Top 350 Explanations Quotes & Sayings - Page 3
Explore popular Explanations quotes.
Last updated on April 21, 2025.
Optimists, by contrast, look for specific, limited, short-term explanations for bad events, and as a result, in the face of a setback, they’re more likely to pick themselves up and try again.
Stories are not explanations of the world we live in. Science does that, and math does that. Our obligation as fiction writers is to enhance the mysteries.
Science is not a thing. It's a verb. It's a way of thinking about things. It's a way of looking for natural explanations for all phenomena.
Writing reminds you of how much there is in your life that stands outside your explanations. In that way, it's almost a journey into faith and doubt at once.
It is the desire for explanations that are at once systematic and controllable by factual evidence that generates science; and it is the organization and classification of knowledge on the basis of explanatory principles that is the distinctive goal of the sciences.
Don't waste your time with explanations: people only hear what they want to hear.
And theories are no more than fictions which help us to make sense of experience and which are subject to disconfirmation when their explanations are no longer adequate.
Writing about race and crime was not new territory for me. But it can be treacherous. So here are my rules: No stereotypes. No generalizations. No explanations. No apologies. Just the facts, ma'am.
You don't need an explanation for everything, Recognize that there are such things as miracles - events for which there are no ready explanations. Later knowledge may explain those events quite easily.
The most important training, though, is to experience life as a writer, questioning everything, inventing multiple explanations for everything. If you do that, all the other things will come; if you don't, there's no hope for you.
Victorian theorists competed to identify how many biologically differentiated races lived on Earth and proposed inherent characteristics for them, formulated explanations for these presumed variations in humanity.
With the destruction of history, contemporary events themselves retreat into a remote and fabulous realm of unverifiable stories, uncheckable statistics, unlikely explanations and untenable reasoning.
Julian Jaynes's theories for the nature of self-awareness, introspection, and consciousness have replaced the assumption of their almost ethereal uniqueness with explanations that could initiate the next change in paradigm for human thought.
Even good excuses, really good ones, don't help very much.
Explanations, on the other hand, are both scarce and useful.
And accurate forecasts and insightful intuition are priceless.
we would understand much more about life’s complexities if we applied ourselves to an assiduous study of its contradictions, instead of wasting time on identities and coherences, seeing as these have a duty to provide their own explanations.
You can assume that if a writer's work has survived for centuries, there are reasons why this is so, explanations that have nothing to do with a conspiracy of academics plotting to resuscitate a zombie army of dead white males.
Whereas many philosophers and theologians appear to possess an emotional attachment to their theories and ideas........scientists feel no qualms about suggesting different but mutually exclusive explanations for the same phenomenon.
Everyone isn’t logical. Everything doesn’t make sense in the end. Sometimes you have to forget about explanations or excuses and leave people and places behind, because otherwise they will drag you straight down.
I think literary theory satisfied a deep love I have for big, encompassing narratives about the world and how it works - which are usually, in the end, more creative visions unto themselves than illuminating explanations.
The overwhelming majority of theories are rejected because they contain bad explanations, not because they fail experimental tests.
Don't try to steer the boat. Don't open shop for yourself. Listen. Keep silent. You are not God's mouthpiece. Try to be an ear, And if you do speak, ask for explanations.
The traces of our life here will lie cold and still, dreaming, like the brittle eyes of dolls in an abandoned cabin, and the last men will look to them for explanations, or apologies.
Try to live with the same intensity as a child. He doesn't ask for explanations; he dives into each day as if it were a new adventure and, at night, sleeps tired and happy.
You don't get explanations in real life. You just get moments that are absolutely, utterly, inexplicably odd.
As children we all possess a natural uninhabited curiosity, a hunger for explanations, which seems to die slowly as we age--suppressed, I suppose by the need not to appear ignorant.
We don't need answers and explanations as much as we need God's presence in and through the suffering.
What appear to us to be causal explanations are in fact just stories—descriptions of what happened that tell us little, if anything, about the mechanisms at work.
Freud's fanciful pseudo-explanations (precisely because they are brilliant) perform a disservice. Now any ass has these pictures available to use in "explaining" symptoms of an illness.
Although a linguist, I was always interested in, and fascinated by, Stephen's explanations of his work and proud of his discoveries and achievements.
