Explicable Quotes & Sayings

Evil is unintelligible. It is just a thing in itself, like boarding a crowded commuter train wearing only a giant boa constrictor. There is no context which would make it explicable. — Terry Eagleton

For reasons not always at the time explicable, there are specific occasions when events begin suddenly to take on a significance previously unsuspected, so that, before we really know where we are, life seems to have begun in earnest at last, and we ourselves, scarcely aware that any change has taken place, are careering uncontrollably down the slippery avenues of eternity. — Anthony Powell

The Communism of the English intellectual is something explicable enough. It is the patriotism of the deracinated. — George Orwell

I'm strangely comforted when I hear from scientists that human beings are the most complex creatures we know of in the universe, still, by far. Black holes are in their way explicable; the simplest living being is not. I lean a bit more confidently into the experience that life is so endlessly perplexing. I love that word. Spiritual life is a way of dwelling with perplexity - taking it seriously, searching for its purpose as well as its perils, its beauty as well as its ravages. — Krista Tippett

Physics explains everything, which we know because anything physics cannot explain does not exist, which we know because whatever exists must be explicable by physics, which we know because physics explains everything. There is something here of the mystical. — David Bentley Hart

Rationalism, which is the feeling that everything is subject to and completely explicable by Reason, consequently rejects everything not visible and calculable. — Francis Parker Yockey

There is no mystery
that's the beauty of it. We are entirely explicable to each other, and yet we stay. What a miracle that is. — Kamila Shamsie

I am convinced that of all the people on the two sides of the great curtain, the space pilots are the least likely to hate each other. Like the late Erich von Holst, I believe that the tremendous and otherwise not quite explicable public interest in space flight arises from the subconscious realization that it helps to preserve peace. May it continue to do so! — Konrad Lorenz

We know how ninety-nine percent of the universe works," he told Carter shortly after they met, "and that's the clockworks, that's what we build with. But the other one percent makes the clockworks wind down. That's inertia. No one knows how that works, but it does. It's that one percent mystery that's the way of our maker. Put everything together, energy and inertia, the explicable and the inexplicable, and that's how you and I make our living. — Glen David Gold

Mrs E. Kapelsen of Boston, Massachusetts was an elderly lady, indeed, she felt her life was nearly at an end. She had seen a lot of it, been puzzled by some, but, she was a little uneasy to feel at this late stage, bored by too much. It had all been very pleasant, but perhaps a little too explicable, a little too routine.
With a sigh she flipped up the little plastic window shutter and looked out over the wing.
At first she thought she ought to call the stewardess, but then she thought no, damn it, definitely not, this was for her, and her alone.
By the time her two inexplicable people finally slipped back off the wing and tumbled into the slipstream she had cheered up an awful lot.
She was mostly immensely relieved to think that virtually everything that anybody had ever told her was wrong. — Douglas Adams

The explicable requires the inexplicable. Experience requires the nonexperienceable. The obvious requires the mystical. — R. Buckminster Fuller

I am not and autobiographical writer--one can't be without a solid and explicable self--and read all autobiographical writers with the same curiosity. What kind of life permits a person the right to become his own subject? — Yiyun Li

It took Descartes to deduce that God would not wish to deceive us. The world must be as it appears to be, the Frenchman deduced, because a perfect God would never wish to deceive us. Nothing has been explicable since. — Tim Parks

Of the works of this mind history is the record. Its genius is illustrated by the entire series of days. Man is explicable by nothing less than all his history. Without hurry, without rest, the human spirit goes forth from the beginning to embody every faculty, every thought, every emotion, which belongs to it, in appropriate events. But the thought is always prior to the fact; all the facts of history preexist in the mind as laws. Each law in turn is made by circumstances predominant, and the limits of nature give power to but one at a time. A man is the whole encyclopaedia of facts. The creation of a thousand forests is in one acorn, and Egypt, Greece, Rome, Gaul, Britain, America, lie folded already in the first man. Epoch after epoch, camp, kingdom, empire, republic, democracy, are merely the application of his manifold spirit to the manifold world. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

