Explanation Quotes - Page 35

• Titus Bramble: The only explanation for his existence in the Premiership is that he is already here.

  Pete Gill

  Soccer, Football, Player

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• To the human mind there is something almost illogical in the assertion that God became a man. It is like speaking about a square circle. Yet this is what Christmas says - and we take refuge from our bewilderment not in explanation but in adoration.

  Ralph P. Martin

  Men, Squares, Circles

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• Westerners think that all that is negative and positive is only caused from outside of themselves. They materialize and externalize their experiences, never understanding the connection between outer and inner phenomena or interdependent phenomena, looking for explanations only from objects through nihilist habit instead of from the subjective experience of their own minds.

  Thinley Norbu

  Thinking, Understanding, Mind

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• Julian Jaynes's theories for the nature of self-awareness, introspection, and consciousness have replaced the assumption of their almost ethereal uniqueness with explanations that could initiate the next change in paradigm for human thought.

  Michael Persinger

  Self, Next, Assumption

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• Michael Moore: a man who never without an excuse for keeping murdering tyrants in power. But now he's supporting the man who bombed Milosevic into submission? How about an explanation, Mr Moore?

  Andrew Sullivan

  Men, Tyrants, Politics

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• Speculation has been singularly fruitful as to what these markings on our next to nearest neighbor in space may mean. Each astronomer holds a different pet theory on the subject, and pooh-poohs those of all the others. Nevertheless, the most self-evident explanation from the markings themselves is probably the true one; namely, that in them we are looking upon the result of the work of some sort of intelligent beings. . . . The amazing blue network on Mars hints that one planet besides our own is actually inhabited now.

  Percival Lowell

  Mean, Intelligent, Blue

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• To avoid the hard necessity of either obeying or rejecting the plain instructions of our Lord in the New Testament we take refuge in a liberal interpretation of them. We evangelicals also know how to avoid the sharp point of obedience by means of fine and intricate explanations. These are tailor-made for the flesh. They excuse disobedience, comfort carnality and make the words of Christ of none effect. And the essence of it all is that Christ simply could not have meant what He said. His teachings are accepted even theoretically only after they have been weakened by interpretation.

  Aiden Wilson Tozer

  Teaching, Mean, Essence

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• The philosophical implication of race-thinking is that by offering us the mystery of heredity as an explanation, it diverts our attention from the social and intellectual factors that make up personality.

  Jacques Barzun

  Philosophical, Thinking, Race

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• The doctors take the bodily evidence as the disease. . . . disease is itself an impudent opinion. He throws off the feelings of the sick and imparts to them his own which are perfect health, and his explanation destroys their feelings or disease. . . . He is like a captain who knows his business and feels confident in a storm, and his confidence sustains the crew and ship when both would be lost if the captain should give way to his fears.

  Phineas Quimby

  Doctors, Giving, Perfect

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• Human nature is full of riddles and contradictions; its very complexity engenders art-and by art I mean the search for something more than simple linear formulations, flat solutions, oversimplified explanations.

  Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

  Art, Mean, Simple

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• The future is created at the intersection of business, technology, design, and culture. *In the Bubble* is an insightful and delightful explanation of this nexus and of how each force affects the others. Designers often miss a great deal in their educations about the real people who will use and inhabit their work. Thackara astutely illuminates a lot of what designers don't know they're missing.

  Nathan Shedroff

  Real, Technology, People

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• My only real solace? Sleep. In the absence of an explanation of anything, for everything, I live for it and what it can bring.

  Rebecca Lim

  Real, Sleep, Absence

  Rebecca Lim (2010). “Mercy (Mercy, Book 1)”, p.7, HarperCollins UK

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• Society soon grows used to any state of things which is imposed upon it without explanation.

  Edith Wharton

  Society, Used, States

  Edith Wharton (2008). “Old New York”, p.227, Simon and Schuster

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• The American vice is explanation.

  Gore Vidal

  Vices

  Gore Vidal (1982). “Pink triangle and yellow star, and other essays (1976-1982)”

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• Unemployment is like a headache or a high temperature - unpleasant and exhausting but not carrying in itself any explanation of its cause.

  William Beveridge

  Unemployment, Temperature, Causes

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• But I have contrived an explanation which has every advantage; is inviting to christians of every communion; gradually frees them from all religious prejudices; cultivates the social virtues; and animates them by a great, a feasable, a speedy prospect of universal happiness, in a state of liberty and moral equality, freed from the obstacles which subordination, rank, and riches, continually throw in our way. My explanation is accurate and complete, my means are effectual, and irresistable. Our secret association works in a way that nothing can withstand, and man shall soon be free and happy.

  Adam Weishaupt

  Christian, Religious, Mean

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• Tony Awards boost Broadway attendance and sell the shows on the road. They're the sugar to swat the fly. If you needed more explanation for the yearly ballyhoo, in the metropolitan areas where a Broadway show plays, the local economy is boosted by three and a half times the gross ticket sales. So when we're talking Tonys, we're talking moolah.

  John Lahr

  Awards, Talking, Play

  "Lahr’s Tony Picks: The 2012 Edition". www.newyorker.com.

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• The whole motley confusion of acts, omissions, regrets and hopes which is the life of each one of us finds in death, not meaning or explanation, but an end.

  Octavio Paz

  Regret, Omission, Life And Death

  Octavio Paz (1985). “The Labyrinth of Solitude: And the Other Mexico ; Return to the Labyrinth of Solitude ; Mexico and the United States ; The Philanthropic Ogre”, p.54, Grove Press

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• Causal analysis provides absolutely no value judgment, and a value judgment is absolutely not a causal explanation.

  Max Weber

  Analysis, Judgment, Values

  Max Weber (1949). “Max Weber on the methodology of the social sciences”

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• Suppose cats became philosophers, they would see a cat universe and have a cat solution of the problem of the universe, and a cat ruling it. So we see from this that our explanation of the universe is not the whole of the solution.

  Swami Vivekananda

  Cat, Philosopher, Problem

  Swami Vivekananda (2015). “Jnana Yoga: The Yoga of Knowledge”, p.65, editionNEXT.com

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• If, while I'm painting, I distort or destroy a motif, it is not a planned or conscious act, but rather it has a different justification: I see the motif, the way I painted it, is somehow ugly or unbearable. Then I try to follow my feelings and make it attractive. And that means a process of painting, changing or destroying - for however long it takes - until I think it has improved. And I don't demand an explanation from myself as to why this is so.

  Gerhard Richter

  Art, Mean, Thinking

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• [A certain class of explanations in science are] analgesics that dull the ache of incomprehension without removing the cause.

  Peter Medawar

  Science, Class, Dull

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• I'm no actor. And I have sixty-four pictures to prove it.

  Victor Mature

  Acting, Actors, Four

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• The explanation of the propensity of the English people to portrait painting is to be found in their relish for a Fact. Let a man do the grandest things, fight the greatest battles, or be distinguished by the most brilliant personal heroism, yet the English people would prefer his portrait to a painting of the great deed. The likeness they can judge of; his existence is a Fact. But the truth of the picture of his deeds they cannot judge of, for they have no imagination.

  Benjamin Haydon

  Fighting, Men, People

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• We should get used to the idea that we'll probably never be able to find - and confirm - a good explanation of the ultimate origin of the universe, though I see no reason to believe that we can't press much further on this question than we have managed to date.

  Daniel Dennett

  Believe, Ideas, Able

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