.

Critics should help people see for themselves; they should never try to define things, or impose their own explanations, though I admit that if... a critic's explanations serve to increase the general obscurity, that's all to the good.

The one man who should never attempt an explanation of a poem is its author. If the poem can be improved by it's author's explanations it never should have been published, and if the poem cannot be improved by its author's explanations the explanations are scarcely worth reading.

Hopefully we are emerging from an era of fantasy explanations for real phenomena. The authors certainly have to face a community of therapists who are obsessionally committed to explanations for disease and for therapy unsupported by a scrap of evidence except for their claimed therapeutic success.

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.

There are alternate explanations for everything.

And the actual achievements of biology are explanations in terms of mechanisms founded on physics and chemistry, which is not the same thing as explanations in terms of physics and chemistry.

Genetically influenced behavior is not necessarily good and not necessarily unchangeable. Explanations of bad behavior that appeal to genes do not absolve a person any more than do explanations that appeal to upbringing.

With our human limitations we're not always able to understand the explanations.

The relevant features of scientific practice often have mundane explanations which don't point to any deep metaphysical moral. (Thus it would simply be messy and pointless for the chemists to essay physical reductions, or for the biologists to offer number-free explanations. It's a weird kind of science-worship that views these practical considerations as clues to the nature of reality.)

Alternative explanations are always welcome in science, if they are better and explain more. Alternative explanations that explain nothing are not welcome... Note how science changed those beliefs when new data became available. Religions stick to the same ancient beliefs regardless of the data.

It is a sign of maturity... to find explanations in charity.

No excuses. No explanations.

I flicked my eyes over to Steve again and saw him straighten. He would need a diversion just to start. “Explanations?” I bellowed. “Explanations? There’s your explanation…there!” I stabbed a finger dramatically towards the far corner of the room. Pathetic, really. I mean, talk about the oldest trick in the book. But it’s a good book, and the trick would have been cut from subsequent editions if it didn’t sometimes work.

Explanations comfort us by giving the impression that there is an order in things.

I fear explanations explanatory of things explained.

Failure has a thousand explanations. Success doesn't need one.

No, no! The adventures first, explanations take such a dreadful time.

There are no explanations for human evil. Only excuses.

Americans get very simple explanations of what happens to them.

God has ordained that His people live by promises and not by explanations.

Passion impels our deeds; ideology supplies the explanations.

Children need explanations and they deserve explanations.

Life is bigger than our explanations of it. To be in touch with life, go beyond your explanations.

Unfortunately, in the field of evolution most explanations are not good. As a matter of fact, they hardly qualify as explanations at all; they are suggestions, hunches, pipe dreams, hardly worthy of being called hypotheses.

I do loathe explanations.

We are tired of aristocratic explanations in Harvard words.

Oh, where is the Fairy Godmother of explanations when you need her?

Not only is science corrosive to religion, but religion is corrosive to science. It teaches people to be satisfied with trivial non-explanations and blinds them to the wonderful real explanations that we have within our grasp.

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

There are no client conflicts, only bad explanations.

Explanations are such cheap poetry.

The scientific method is the ultimate elegant explanation. It is the ultimate foundation for anything worthy of the name "explanation". It makes no sense to talk about explanations without having a process for deciding which are right and which are wrong, and in a broad sense that is what the scientific method is about. All of the other wonderful explanations celebrated here owe their origin and credibility to the process by which they are verified-the scientific method.

I've always wondered where explanations end and excuses begin.

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.

It is an immutable law in business that words are words, explanations are explanations, promises are promises-but only performance is reality.

Anytime somebody loses a presidential election, there are lots of explanations.

The reason people turn to supernatural explanations is that the mind abhors a vacuum of explanation. Because we do not yet have a fully natural explanation for mind and consciousness, people turn to supernatural explanations to fill the void.

Success requires no explanations. Failure permits no alibis.