Quotes About Explanations

When multiple explanations exist, the simplest is usually correct.

Explanations need not be valid to be of value. In religion, as in other fields of inquiry, a suggestive and original theory can, even in failure, stimulate new inquiry or reformulate problems in such a way as to promote fruitful new understandings. (p.10).

No one faith is necessarily superior to another. All explanations are valid and in some respects when it comes to the big mysteries of life.

The first thing he said was that he had seen me give the Rolling Stones credit for the magazine's name. Bob said that he and I knew full well that it came from his song. I sputtered out my explanations, but he was adamant about it and gave me a sideways look that let me off the hook a little.

These results are completely lopsided: it was not the case that 51 percent of the Americas, Australia, and Africa was conquered by Europeans, while 49 percent of Europe was conquered by Native Americans, Aboriginal Australians, or Africans. The whole modern world has been shaped by lopsided outcomes. Hence they must have inexorable explanations, ones more basic than mere details concerning who happened to win some battle or develop some invention on one occasion a few thousand years ago.

Two contrasting explanations suggest themselves: problems with the local people, or problems with the locally available wild plants.

We tend to seek easy, single-factor explanations of success. For most important things, though, success actually requires avoiding many separate possible causes of failure.

Life is too short to waste time complaining Don't waste your time with explanations: people only hear what they want to hear

Such are the lives of those who haven't the courage to risk: solutions are generously provided by God, but people always seek complicated explanations, and end up doing nothing.

The temptation to tell a Chief in a great position the things he most likes to hear is one of the commonest explanations of mistaken policy.

G]li uomini sono vigliacchi. Hanno paura di quello che non vedono e non capiscono, e per placare quella paura trovano spiegazioni senza senso. Per questo tua madre è stata uccisa. Perché lei sapeva parlare con gli oni . Allora l'hanno accusata d'essere la reincarnazione d'una volpe. Ma una volpe non si trasformerebbe mai in un essere umano. Se potesse mutare aspetto, sceglierebbe un animale.

Like most of us, Joe Biden has had moments when he's led the league in mistakes or verbal gaffes. The difference is his were on a public stage where explanations are almost always made out by pundits to be excuses.

But even as we make these conclusions we feel our throats plugging up, because they are both true and untrue. So much has been written about the girls in the newspapers, so much has been said over backyard fences, or related over the years in psychiatrists' offices, that we are certain only of the insufficiency of explanations.

People suffering nervous breakdowns often do a lot of research, to find explanations for what they are undergoing. The research, of course, fails.

The simple explanations that are so frequently proffered to explain murder—poverty, pathology, parents, media violence—fail crashingly at getting to the heart of the darkness, the underlying architecture of the murdering mind.

Good sociology is sociological work that produces meaningful descriptions of organizations and events, valid explanations of how they come about and persist, and realistic proposals for their improvement or removal.

Truth is truth, not the explanations of Truth. Truth is a living, moving process. Truth is constantly undulating and vibrating. You can become one with the Truth, but you cannot adequately explain it.

In practice, science is often guided by a search for unifying ideas that are as simple as possible and that connect many different observations with as few explanations as possible.

You two are suggesting that something supernatural is going on here, but this isn't a horror movie. In real life there are always logical explanations.

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.

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

This is one of the difficulties and pleasures of studying the Inklings; Christians all, they offer, along with the expected 20th-century psychological explanations for behavior, unexpected spiritual ones.

The source of magic in this world is more mysterious than all the explanations that sorcerers and wizards have given for it, and it is more prevalent than can be understood by those who live according to the constricted form of reason so prevalent in our time.

Many of the lost will be found, eventually, dead or alive. Disappearances, after all, have explanations.