We have to prepare our teenagers and our children for a world away from us. That requires explanations. That requires understanding.
Science is beautiful when it makes simple explanations of phenomena or connections between different observations. Examples include the double helix in biology and the fundamental equations of physics.
In the final analysis, all explanations of meaning, various as they are, serve to indicate how something is 'appropriate' in and to our practices, our lives in effect.
We are in a far better position to observe instincts in animals or in primitives than in ourselves. This is due to the fact that we have grown accustomed to scrutinizing our own actions and to seeking rational explanations for them.
If we had to accept the idea of an independent creator, the explanations given in [several Buddhist texts] which completely refutes the existence per se of all phenomena, would be negated.
I'm interested in painting the most beautifully compelling pictures and images and metaphors and stories and explanations possible that will put Jesus in language for a world that desperately needs to hear it.
In the moment of hardship, we ask why some things happen. In those moments of suffering, questioning prayers that do not ask for explanations but beg the Lord to accompany us are the most useful
But the stupidity which is common to all such "explanations" is, of course, simply that of proceeding as though the merits of a theory - such things as truth, or probability, or explanatory power - could not possibly be among the reasons for its currency.
Every articulate family ... generates its own stories, explanations and myths to illuminate the differences in temperament and talent among its children, the lines of allegiance and influence between parent and child.
We are prodding, challenging, seeking contradictions or small, persistent residual errors, proposing alternative explanations, encouraging heresy. We give our highest rewards to those who convincingly disprove established beliefs.
I should have thought of this years ago. But that was the problem with being sane. Sane people played by the rules. They looked for rational explanations and solutions in an insane universe.
It's a disease we have that we think that everything is explainable. It's a merchandising idea because you can sell explanations and cures for everything, but it doesn't work like that. It's very hard to understand everything.
I understand what happens to the brain when people are near death, and I had always believed there were good scientific explanations for the heavenly out-of-body journeys described by those who narrowly escaped death.
We should keep in mind that it is easy to concoct stories explaining the past or to become confident about dubious scenarios of the future. We should view both explanations and prophecies with skepticism.
Only professional mathematicians learn anything from proofs. Other people learn from explanations.
Anything that we can destroy, but are unable to make is, in a sense, sacred, and all our 'explanations' of it do not explain anything.
In the sky there are always answers and explanations for everything: every pain, every suffering, joy and confusion.
Human beings are pattern-seeking animals. It's part of our DNA. That's why conspiracy theories and gods are so popular: we always look for the wider, bigger explanations for things.
And let me take one of the explanations most commonly given: Analysts were pressured to reach conclusions that would fit the political agenda of one or another administration. I deeply think that is a wrong explanation.
True brevity of expression consists in a man only saying what is worth saying, while avoiding all diffuse explanations of things which every one can think out for himself.
Freemasonry is a Jewish establishment, whose history, grades, official appointments, passwords, and explanations are Jewish from beginning to end
If you reject the infinite, you are stuck with the finite, and the finite is parochial... the best explanation of anything eventually involves universality, and therefore infinity. The reach of explanations cannot be limited by fiat.
I go out to take a walk, I see something, I take a picture. I take photographs. I have avoided profound explanations of what I do.
a great man always knows better than to explain unless an explanation is demanded. To rush into explanations and excuses is always a sign of weakness.
A key issue in developmental biology at that time was the problem of how cells underwent differentiation, with most workers concentrating on explanations in terms of changes in enzyme and gene regulation.
They [scientists of centuries past] call on God only from the lonely and precarious edge of incomprehension. Where they feel certain about their explanations, however, God gets hardly a mention.
One of the hardest conditions of boyhood is the almost continuous strain put upon the powers of invention by the constant and harassing necessity for explanations for every natural act.
When my daughter asks, 'What do you do?', every movie I have a different answer. As she grows, she wants more explanations.
Myths are stories that explain a natural phenomenon. Before humans found scientific explanations for such things as the moon and the sun and rainbows, they tried to understand them by telling stories.
The Synthesis consists in assuming the Causes discovered and established as Principles, and by them explaining the Phænomena proceeding from them, and proving the Explanations.
In short-to overstate the point only slightly-because people don't really know why they do what they do, they give explanations of their own behavior that are about as reliable as anyone else's, and in many circumstances actually less so.
