Simple Explanation Quotes & Sayings

As Linda says again and again, the simple life isn't the easy life. Each soul here is enormously courageous. The conflicts in their lives have not been trivial. It's taken most of them a great deal of time, introspection and explanation to arrive at their chosen sanity. They are intrepid explorers, leaving the security of the known for the hoped-for brighter tomorrow. — Linda Breen Pierce

One of the best-known studies of availability suggests that awareness of your own biases can contribute to peace in marriages, and probably in other joint projects. In a famous study, spouses were asked, "How large was your personal contribution to keeping the place tidy, in percentages?" They also answered similar questions about "taking out the garbage," "initiating social engagements," etc. Would the self-estimated contributions add up to 100%, or more, or less? As expected, the self-assessed contributions added up to more than 100%. The explanation is a simple availability bias: both spouses remember their own individual efforts and contributions much more clearly than those of the other, and the difference in availability leads to a difference in judged frequency. — Daniel Kahneman

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. — Richard Dawkins

I don't think God is an explanation at all. It's simply redescribing the problem. We are trying to understand how we have got a complicated world, and we have an explanation in terms of a slightly simpler world, and we explain that in terms of a slightly simpler world and it all hangs together down to an ultimately simple world. Now, God is not an explanation of that kind. God himself cannot be simple if he has power to do all the things he is supposed to do. — Richard Dawkins

Sitting there, I remembered two things about going to mass with my father: he never took Communion because of his and my mother's divorce, and he always tapped his heart three times, with solemn insistence, after the recitation of the Apostles' Creed. I asked him about his ritual once. His eyes filled with such alarm that I instantly knew his heart tapping had something to do with a loss or devastation: his parents' early death, his divorce, his wounding in Vietnam. There was no reason for me to invade that space. Maybe that was the best simple explanation for religion: it filled our spaces. — Tom Bissell

I've come to understand that "why?" is the wrong question. It's usually where we start our journey, but it never takes us to any destination. We must find the courage to move away from that place of demanding an explanation from God and take the next step, the one of simple trust: Lord, what do You want to show me? — Cathee A. Poulsen

Very simple was my explanation, and plausible enough
as most wrong theories are! — H.G.Wells

Call saw that everyone was looking at him, the hands and cowboys and townspeople alike. The anger had drained out of him, leaving him feeling tired. He didn't remember the fight, particularly, but people were looking at him as if they were stunned. He felt he should make some explanation, though it seemed to him a simple situation.
"I hate a man that talks rude," he said. "I won't tolerate it. — Larry McMurtry

The tension of constructing an explanation, from A to B to C to D, apparently so simple a task, irritates many people with ADD. While they can hold the information in mind, they do not have the patience to sequentially put it out. That is too tedious. They would like to dump the information in a heap on the floor all at once and have it be comprehended instantly. Otherwise, — Edward M. Hallowell

But things happened the way they happened without regard to our desire for them to have happened another way. Despite an age-old instinct to provide an explanation more complex than that, something with a level of profundity and depth which would seem commensurate with the confusion I felt, it really was that simple. — Kevin Powers

The atom can't be seen, yet its existence can be proved. And it is simple to prove that it can't ever be seen. It has to be studied by indirect evidence - and the technical difficulty has been compared to asking a man who has never seen a piano to describe a piano from the sound it would make falling downstairs in the dark. — Carl David Anderson

The medical literature on the causes of food poisoning is full of euphemisms and dry scientific terms: coliform levels, aerobic plate counts, sorbitol, MacConkey agar, and so on. Behind them lies a simple explanation for why eating a hamburger can now make you seriously ill: There is shit in the meat. — Eric Schlosser

A war changes people in a number of ways. It either shortcuts you to your very self; or it triggers such variations that you might as well have been a larva, pupating in dampness, darkness and tightly wrapped puttees. Then, providing you don't take flight from a burst shell, you emerge from your khaki cocoon so changed from what you were that you fear you've gone mad, because people at home treat you as though you were someone else. Someone who, through a bizarre coincidence, had the same name, address and blood ties as you, but who must have died in the war. And you have no choice but to live as an impostor because you can't remember who you were before the war. There's a simple but horrible explanation for this: you were born in the war. You slid, slick, bloody and fully formed, out of a trench.
The Great War was the greatest changer of them all. — Ann-Marie MacDonald

The explanation is quite simple. I wished to be near my mother. — James Whistler

Why, then, are narrow genetic assumptions so widely accepted and, in particular, so enthusiastically embraced by the media? The neglect of developmental science is one factor. Our preference for a simple and quickly understood explanation is another, as is our tendency to look for one-to-one causations for almost everything. Life in its wondrous complexity does not conform to such easy reductions. — Gabor Mate

