Quotes Tagged "explanation"

Love is an endless mystery, because there is no reasonable cause that could explain it.

To live on a day-to-day basis is insufficient for human beings; we need to transcend, transport, escape; we need meaning, understanding, and explanation; we need to see over-all patterns in our lives. We need hope, the sense of a future. And we need freedom (or, at least, the illusion of freedom) to get beyond ourselves, whether with telescopes and microscopes and our ever-burgeoning technology, or in states of mind that allow us to travel to other worlds, to rise above our immediate surroundings. We may seek, too, a relaxing of inhibitions that makes it easier to bond with each other, or transports that make our consciousness of time and mortality easier to bear. We seek a holiday from our inner and outer restrictions, a more intense sense of the here and now, the beauty and value of the world we live in.

I don't accept the currently fashionable assertion that any view is automatically as worthy of respect as any equal and opposite view. My view is that the moon is made of rock. If someone says to me 'Well, you haven't been there, have you? You haven't seen it for yourself, so my view that it is made of Norwegian Beaver Cheese is equally valid' - then I can't even be bothered to argue. There is such a thing as the burden of proof, and in the case of god, as in the case of the composition of the moon, this has shifted radically. God used to be the best explanation we'd got, and we've now got vastly better ones. God is no longer an explanation of anything, but has instead become something that would itself need an insurmountable amount of explaining. So I don't think that being convinced that there is no god is as irrational or arrogant a point of view as belief that there is. I don't think the matter calls for even-handedness at all.

If I die very young, hear this: I was never anything but a kid playing. I was a heathen like the sun and the water, I had the universal religion only people don’t have. I was happy because I didn’t ask for anything at all, Or tried to find anything, And I didn’t find any more explanation Than the word explanation having no meaning at all.

There has to be new words to explain new worlds.

In ancient times people weren't just male or female, but one of three types: male/male, male/female, or female/female. In other words, each person was made out of the components of two people. Everyone was happy with this arrangement and never really gave it much thought. But then God took a knife and cut everybody in half, right down the middle. So after that the world was divided just into male and female, the upshot being that people spend their time running around trying to locate their missing other half.

People who live with OCD drag a metal sea anchor around. Obsession is a break, a source of drag, not a badge of creativity, a mark of genius or an inconvenient side effect of some greater function.

Explanation separates us from astonishment, which is the only gateway to the incomprehensible.

The Rose is without an explanation; She blooms, because She blooms.

Communism to me is one-third practice and two-thirds explanation.

Evolution is an indispensable component of any satisfying explanation of our psychology.

I embarked on my life - I didn't do anything. I don't have an explanation.

With the exception of gravitation and radioactivity, all of the phenomena known to physicists and chemists in 1911 have their ultimate explanation in the laws of quantum electrodynamics.

An explanation of cause is not a justification by reason.

An excuse is the handy explanation we offer when we disappoint other people.

A little inaccuracy sometimes saves a ton of explanation.