Explanation Quotes - Page 9

• Train yourselves. Don't wait to be fed knowledge out of a book. Get out and seek it. Make explorations. Do your own research work. Train your hands and your mind. Become curious. Invent your own problems and solve them. You can see things going on all about you. Inquire into them. Seek out answers to your own questions. There are many phenomena going on in nature the explanation of which cannot be found in books. Find out why these phenomena take place. Information a boy gets by himself is enormously more valuable than that which is taught to him in school.

  Irving Langmuir

  Book, Teaching, School

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• In a word, I consider hospitals only as the entrance to scientific medicine; they are the first field of observation which a physician enters; but the true sanctuary of medical science is a laboratory; only there can he seek explanations of life in the normal and pathological states by means of experimental analysis.

  Claude Bernard

  Life, Mean, Science

  Claude Bernard (2012). “An Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine”, p.168, Courier Corporation

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• When someone admits one and rejects another which is equally in accordance with the appearances, it is clear that he has quitted all physical explanation and descended into myth.

  Epicurus

  Science, Appearance, Theory

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• I open each class with an explanation of the singular importance of being a "dealmaker." The manifesto of the dealmaker is simple: Reality is negotiable.

  Tim Ferriss

  Simple, Reality, Class

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• The best and safest way of philosophising seems to be, first to enquire diligently into the properties of things, and to establish those properties by experiences [experiments] and then to proceed slowly to hypotheses for the explanation of them. For hypotheses should be employed only in explaining the properties of things, but not assumed in determining them; unless so far as they may furnish experiments.

  Isaac Newton

  Philosophy, Science, Experience

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• Our present work sets forth mathematical principles of philosophy. For the basic problem of philosophy seems to be to discover the forces of nature from the phenomena of motions and then to demonstrate the other phenomena from these forces. It is to these ends that the general propositions in books 1 and 2 are directed, while in book 3 our explanation of the system of the world illustrates these propositions.

  Isaac Newton

  Nature, Philosophy, Book

  Sir Isaac Newton (2014). “Newton: Philosophical Writings”, p.60, Cambridge University Press

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• Evolution is a fact, as securely established as any in science, and he who denies it betrays woeful ignorance and lack of education, which likely extends to other fields as well.

  Richard Dawkins

  Ignorance, Simple, Religion

  "Should Religion Impact Your Vote?" by Roy Speckhardt, www.huffingtonpost.com. September 7, 2011.

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• A designer God cannot be used to explain organized complexity because any God capable of designing anything would have to be complex enough to demand the same kind of explanation in his own right.

  Richard Dawkins

  Design, Religion, Atheism

  Richard Dawkins (2008). “The God Delusion”, p.136, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• Not only is science corrosive to religion, but religion is corrosive to science. It teaches people to be satisfied with trivial non-explanations and blinds them to the wonderful real explanations that we have within our grasp.

  Richard Dawkins

  Real, People, Religion

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• Thanks to the telescope and the microscope, religion no longer offers an explanation for anything important.

  Christopher Hitchens

  Religion, Atheism, Important

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• I don't think God is an explanation at all. It's simply redescribing the problem.

  Richard Dawkins

  Thinking, Atheism, Problem

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• Naturally, since [the Sumerians] didn't know what caused the flood anymore than we do, they blamed the gods. (That's the advantage of religion. You're never short an explanation for anything.)

  Isaac Asimov

  Fear, Atheism, Rage

  Isaac Asimov (1989). “The Tyrannosaurus Prescription and 100 Other Essays”

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• The aim of those who try to control thought is always the same. They find one single explanation of the world, one system of thought and action that will (they believe) cover everything; and then they try to impose that on all thinking people.

  Gilbert Highet

  Fear, Believe, Thinking

  Gilbert Highet (1954). “Man's Unconquerable Mind”, p.57, Columbia University Press

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• I only drink to steady my nerves... sometimes I'm so steady I don't move for months.