By the close of 2015, the queen had visited 128 countries. Her most popular destination was Canada (27 visits), followed by Australia (18 visits). When asked to explain her desire to explore, Elizabeth reportedly had a simple yet logical explanation. "I have to be seen to be believed. — The Editors Of LIFE

If all abstract thought is metaphorical, and all metaphors are assembled out of biologically basic concepts, then we would have an explanation for the evolution of human intelligence. Human intelligence would be a product of metaphor and combinatorics. Metaphor allows the mind to use a few basic ideas-substance, location, force, goal-to understand more abstract domains. Combinatorics allows a finite set of simple ideas to give rise to an infinite set of complex ones. — Steven Pinker

I listened, I understood and I didn't understand. Long ago she had threatened Marcello with the shoemaker's knife simply because he had dared to grab my wrist and break the bracelet. From that point on, I was sure that if Marcello had just brushed against her she would have killed him. But toward Stefano, now, she showed no explicit aggression. Of course, the explanation was simple: we had seen our fathers beat our mothers from childhood. We had grown up thinking that a stranger must not even touch us, but that our father, our boyfriend, and our husband could hit us when they liked, out of love, to educate us, to reeducate us. As — Elena Ferrante

There are many aspects of time we just do not understand. That's the thing about writing a popular book: You realize the things you understand because for those you can give a really simple explanation. But some things about time I just don't know how to give simple explanations for, even though I can tell you mathematically what's going on. — Lisa Randall

we seek what we think are simple explanations for events in our lives because we believe the simpler something is, the more fundamental - the more true - it is. But when it comes to randomness, our desire for simplicity can mislead us. Not everything is simple, and to try to force it to be is to misrepresent reality. I believe that the inappropriate application of simple rules and models onto complex mechanisms causes damage - to whatever project is at hand and even to the company as a whole. The simple explanation is so desirable that it is often embraced even when it's completely inappropriate. — Ed Catmull

A nationwide study published by the USDA in 1996 found that [ ... ] 78.6 percent of the ground beef contained microbes that are spread primarily by fecal matter. The medical literature on the causes of food poisoning is full of euphemisms and dry scientific terms: coliform levels, aerobic plate counts, sorbitol, MacConkey agar, and so on. Behind them lies a simple explanation for why eating hamburger meat makes you sick: There is shit in the meat. — Eric Schlosser

It is better to adopt the simplest explanation, even if it is not simple, even if it does not explain very much. A bright light is not necessary, a taper is all one needs to live in strangeness, if it faithfully burns. — Samuel Beckett

Why is it that you guys are so conservative in your views, in the face of the almost complete lack of understanding of what is going on in your field?" I asked. The answer was as simple as it was surprising. "If we [cosmologists] don't accept some common picture of the universe, however unsupported by the facts, there would be nothing to bind us together as a scientific community. Since it is unlikely that any picture that we use will be falsified in our lifetime, one theory is as good as any other." The explanation was social, not scientific. — Per Bak

There is a simple explanation for why men haven't found women funny. It's because men only ever experience women in relation to men: they never get to see what women are like with one another. Shows like ours started to let men in on the joke. — Magda Szubanski

I do not envy people who think they have a complete explanation of the world, for the simple reason that they are obviously wrong. — Salman Rushdie

If a large number of people who are convinced alien abductions are real are hypnotising even larger numbers of others who suspect they might be, then it is likely there will be many alien abduction narratives flying around, as, indeed, there are. Of course, this is not proof they are not true, but it does provide a persuasive context for a simple psychosocial explanation. Hypnotism is a technique that triggers a mass storytelling project in which all the stories are linked. — Bryan Appleyard

[On Archimedes mathematical results:] It is not possible to find in all geometry more difficult and intricate questions, or more simple and lucid explanation ... No investigation of yours would succeed in attaining the proof, and yet, once seen you immediately believe you would have discovered it. — Proclus

Even if your novel occurs in an unfamiliar setting in which all the customs and surroundings will seem strange to your reader, it's still better to start with action. The reason for this is simple. If the reader wanted an explanation of milieu, he would read nonfiction. He doesn't want information. He wants a story. — Nancy Kress

Buster sat on the curb in front of the college, waiting for his sister to pick him up. To pass the time, he skimmed the stories of the creative writing students. One was about a wild party and the story consisted almost entirely of a detailed explanation of a drinking game called Flip 'N Chug that seemed, to Buster, to be too complicated to facilitate the simple goal of getting drunk. — Kevin Wilson

