Quotes About Explanation

Like most of the connections that explain the pain in our hearts, he couldn't bring it to mind. He couldn't see the truth because it was too big and it was right in front of him.

Multi oameni, cand incearca sa justifice de ce au sau nu au o anumita credinta, deseori au multe opinii in loc de motive.

If taken at face value, the miraculous explanation would tell us that science is not worth the trouble, that it will never yield the answers we seek, and that nature will forever be beyond all human understanding. Sterile and nonproductive in its consequences, the claim of miracle would put a lid on curiosity, experimentation, and the human creative imagination.

I'll explain what I just said." She turned to look squarely at Captain Hudson. "I'll have to explain something else, too. I am not Lt. Charlotte Tennyson. I am her clone!

There's a mighty big difference between good, sound reasons and reasons that sound good.

I'm the commander -- see, I don't need to explain -- I do not need to explain why I say things. That's the interesting thing about being president.

The mythologies represent genuine reflection and not a little insight. They reveal man's simple, naïve consciousness busying itself with the explanation of things.

An explanation of cause is not a justification by reason.

Even a scientist is a human being. So it is natural for him, like others, to hate the things he cannot explain. It is a common illusion to believe that what we know today is all we ever can know. Nothing is more vulnerable than scientific theory, which is an ephemeral attempt to explain facts and not an everlasting truth in itself.

It is painful—there is no denying it—to interpret radiant things from the shadow-side, and thus in a measure reduce them to their origins in dreary filth. But it seems to me to be an imperfection in things of beauty, and a weakness in man, if an explanation from the shadow-side has a destructive effect.

The most that can fairly be demanded is that the number of individual observations shall be as high as possible. If this number, statistically considered, falls within the limits of chance expectation, then it has been statistically proved that it was a question of chance; but no explanation has thereby been furnished. There has merely been an exception to the rule.

But the fact remains that the most thorough explanation leaves the patient in many cases an intelligent but still incapable child.

Nothing is more vulnerable than scientific theory, which is an ephemeral attempt to explain facts and not an everlasting truth in itself.

A voi s? înÅ£elegi sau s? explici prea mult e la fel de inutil ÅŸi de nociv ca a nu înÅ£elege.

As long as concepts are identical with mere words, the variation is almost imperceptible and plays no practical role. But when an exact definition or a careful explanation is needed, one can occasionally discover the most amazing variations, not only in the purely intellectual understanding of the term, but particularly in its emotional tone and its application. As a rule, these variations are subliminal and therefore never realized.

men fear the chaos of the world, I thought, and the yawning eternity hereafter. So we build patterns to explain its terrible mysteries and reassure ourselves we are safe in this world and beyond.

You cannot go on 'explaining away' for ever: you will find that you have explained explanation itself away. You cannot go on 'seeing through' things for ever. The whole point of seeing through something is to see something through it.

This attitude adds nothing to the explanation of the paradoxes, for it fails to recognize that the conception of motion at a point, which is the crux of the situation, is not a scientific notion but a mathematical abstraction.

Newton had considered the calculus as a scientific description of the generation of magnitudes, and Leibniz had viewed it as a metaphysical explanation of such generation. The formalism of the nineteenth century took from the calculus any such preconceptions, leaving only the bare symbolic relationships between abstract mathematical entities.

A thorough-going empiricist for whom mathematics was a method rather than an explanation, Newton apparently considered any attempt to question the instantaneity of motion as linked with metaphysics, and so avoided framing a definition of it.

We are led into philosophical confusion, thought Wittgenstein, by seeking explanations at times when we should instead simply stop and say, "This is how things are.

But it seems to me to be an imperfection in things of beauty, and a weakness in man, if an explanation from the shallow-side has a destructive effect. The horror which we feel for Freudian interpretations is entirely due to our own barbaric or childish naivete, which believes that there can be heights without corresponding depths, and which blinds us to the really "final" truth that, when carried to extremes, opposites meet.

Every human behavior can be explained by what precedes it, but that does not excuse it

Leaving people to jumped conclusions is sometimes simpler than explaining a complicated truth