You explain nothing, O poet, but thanks to you all things become explicable. — Paul Claudel

Nothing important is completely explicable. — Madeleine L'Engle

Science is not a system of certain, or -established, statements; nor is it a system which steadily advances towards a state of finality ... And our guesses are guided by the unscientific, the metaphysical (though biologically explicable) faith in laws, in regularities which we can uncover-discover. Like Bacon, we might describe our own contemporary science-'the method of reasoning which men now ordinarily apply to nature'-as consisting of 'anticipations, rash and premature' and as 'prejudices'. — Karl Popper

Man is explicable by nothing less than all his history. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Not all truths are explicable, Julia," he said. "And not all explicable things are true. — Jan-Philipp Sendker

We know from astronomy that the universe had a beginning, from physics that the future is both open and unpredictable, from geology and paleontology that the whole of life has been a process of change and transformation. From biology we know that our tissues are not impenetrable reservoirs of vital magic, but a stunning matrix of complex wonders, ultimately explicable in terms of biochemistry and molecular biology. With such knowledge we can see, perhaps for the first time, why a Creator would have allowed our species to be fashioned by the process of evolution. — Kenneth R. Miller

Everyone will be compelled to see that which is optically true, is explicable in its own terms, is objective, before he can arrive at any possible subjective position. This will abolish that pictorial and imaginative association pattern which has remained unsuperseded for centuries and which has been stamped upon our vision by great individual painters. — Laszlo Moholy-Nagy

The further on we go, the more meaning there is, but the less articulable. You live your life and the older you get- the more specifically you harvest- the more precious becomes every ounce and spasm. Your life and times don't drain of meaning because they become more contradictory, ornamented by paradox, inexplicable. The less explicable, the more meaning. The less like a mathematics equation (a sum game); the more like music (significant secret). — Gregory Maguire

Each outbreak, by this view, represents a local event primarily explicable by a larger cause - the arrival of the wave. The main proponent of the wave idea is Peter D. Walsh, an American ecologist who has worked often in Central Africa and specializes in mathematical theory about ecological facts. I think it's spreading from host to host in a reservoir host, — David Quammen

The whole history of Israel, its ritual and its government, is explicable only as it is typical of the spiritual Israel, of the sacrifice on Calvary, of the precious blood which alone can wash away sin. — Abbott Eliot Kittredge

The difference between the Parthenon and the World Trade Center, between a French wine glass and a German beer mug, between Bach and John Philip Sousa, between Sophocles and Shakespeare, between a bicycle and a horse, though explicable by historical moment, necessity, and destiny, is before all a difference of imagination. — Guy Davenport

The Stetson passage is an allusion to Frazer theory in The Golden Bough that religion originated as agricultural engineering. Through a grotesque process of literalization, all of the dying gods and heroes in The Golden Bough, along with Christ and the Fisher King, are transferred from mythic to modern consciousness ( Frazer himself was an unabashed positivist) to be made explicable in scientific terms as fertilizer. — Jewel Spears Brooker

He had all sorts of rules he'd constructed for himself over the decades, based on lessons someone must have taught him
what he wasn't entitled to; what he mustn't enjoy; what he mustn't hope or wish for; what he mustn't covet
and it took some years to figure out what these rules were, and longer still to figure out how to try to convince him of their falsehood. But this was very difficult: they were rules by which he had survived his life, they were rules that made the world explicable to him. — Hanya Yanagihara

It seems a miracle that young children easily learn the language of any environment into which they were born. The generative approach to grammar, pioneered by Chomsky, argues that this is only explicable if certain deep, universal features of this competence are innate characteristics of the human brain. Biologically speaking, this hypothesis of an inheritable capability to learn any language means that it must somehow be encoded in the DNA of our chromosomes. Should this hypothesis one day be verified, then lingusitics would become a branch of biology. — Niels Kaj Jerne

