Quotes About Explanation

I have always been fascinated by the way things work and how they came to take the form that they did. Writing about these things satisfies my curiosity about the made world while at the same time giving me an opportunity to design a new explanation for the processes that shape it.

God is only a word dreamed up to explain the world

Oh, Daddy, do 'splain yourself you are not 'splaining yourself at all.

It is true that I have sent six bullets through the head of my best friend, and yet I hope to shew by this statement that I am not his murderer.

free trade economists have argued that the mere co-existence of protectionism and economic development does not prove that the former caused the latter. This is true. But I am at least trying to explain one phenomenon - economic development-with another that co-existed with it - protectionism. Free trade economists have to explain how free trade can be an explanation for the economic success of today's rich countries, when it simply had not been practised very much before they became rich.

Man, who has not been granted the gift of undoing, who is always an un-consulted heir of other men's deeds, and who is always burdened with a responsibility that appears to be the consequence of an unending chain of events rather than conscious acts, demands an explanation and interpretation of the past in which the mysterious key to his future destiny seems to be concealed.

The scapegoat explanation therefore remains one of the principal attempts to escape the seriousness of antisemitism and the significance of the fact that the Jews were driven into the storm center of events. Equally

There is an abyss between the men of brilliant and facile conceptions and men of brutal deeds and active bestiality which no intellectual explanation is able to bridge.

Most people oversimplify Occam's razor to mean the simplest answer is usually correct. But the real meaning, what the Franciscan friar William of Ockham really wanted to emphasize, is that you shouldn't complicate, that you shouldn't "stack" a theory if a simpler explanation was at the ready. Pare it down. Prune the excess.

Because it sounds like he's trying to justify his actions.

Any time they try to describe the tsunami to us, I am so touched by how high they look in the air, when they explain it with their hands-they go so high.

I guess something that I've noticed from American acts who had success in touring is more of an explanation as to their music. Which is I think quite funny. I think British acts might like to leave more to the imagination - maybe a bit more obscure perhaps - a bit more shy.

I hate when there's a deleted scene on a DVD with no explanation, or you have to go out of your way to find an alternate audio track.

Everyone wants to understand art. Why not try to understand the song of a bird? ...people who try to explain pictures are usually barking up the wrong tree.

Absurd, irreducible; nothing--not even a profound and secret delirium of nature--could explain [a tree root].

A tree forms itself in answer to its place and the light. Explain it how you will, the only thing explainable will be your explanation." Sabbaths 1999 IV

The very second he thinks he has to explain himself to you, he'll feel as though he is losing his freedom. Then he'll make up a story to conceal something that didn't need to be concealed, just to protect his "territory" or his "turf." And he'll feel cornered.

Why postulate a fundamental Hegelian concept of Otherness as the final explanation— and then carefully document the biological and historical circumstances that have pushed the class "women" into such a category— when one has never seriously considered the much simpler and more likely possibility that this fundamental dualism sprang from the sexual division itself?

Not being able to find a cause is profoundly distressing; it creates anxiety because it implies a loss of control. The desire to find a cause is driven by fear.

Accountability can mean letting people tell their account, their story.

The new psychoanalytic method [is]… somewhat subtle but irreplaceable, so fruitful has it proved to be in explaining obscure unconscious mental processes.

For in the country, farm or town, you always know. No one's just there. There's always a source, a why and wherefore.

We are to admit no more causes of natural things than such as are both true and sufficient to explain their appearances. To this purpose the philosophers say that Nature does nothing in vain, and more is in vain when less will serve; for Nature is pleased with simplicity and affects not the pomp of superfluous causes.

Only love itself can explain love and lovers.