Quotes About Explanation

Conspiracy theories are also a way for people to give context and meaning to events that frighten them. Without a coherent explanation for why terrible things happen to innocent people, they would have to accept such occurrences as nothing more than the random cruelty either of an uncaring universe or an incomprehensible deity.

Theism does not offer a sufficiently substantial explanation of our capacities, and naturalism does not offer a sufficiently reassuring one.

Physical science has progressed by leaving the mind out of what it tries to explain, but there may be more to the world than can be understood by physical science.

The existence of conscious minds and their access to the evident truths of ethics and mathematics are among the data that a theory of the world and our place in it has yet to explain.

There are things that science as presently conceived does not help us to understand, and which we can see, from the internal features of physical science, that it is not going to explain. They seem to call for a more uncompromisingly mentalistic or even normative form of understanding.

evolutionary naturalism offers an explanation of our knowledge that is seriously inadequate, when applied to the knowledge-generating capacities that we take ourselves to have.

by establishing the Mental Nature of the Universe, easily explains all of the varied mental and psychic phenomena that occupy such a large portion of the public attention, and which, without such explanation, are non-understandable and defy scientific treatment.

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.

That's the key to love: Never explain yourself. If a woman attacks, and your response is explanations, then strap on a helmet.

I didn't mean—

No one would want to read a book in which I explain the science of cloning because it would be very dull and it would also make no sense.

Better a bad excuse, than none at all.

I'm not interested in breaking news. I'm interested in telling the story of what's going on and then trying to figure it out.

My view is that science only has something to say about a very particular notion of God, which goes by the name of 'god of the gaps'.

As a novelist, you write about social mores, but not everything can be explained.

I believe the most compelling explanation of Obama's actions is that he is, just like his father, an anti-colonialist.

You can't explain collateralized debt obligation in a novel - it's too draggy.

If some really acute observer made as much of egotism as Freud has made of sex, people would forget a good deal about sex and find the explanation for everything in egotism.

The simplest explanation is usually the right one

Your past is not an excuse. But it is an explanation - offering insight into the questions so many of us ask ourselves: Why do I behave the way I behave? Why do I feel the way I do? For me, there is no doubt that our strengths, vulnerabilities, and unique responses are an expression of what happened to us.

Eso que llamas cuentos no son cuentos, ¡son realidades! —decía Nilgün—. Son necesarias para explicar el mundo.

Beauty is a form of Genius--is higher, indeed, than Genius, as it needs no explanation. It is one of the great facts of the world, like sunlight, or springtime, or the reflection in the dark waters of that silver shell we call the moon. It cannot be questioned. It has divine right of sovereignty. It makes princes of those who have it.

I do not open up the truth to one who is not eager to get knowledge, nor help out anyone who is not anxious to explain himself. When I have presented one corner of a subject to anyone, and he cannot from it learn the other three, I do not repeat my lesson.

The ugly truth is that other than Feynman's sum-over theories there is no believable explanation of quantum mechanics that does not involve human consciousness. Of course this raises the questions as to how it managed to get along without us.