Time is the explicable raw material of everything. — Arnold Bennett

A good scientific theory should be explicable to a barmaid. — Ernest Rutherford

As they rolled over the marshes before Venice, he fell back in his seat, windburnt and exhausted, and noticed that the bottle of water, but for its slight and elegant blue tint, was the smoothest, clearest, and most transparent thing he had ever seen. All that was reflected in it was sharp, subdued, and calm. The fields outside, beyond the reeds; the reeds themselves, waving green and yellow; the water, shockingly blue in north light, were clarified, compressed, and preserved within the lens. And if bottles of mineral water could pacify the light of mountains, fields, and the sea, to what painful mysteries would the lens of beauty be opaque? Even death, Alessandro thought, would yield to beauty - if not in fact then in explanation - for the likeness of every great question could be found in forms as simple as songs, and there, if not explicable, they were at least perfectly apprehensible. — Mark Helprin

I do think that our perception of reality is fragmentary, and in 20th-century literature, it's totally normal to not describe reality as something whole and completely transportable and explicable. That's been accepted in novels. But genre films always pretend that reality is transportable, which means that it is explicable. — Michael Haneke

-the wind called a mordant note through the sickly trees while other less explicable sounds scraped up the beach-head toward him-waiting for the unknown wickedness to arrive. — Nick Cutter

Venetia thought of dogs as important enablers on our paths of individual enlightenment. This could manifest itself as our own personal spiritual awareness, represented by the metaphors of religious literature. Or reconciliation with the world as finite and only scientifically explicable. Regardless of the understanding at which you arrive, indulging a dog playfully took you to a moment of truth. Into the present. Real Joy. This is what interested Venetia. — Christian Howell

Imagine the Creator as a low comedian, and at once the world becomes explicable. — H.L. Mencken

At what point does character-playing become habit, something for which we are grateful because it allows us to go through the world with the ease that comes from being predictable to ourselves, even if that predictability takes the form of neurosis, hysteria, depression? And at what point does that habit turn darkly into addiction? I wiped my hands clean. We are so desperate to be explicable to ourselves, to rely on ourselves, that we need to believe a certain version of who we are even when evidence starts to mount that the version is a lie, even when the part of us which is not tamed by habit strains to break free and overwhelm the tired, repetitive creature that our character has become, mouldering at the edges. — Kamila Shamsie

The UFOs were explicable enough, just experimental aircrafts from the airport. Of course the government was not going to tell people what was actually going on. She would not be surprised if the government encouraged the UFO cultists to flock there as the perfect cover, since no one would ever believe them. — Thomm Quackenbush

Everything is explicable in the terms of the behavior of a small child. — Stanislaw Lem

44. [...] later that afternoon, a therapist will say to me, "If he hadn't lied to you, he would have been a different person than he is." She is trying to get me to see that although I thought I loved this man very completely for exactly who he was, I was in fact blind to the man he actually was, or is.
45. This pains me enormously. She presses me to say why; I can't answer. Instead I say something about how clinical psychology forces everything we call love into the pathological or the delusional or the biologically explicable, that if what I was feeling wasn't love then I am forced to admit that I don't know what love is, or, more simply, that I loved a bad man. How all of these formulations drain the blue right out of love and leave an ugly, pigmentless fish flapping on a cutting board on a kitchen counter. — Maggie Nelson

Once we perceive that it is Judaism which is the root cause of antisemitism, otherwise irrational or inexplicable aspects of antisemitism become rationally explicable ... Only something representing a threat to the core values, allegiances and beliefs of others could cause such universal, deep and lasting hatred. This Judaism has done ... — Dennis Prager

Many of us will also find it hard to abandon our belief that in man himself there dwells an impulse towards perfection, which has brought him to his present heights of intellectual prowess and ethical sublimation, and from which it might be expected that his development into superman will be ensured. But I do not believe in the existence of such an inner impulse, and I see no way of preserving this pleasing illusion. The development of man up to now does not seem to me to need any explanation differing from that of animal development, and the restless striving towards further perfection which may be observed in a minority of human beings is easily explicable as the result of that repression of instinct upon which what is most valuable in human culture is built. — Sigmund Freud