Why?" My high, strained voice made me sound like a child. I cleared my throat and tried again. "Why wait until now to talk?" Apparently, my curiosity had won. He quietly studied me for a moment then opened his arms. I didn't hesitate, but stepped right into them. I needed his comfort. He tucked me against his chest and gave me his explanation in a simple, heart-melting way. "If I'd spoken, even just one word, I would have never been able to hold back what I feel for you. You would have run." I remembered the day he'd plopped down on the towel next to Rachel. Had he arrived any other way, I would have tried to kick him out. If that wouldn't have worked, I would have...run. Even then, he'd known me. I hadn't been ready for any monumental life changes then and wasn't sure if I was now. I — Melissa Haag

contextualization is inevitable. As soon as you choose a language to speak in and particular words to use within that language, the culture-laden nature of words comes into play. We often think that translating words from one language to another is simple - it's just a matter of locating the synonym in the other language. But there are few true synonyms. The word God is translated into German as Gott - simple enough. But the cultural history of German speakers is such that the word Gott strikes German ears differently than the English word God strikes the ears of English speakers. It means something different to them. You may need to do more explanation if you are to give German speakers the same biblical concept of God that the word conveys to English speakers. — Timothy J. Keller

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. — Lafcadio Hearn

NO" is a complete sentence. It does not require an explanation to follow. You can truly answer someone's request with a simple No. — Sharon E. Rainey

Facts which at first seem improbable will, even on scant explanation, drop the cloak which has hidden them and stand forth in naked and simple beauty. — Galileo Galilei

So, in one slightly technical line, here's the mathematical skinny. There's an equation in string theory that has a contribution of the form (D-10) times (Trouble), where D represents the number of spacetime dimensions and Trouble is a mathematical expression resulting in troublesome physical phenomena, such as the violation of energy conservation mentioned above. As to why the equation takes this precise form, I can't offer any intuitive, nontechnical explanation. But if you do the calculation, that's where the math leads. Now, this simple but key observation is that if the number of spacetime dimensions is ten, not the four we expect, the contribution becomes 0 times Trouble. And since 0 times anything is 0, in a universe with ten spacetime dimensions the trouble gets wiped away. That's how the math plays out. Really. And that's why string theorists argue for a universe with more than four spacetime dimensions. — Brian Greene

Nathan called all shiksas Maria
the explanation seemed as ludicrously simple as that. — Philip Roth

There is a simple, logical explanation,' I said to myself. And because you never know who else is listening, I added, 'And there is nothing under the bed.'
Dexter — Jeff Lindsay

You may be astonished that in such a short period of time I could go from weeping over the muffled killing of a flying fish to gleefully bludgeoning to death a dorado. I could explain it by arguing that profiting from a pitiful flying fish's navigational mistake made me shy and sorrowful, while the excitement of actively capturing a great dorado made me sanguinary and self-assured. But in point of fact the explanation lies elsewhere. It is simple and brutal: a person can get used to anything, even to killing. — Yann Martel

We're in the explanation business, and if the answers to the questions we explore got too simple, we'd be out of work. — Michael Pollan

If I have learned anything as a scientist, it is that one should not make things complicated when a simple explanation will do. — Ivar Giaever

Don't ask me how he got here, or what he really is. I think we've all learned over the years that the sooner we accept the simple explanation for the unexplained, the better chance we have of surviving a crisis. — Christopher Moore

Before I had kids, I thought you should never lie to a kid. But now I've had them, I realize you almost lie to them by definition, because if you're trying to summarize something for your 1-year-old, you put it in very simple terms. You only gradually complicate the explanation as they get older. — Emma Donoghue

Any one of my many shrinks could tell you that I was looking for my father. Wasn't everyone? The explanation didn't quite content me. Not that it seemed wrong: it just seemed too simple. Perhaps the search was really a kind of ritual in which the process was more important than the end. Perhaps it was a kind of quest. Perhaps there was no man at all, but just a mirage conjured by our longing and emptiness. When you go to sleep hungry you dream of eating. When you go to sleep with a full bladder you dream of getting up to pee. When you go to sleep horny you dream of getting laid. Maybe the impossible man was nothing more than a specter made of our own yearning. Maybe he was like the fearless intruder, the phantom rapist women expect to find under their bed or in their closets. Or maybe he was really death, the last lover. — Erica Jong

If in this narrative I have not yet paid Queen Sophia adequate consideration, particularly given the unrelenting domination the woman would soon claim over every single element of my life, I offer this simple yet honest explanation: for fifteen unbroken years, my mother had toiled to protect me from the woman. It is remarkable, as I reflect upon my childhood, how utterly unaware I was of this situation while it transpired, the truth coming to my notice only in despondent hindsight. — Catherine Gilbert Murdock

For a long time, I did not move from the dark, wood-panelled hall. I wanted company, and I had none, lights and warmth and a strong drink inside me, I needed reassurance. But, more than anything else, I needed an explanation. It is remarkable how powerful a force simple curiosity can be. I had never realized that before now. In spite of my intense fear and sense of shock, I was consumed with the desire to find out exactly who it was that I had seen, and how, I could not rest until I had settled the business, for all that, while out there, I had not dared to stay and make any investigations. — Susan Hill

