Explanation Quotes - Page 10

I find it quite improbable that such order came out of chaos. There has to be some organizing principle. God to me is a mystery, but is the explanation for the miracle of existence, why there is something instead of nothing.

Allan Sandage

God, Science, Order

"Sizing up the Cosmos: An Astronomer's Quest" by John Noble Wilford, www.nytimes.com. March 12, 1991.

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To understand is nothing, but to be understood-that is the problem and the source of anguish. The soul throbs and would have the other know-but can not and feels isolated. Then come gestures, words, awkward explanations and material symbols for imponderable outbursts of feeling-and the soul despairs.

Andre Gide

Philosophical, Soul, Awkward

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Genetically influenced behavior is not necessarily good and not necessarily unchangeable. Explanations of bad behavior that appeal to genes do not absolve a person any more than do explanations that appeal to upbringing.

Steven Pinker

Evolution, Behavior, Genes

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To my mind, the theory of [evolution] does not stand up at all. If living matter is not, then, caused by the interplay of atoms, natural forces, and radiation [i.e., time, chance, and chemistry], how has it come into being? I think, however, that we must go further than this and admit that the only acceptable explanation is creation.

Henry Lipson

Thinking, Theory Of Evolution, Mind

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This doctrine, that of the ghost in the machine, strictly separates the mind or soul from the body. And by doing so it takes the soul outside the sphere of mechanical or scientific explanation. It splits the world of the mind from the world of science. It is often supposed to protect our cherished free will.

Simon Blackburn

Soul, Mind, Machines

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A great deal of the universe does not need any explanation. Elephants, for instance. Once molecules have learnt to compete and to create other molecules in their own image, elephants, and things resembling elephants, will in due course be found roaming around the countryside ... Some of the things resembling elephants will be men.

Peter Atkins

Men, Roaming Around, Elephants

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Success requires no explanations. Failure permits no alibis.

Napoleon Hill

Inspirational, Wrestling, Permit

Napoleon Hill (2016). “Your Right to Be Rich”, p.108, Jaico Publishing House

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The farther we go, the more the ultimate explanation recedes from us, and all we have left is faith.

Vaclav Hlavaty

Faith, Left, Ultimate

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Anyone can repeat a technical explanation they read in a text-book or blog post.

Albert Einstein

Book, Repeats, Posts

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Sorrow is not in death but in loneliness, and conflict comes when you seek consolation, forgetfullness, explanations, and illusions.

Jiddu Krishnamurti

Love, Life, Truth

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Is the divine presence a Republican? Or is He/She/It running an inter-galactic fossil fuel conglomerate?...whatever the explanation may be, the Paraclete appears to be as determined as any terrestrial corporate frontman to prevent a successful conclusion to the climate talks. How I know? Because every time anyone gets together to try to prevent global climate breakdown, He swaths the rich, densely habited parts of the world with snow and ice, while leaving obscurer places to cook.

George Monbiot

Running, Successful, Ice

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It's paradoxical that where people are the most closely crowded, in the big coastal cities in the East and West, the loneliness is the greatest... The explanation, I suppose, is that the physical distance between people has nothing to do with loneliness. It's psychic distance...

Robert M. Pirsig

Distance, Loneliness, Psychics

"Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance". Book by Robert M. Pirsig, 1974.

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Dialogue is the ideal means of showing what is between the characters. It crystallizes relationships. It should, ideally, be so effective as to make analysis or explanation of the relationships between the characters unnecessary.

Elizabeth Bowen

Writing, Character, Mean

Elizabeth Bowen (1950). “Collected Impressions”

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It was God who made me so beautiful. If I weren't, then I'd be a teacher.

Linda Evangelista

Beautiful, Teacher, Teaching

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Part of the reason that these attempts at explanation fail, I think, is that photographers, like all artists, choose their medium because it allows them the most fully truthful expression of their vision... as Robert Frost told a person who asked him what one of his poems meant, 'You want me to say it worse?'

Robert Adams

Photography, Thinking, Artist

Robert Adams (1994). “Why People Photograph: Selected Essays and Reviews”

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One barrier... is the impoverishment of classroom language, the failure to cultivate a common vocabulary about inquiry, explanation, argument and problem solving.

David Perkins

Teaching, Learning, Vocabulary

David Perkins (2008). “Smart Schools: From Training Memories to Educating Minds”, p.143, Simon and Schuster

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There's a difference between a mystery and a question. Questions demand answers, but a mystery demands something more valuable-explanation.

Robert Cialdini

Teaching, Differences, Answers

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Reincarnation contains a most comforting explanation of reality by means of which Indian thought surmounts difficulties which baffle the thinkers of Europe.

Albert Schweitzer

Mean, Reality, Europe

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Has it occurred to you that transmigration is at once an explanation and a justification of the evil of the world? If the evils we suffer are the result of sins committed in our past lives, we can bear them with resignation and hope that if in this one we strive toward virtue out future lives will be less afflicted.

W. Somerset Maugham

Past, Evil, Suffering

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We tolerate, even promote, many things we once regarded as evil, wrong, or immoral. And then we seek "explanations" for an act that seems beyond comprehension. Remove societal restraints on some evils and one can expect the demons to be freed to conduct other evil acts.

Cal Thomas

Evil, Political, Politics

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Variable behaviour of the sun is an obvious explanation, and there is increasing evidence that Earth's climate responds to changing patterns of solarmagnetic activity. ... If you look back into the sun's past, you find that we live in a period of abnormally high solar activity. ... It's a boom-bust system, and I would expect a crash soon. ... Having a crash would certainly allow us to pin down the sun's true level of influence on the Earth's climate. Then we will be able to act on fact, rather than from fear.

Nigel Weiss

Past, Sun, Facts

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It is perhaps just dawning on five or six minds that physics, too, is only an interpretation and exegesis of the world (to suit us, if I may say so!) and not a world-explanation.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Mind, World, May

Friedrich Nietzsche (2009). “Basic Writings of Nietzsche”, p.211, Modern Library

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By explanation the scientist understands nothing except the reduction to the least and simplest basic laws possible, beyond which he cannot go, but must plainly demand them; from them however he deduces the phenomena absolutely completely as necessary.

Carl Friedrich Gauss

Science, Law, Demand

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To give a causal explanation of an event means to deduce a statement which describes it, using as premises of the deduction one or more universal laws, together with certain singular statements, the initial conditions ... We have thus two different kinds of statement, both of which are necessary ingredients of a complete causal explanation.

Karl Popper

Mean, Science, Law

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[The aim of science is] to explain what so far has taken to be an explicans, such as a law of nature. The task of empirical science constantly renews itself. We may go on forever, proceeding to explanations of a higher and higher universality.

Karl Popper

Taken, Science, Law

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