Quotes About Explanation

Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have.

What is inadmissible, both morally and scientifically, is the hubris that pretends to understand the behavior of human agents without for a moment listening systematically to how they understand what they are doing and how they explain themselves.

Yet SIOP, without advancing any explanation, puts "language objectives" on a par with "content objectives" and teaches both explicitly.

Everything we do is for a reason.

Look," she said. "You're right. You deserve an explanation. I think it's okay to tell you everything now—not that we know too much of the why.

The mind constructs small-scale models of reality to anticipate events, to reason, and to underlie explanation.

Science always uses metaphor.

A prediction is but an explanation in advance.

What Copernicus dispelled, however, were not myths but other explanations.

Explanations settle issues, showing that matters must end as they have. Narratives raise issues, showing that matters do not end as they must but as they do. Explanation sets the need for further inquiry aside; narrative invites us to rethink what we thought we knew. If the silence of nature is the possibility of language, language is the possibility of history.

What can be explained can also be predicted, if one knows the initial events and the laws covering their succession.

We understand nature as source when we understand ourselves as source. We abandon all attempts at an explanation of nature when we see that we cannot be explained, when our own self-origination cannot be stated as fact. We behold the irreducible otherness of nature when we behold ourselves as its other.

Explanation sets the need for further inquiry aside; narrative invites us to rethink what we thought we knew.

We allow ourselves to believe that nature can be explained. In the process we confine nature to those explanations. The eels, through their simplicity of form, their preference for darkness, and their grace of movement in the opposite direction of every other fish, have helped me to see things for which there is no easy classification, things that can't be quantified or solved, and get to the essence of experience. They have been my way back.

There is a reason and not a reason for everything.

A psychological explanation of our feelings is not a moral explanation of our conduct.

But once you've got the How, the Why drives it home.

The impossible often has a kind of integrity to it which the merely improbable lacks. How often have you been presented with an apparently rational explanation of something that works in all respects other than one, which is just that it is hopelessly improbable? Your instinct is to say, 'Yes, but he or she simply wouldn't do that.

These two were busy explaining to the harassed man that the phrase "too much Mozart" was, given any reasonable definition of those three words, an inherently self-contradictory expression, and that any sentence which contained such a phrase would be thereby rendered meaningless and could not, consequently, be advanced as part of an argument in favor of any given program-scheduling strategy.

She was about to demand a full and instant explanation of this preposterous remark when a passing white Ford Sierra slowed down beside them. The driver wound down the window and leaned out. "Had a crash then?" he shouted at them. "Yes." "Ha!" he said and drove on.

Yes but, Arthur, that's ridiculous. People think that if you just say 'hallucinations' it explains anything you want it to explain and eventually whatever it is you can't understand will just go away.

He had the perfect idea for explaining away every inexplicable weirdness about himself at a stroke, and he whistled as he pushed open the door which had so daunted him last night. "Arthur!!!!" He grinned cheerfully at the boggling eyes that stared at him from all corners of the pub, and told them all what a wonderful time he'd had in Southern California.

If somebody wants to run for office, they had better to explain why they want to run for office. Wanting to be a candidate seems, in itself, reason for exclusion.

At meetings you have to explain what you've accomplished, so naturally you fluff up your work a bit, like pillows on a couch.