Any philosophic explanation of Quality is going to be both false and true precisely because it is a philosophic explanation. The process of philosophic explanation is an analytic process, a process of breaking something down into subjects and predicates. What I mean (and everybody else means) by the word 'quality' cannot be broken down into subjects and predicates. This is not because Quality is so mysterious but because Quality is so simple, immediate and direct. — Robert M. Pirsig

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

Only simple ideas can be held by large groups of people. Commonly held ideas are almost always dumbed down until they are practically lies ... and often dangerous ones. Once vast numbers of people have come to believe the lie, they adjust their own behavior to bring themselves into sync with it, and thereby change the world itself. The world, then, no longer resembles the one that gave rise to the original insight. Soon, a person's situation is so at odds with the world as it really is that a crisis develops, and he or she must seek a new metaphor for explanation and guidance. — Bill Bonner

Many people have trouble sticking to their resolutions, and there is a simple scientific explanation for this. In 1987, a team of psychologists conducted a study in which they monitored the New Year's resolutions of 275 people. After one week the psychologists found that 92 percent of the people were keeping their resolutions; after two weeks we have no idea what happened because the psychologists had quit monitoring. — Dave Barry

But that night as I drove back to Montreal, I at least discovered this: that there is no simple explanation for anything important any of us do, and that the human tragedy, or the human irony, consists in the necessity of living with the consequences of actions performed under the pressure of compulsions so obscure we do not and cannot understand them. — Hugh MacLennan

Your explanation depresses me," I said.
"Your nonsense depresses me," said Simple. — Langston Hughes

To yearn for a single, and usually simple, explanation of the chaotic materials of the past, to search for a single thread in that most tangled of all skeins, is a sign of immaturity. — Henry Steele Commager

If a police officer encounters you in one of those moments, he or she has every right to ask you two simple questions. Memorize these two questions so you will not be tempted to answer any others:

Who are you?
What are you doing right here, right now?

If you are ever approached by a police officer with those two questions, and your God-given common sense tells you that the officer is being reasonable in asking for an explanation, don't be a jerk. — James Duane

Americans get very simple explanations of what happens to them. — Mick Jagger

Maybe there'll be a simple, innocent explanation. I don't think so, because I think we would have offered that up already. — Mike McCurry

Why it is that animals, instead of developing in a simple and straightforward way, undergo in the course of their growth a series of complicated changes, during which they often acquire organs which have no function, and which, after remaining visible for a short time, disappear without leaving a trace ... To the Darwinian, the explanation of such facts is obvious. The stage when the tadpole breathes by gills is a repetition of the stage when the ancestors of the frog had not advanced in the scale of development beyond a fish. — Francis Maitland Balfour

Terrorism, ladies and gentlemen, in my eyes I have a very, very, very simple explanation. Gangs of criminals, killers, used unfortunately by certain governments in the past for political purposes, who are on their own now as gangs. — Hamid Karzai

Evil is simple. It's a child's explanation for why people do bad things. The truth is always more complicated and worth pursuing. — Mindy Mejia

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. Evolution is not some recondite backwater of science, ignorance of which would be pardonable. It is the stunningly simple but elegant explanation of our very existence and the existence of every living creature on the planet. — Richard Dawkins

Finally, "industrial society," to use a genteel euphemism for capitalism, has also become an easy explanation for the environmental ills that afflict our time. But a blissful ignorance clouds the fact that several centuries ago, much of England's forest land, including Robin Hood's legendary haunts, was deforested by the crude axes of rural proletarians to produce charcoal for a technologically simple metallurgical economy and to clear land for profitable sheep runs. This occurred long before the Industrial Revolution. — Murray Bookchin

One year, on vacation in Hawaii, I was relaxing at a beach, watching whales in the distance, when a fisherman, obviously a local, drove up in his pick-up truck. He got out with a dozen fishing rods. Not one. A dozen. He baited each hook, cast all the lines into the ocean, and set the rods in the sand. Intrigued, I wandered over and asked him for an explanation. "It's simple," he said. "I love fish but I hate fishin'. I like eatin', not catchn'. So I cast out 12 lines. By sunset, some of them will have caught a fish. Never all of 'em. So if I only cast one or two I might go hungry. But 12 is enough so some always catch. Usually there's enough for me and extras to sell to local restaurants. This way, I live the life I want." The simple fellow had unwittingly put his finger on a powerful secret. The flaw in most businesses, that keeps them always in desperate need - which suppresses prices - is: too few lines cast in the ocean. — Dan S. Kennedy

Balancing so many things at once means that too often we only skim across the surface of an issue. As our concentration span shrinks, we risk losing the capacity to think about things carefully, to consider their complexity, to examine their long-term implications. We can become drawn to the elevator pitch, to the simple explanation, to the quick fix. At the same time, we become less capable of genuinely listening to one another, as — Donniel Hartman