Quotes on Explanation

Because it is there [famous explanation for wanting to climb Mount Everest].

Of two equivalent theories or explanations, all other things being equal, the simpler one is to be preferred.

The best argument is that which seems merely an explanation.

To him who has had the experience no explanation is necessary, to him who has not, none is possible.

A God capable of continuously monitoring and controlling the individual status of every particle in the universe cannot be simple. His existence is going to need a mammoth explanation in its own right.

Religion has run out of justifications. Thanks to the telescope and the microscope, it no longer offers an explanation of anything important. Where once it used to able, by its total command of a worldview, to prevent the emergence of rivals, it can now only impede and retard-or try to turn back-the measureable advances that we have made.

I think it is an immutable law in business that words are words, explanations are explanations, promises are promises, but only performance is reality

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.

There is a great deal of unmapped country within us.

I think you can have 10,000 explanations for failure, but no good explanation for success.

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...

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

Success requires no explanations. Failure permits no alibis.

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.

I always felt that the great high privilege, relief and comfort of friendship was that one had to explain nothing.

War is an art and as such is not susceptible of explanation by fixed formula

Everything has a natural explanation. The moon is not a god but a great rock and the sun a hot rock.

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.

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.

We operate with nothing but things which do not exist, with lines, planes, bodies, atoms, divisible time, divisible space - how should explanation even be possible when we first make everything into an image, into our own image!

It is between fifty and sixty years since I read it (i.e. the Book of Revelations), and I then considered it merely the ravings of a maniac, no more worthy nor capable of explanation than the incoherence of our own nightly dreams.