Explanation Quotes

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

As for the British churchman, he goes to church as he goes to the bathroom, with the minimum of fuss and no explanation if he can help it.

Whichever theory we adopt to give a rational explanation of human existence, that theory must take into account and explain the mental nature we see at work in all modern communities.

Design can never be an ultimate explanation for anything. It can only be a proximate explanation. A plane or a car is explained by a designer but that's because the designer himself, the engineer, is explained by natural selection.

I have three degrees in history and only one in law, but since I came back to specialize in constitutional law where history is so essentially a part and an explanation of much that exists, the two disciplines blended very well.

On the ordinary view of each species having been independently created, we gain no scientific explanation.

It is so stupid of modern civilisation to have given up believing in the devil when he is the only explanation of it.

We all dream. We dream vividly, depending on our nature. Our existence is beyond our explanation, whether we believe in God or we have religion or we're atheist.

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

The point of my explanation is I'm very subjective when it comes to describing my characters: they are all a little bit a part of me from the outside in or the inside out - but to put your mind at ease, I built Paul Snider from the outside in.

But I remember the moment when my father died. I wasn't a very committed Catholic beforehand, but when that happened it suddenly all felt so obvious: I now believe religion is our attempt to find an explanation, for us to feel more protected.

People would ask me why I was doing what I was doing - but I always told them that I just loved to skate. There was no other explanation.

To one who has faith, no explanation is necessary. To one without faith, no explanation is possible.

Throughout human history, the apostles of purity, those who have claimed to possess a total explanation, have wrought havoc among mere mixed-up human beings.

If some really acute observer made as much of egotism as Freud has made of sex, people would forget a good deal about sex and find the explanation for everything in egotism.

There has to be a mathematical explanation for how bad that tie is.

The difference between a tool and a machine is not capable of very precise distinction; nor is it necessary, in a popular explanation of those terms, to limit very strictly their acceptation.

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

I believe the most compelling explanation of Obama's actions is that he is, just like his father, an anti-colonialist.

But if it not be true, the myth itself requires to be explained, and every principle of philosophy and common sense demand that the explanation be sought, not in arbitrary allegorical categories, but in the actual facts of ritual or religious custom to which the myth attaches.

The non-comic, factual explanation is that I felt there was a myth about terrorist bombers being medieval-minded, 'fundamentalist, primitivist' people. There seems to be a lot of evidence to contradict that, especially in Britain. Some of the ideology behind what has become modern jihadism was socially progressive, certainly in Egypt, for example.

Myth is an attempt to narrate a whole human experience, of which the purpose is too deep, going too deep in the blood and soul, for mental explanation or description.

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

Of course, the simple explanation of the fact is that marriage is the most important act of man's life in Europe or America, and that everything depends upon it.

In fact, when you get right down to it, almost every explanation Man came up with for anything until about 1926 was stupid.

My explanation remains the same: It was an attempt to make the point that anyone who opposed the war can achieve their objective by working within their sphere of influence, whether their political party or community of faith.

Any decision I make is based on myself, and the only person I have to give an explanation to is God.

Maybe... there is a perfectly reasonable explanation for unlawfully detaining 120 people. Maybe they just got carried away with last year's idea of pre-emptive strikes and thought, 'Let's not wait for an actual crime to occur. Let's get the innocent.

And never - not in a single case - was the explanation, 'I was pressured to do this.' The explanation was very often, 'The limited data we had led one to reasonably conclude this. I now see that there's another explanation for it.'

The clearest explanation for the failure of any marriage is that the two people are incompatible; that is, that one is male and the other female.