  W. C. Fields

  Drinking, Moving, Nerves

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• There are only two possible explanations as to how life arose: Spontaneous generation arising to evolution or a supernatural creative act of God.... There is no other possibility. Spontaneous generation was scientifically disproved 120 years ago by Louis Pasteur and others, but that just leaves us with only one other possibility... that life came as a supernatural act of creation by God, but I can't accept that philosophy because I do not want to believe in God. Therefore I choose to believe in that which I know is scientifically impossible, spontaneous generation leading to evolution.

  George Wald

  Philosophy, Believe, Years

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• Set aside the many competing explanations of the big bang; something made an entire cosmos out of nothing. It is this realization - that something transcendent started it all - which has hard-science types... using terms like "miracle."

  Gregg Easterbrook

  Miracle, Bangs, Cosmos

  "The New Convergence". www.wired.com. December 1, 2002.

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• Evolutionary biologists have been able to pretend to know how complex biological systems originated only because they treated them as black boxes. Now that biochemists have opened the black boxes and seen what is inside, they know the Darwinian theory is just a story, not a scientific explanation.

  Phillip E. Johnson

  Black, Stories, Able

  Phillip E. Johnson (1997). “Defeating Darwinism by Opening Minds”, p.77, InterVarsity Press

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• I really didn't say everything I said.

  Yogi Berra

  Silly, Mlb, Dumb

  Quoted in Sports Illustrated, 17 Mar. 1986

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• All men who have ideals . . . live by some kind of faith, by committing themselves to some kind of loyalty which is not universally recognized as the common property of all thinking men. They must have something-something outside themselves, to make them feel life is worth living, that good rather than evil is the explanation of the world.

  Ronald Knox

  Loyalty, Thinking, Men

  Ronald Knox (2010). “In Soft Garments: Classic Catholic Apologetics”, p.105, Ignatius Press

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• My movies were the kind they show in prisons and airplanes, because nobody can leave.

  Burt Reynolds

  Movie, Airplane, Kind

  Burt Reynolds, Jon Winokur (2015). “But Enough About Me: A Memoir”, p.87, Penguin

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• You cannot explain failure any more than you can argue with success.

  J. Richard Clarke

  Failure, Arguing

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• In the final, the positive, state, the mind has given over the vain search after absolute notions, the origin and destination of the universe, and the causes of phenomena, and applies itself to the study of their laws - that is, their invariable relations of succession and resemblance. Reasoning and observation, duly combined, are the means of this knowledge. What is now understood when we speak of an explanation of facts is simply the establishment of a connection between single phenomena and some general facts.

  Auguste Comte

  Knowledge, Mean, Science

  "Auguste Comte and Positivism: The Essential Writings".

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• The question whether atoms exist or not... belongs rather to metaphysics. In chemistry we have only to decide whether the assumption of atoms is an hypothesis adapted to the explanation of chemical phenomena... whether a further development of the atomic hypothesis promises to advance our knowledge of the mechanism of chemical phenomena... I rather expect that we shall some day find, for what we now call atoms, a mathematico-mechanical explanation, which will render an account of atomic weight, of atomicity, and of numerous other properties of the so-called atoms.

  August Kekule

  Knowledge, Science, Promise

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• For if as scientists we seek simplicity, then obviously we try the simplest surviving theory first, and retreat from it only when it proves false. Not this course, but any other, requires explanation. If you want to go somewhere quickly, and several alternate routes are equally likely to be open, no one asks why you take the shortest. The simplest theory is to be chosen not because it is the most likely to be true but because it is scientifically the most rewarding among equally likely alternatives. We aim at simplicity and hope for truth.

  Nelson Goodman

  Science, Simplicity, Trying

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• [Theory is] an explanation that has been confirmed to such a degree, by observation and experiment, that knowledgeable experts accept it as fact. That's what scientists mean when they talk about a theory: not a dreamy and unreliable speculation, but an explanatory statement that fits the evidence. They embrace such an explanation confidently but provisionally - taking it as their best available view of reality, at least unil some severely conflicting data or some better explanation might come along.

  David Quammen

  Mean, Reality, Views

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