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Science is all about proving theories and understanding the universe. Science folds everything into neat logical well-explained packages. The fey are magical capricious illogical and unexplainable. Science cannot prove the existence of faeries so naturally we do not exist. That type of nonbelief is fatal to faries.
Julie Kagawa (The Iron King (The Iron Fey, #1))
Personally, I'm a lazy kind of guy, and leaving the door open on the mystical saves me work. I don't have to stress my brain trying to explain the unexplainable. It's magic. End of discussion.
Janet Evanovich (Wicked Appetite (Lizzy & Diesel, #1))
I am a strong believer that fate exists. That everything happens for a reason. That the people we have in our lives are in our lives without accident. There is always meaning. Explainable or unexplainable. There is no such thing as luck. We are all here for a purpose. All we have to do is believe.
Juansen Dizon (Confessions of a Wallflower)
Empathy and a huge imagination explain a lot of mysteries in the universe.
Shannon L. Alder
Magic is only unexplained science. Science is explained magic. When I study science, I study magic. When I study magic, I study science.
C. JoyBell C.
Coincidence: just another way of explaining the unexplainable.
Dana E. Donovan (The Witch's Ladder (Tony Marcella Mystery, #1))
You will never find a faery at a science fair. Why? Because science is all about proving theories and understanding the universe. Science folds everything into neat logical, well-explained packages. The fey are magical, capricious, illogical and unexplainable. Science cannot prove the existence of faeries, so naturally we do not exist. That type of non-belief is fatal to faeries.
Julie Kagawa (The Iron King (The Iron Fey, #1))
The older I get, the more I believe in what I can't explain or understand, even more than the things that are explainable and understandable.
Lillian Gish
It was a thread woven through all of humankind: this need for story to explain the unexplainable, to comfort the hurting, to promise that no one was alone. Evie's uncle Will had said there was no greater power on earth than story. And in this shared moment, Memphis knew that it was so.
Libba Bray (The King of Crows (The Diviners, #4))
The task of the theologian is to explain everything through God, and to explain God as unexplainable.
Karl Rahner
The paranormal was just an unknown science that had yet to be explained.
Kelly Covic (Insomnia (A Short Stories Collection))
Wailing, keening, trying to explain the unexplainable. Trying to release himself and anyone who will listen from the prison of a human experience that cannot explain grief.
Bono (Surrender: 40 Songs, One Story)
We have a disturbed relationship with our past which religion cannot explain. We are primitive in unexplainable ways, our lives woven of the familiar and the strange, the reasonable and the insane.
Frank Herbert (The Dosadi Experiment (ConSentiency Universe, #2))
It's pathetic how we can't live with the things we don't understand. How we need everything labeled and explained and deconstructed. Even if it's for sure unexplainable. Even God.
Chuck Palahniuk
How often are you aware of your surroundings, really aware? And how often are you merely reacting in the same automatic way as you do in dreams?
Stephen LaBerge (Fringe-ology: How I Tried to Explain Away the Unexplainable-And Couldn't)
We love them for their unique abique ability to tug at soul, to connect to us in a way that no other person can. Love is unexplainable, unpredictable, and often unreasonable. It doesn't make sense, and doesn't care to explain to us its thought process.
Alessandra Torre (Do Not Disturb (Deanna Madden, #2))
but true love goes far deeper than that. It is an unexplainable connection of the heart, one that endures triumph and tragedy, pain and suffering, obstacles and loss. It is something that is either present or missing - there is no "almost", "in between", "most of the time." It is the unexplainable reason that some marriages entered into after one-week courtships can last a lifetime. Its absence is why "perfect" marriages fall apart. It can't be quantified or explained in science, religion, or philosophy. It can't be advised on by friends or marriage counselors who can't take their own advice. There are no rules, no how-to books, no guaranteed methods of success. It is not defined by vows or rings or promises of tomorrow. It is simply a miracle of God, that too few are blessed to experience.
Richard Doetsch (The Thieves Of Darkness (Michael St. Pierre, #3))
Love is the astrolabe of God’s mysteries. A lover may be drawn to this love or that love, but finally he is drawn to the Sovereign of Love. However much we describe and explain love, when we fall in love we are ashamed of our words. Explanation by the tongue makes most things clear, but love unexplained is clearer. When the pen came to the subject of love, it broke. When the discourse reached the topic of love, the pen split and the paper tore. If intellect tries to explain it, it falls helpless as a donkey on a muddy trail; only Love itself can explain love and lovers! The proof of the sun is the sun itself. If you wish to see it, don’t turn away from it.
Rumi (Jalal ad-Din Muhammad ar-Rumi)
It is very easy to claim a theory of everything if you get to decide what that everything is. It is very easy to explain everything on the table if you have put everything you cannot explain underneath it in the wastebasket.
Whitley Strieber (The Super Natural: Why the Unexplained Is Real)
Of course that is not the whole story, but that is the way with stories; we make them what we will. It’s a way of explaining the universe while leaving the universe unexplained, it’s a way of keeping it all alive, not boxing it into time. Everyone who tells a story tells it differently, just to remind us that everybody sees it differently. Some people say there are true things to be found, some people say all kinds of things can be proved. I don’t believe them. The only thing for certain is how complicated it all is, like string full of knots. It’s all there but hard to find the beginning and impossible to fathom the end. The best you can do is admire the cat’s cradle, and maybe knot it up a bit more. History should be a hammock for swinging and a game for playing, the way cats play. Claw it, chew it, rearrange it and at bedtime it’s still a ball of string full of knots. Nobody should mind. Some people make a lot of money out of it. Publishers do well, children, when bright, can come top. It’s an all-purpose rainy day pursuit, this reducing of stories called history.
Jeanette Winterson (Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit)
People have trouble admitting when they act for purely selfish reasons. Telling the truth about something like that forces them to redefine their sense of self. So they make up a story. We all do it. Tell stories to explain the unexplainable. To get by. Sometimes the stories even help us survive that which would otherwise destroy us.
Susan Mallery (Barefoot Season (Blackberry Island #1))
I love you... I love you without needing you, I love you without wanting you. I love you for being you. Because, you see, needing you is a necessity; and wanting you is a desire. But being, is as it is. And so, you as you are, this as it is, is as it is just fine. I guess the next level will be, I love you... with no explanation. Simply because I'm lost at words for you, and even if I found words, none of them would explain. Like a man who speaks another language trying to communicate, so will I be a love that feels an unexplainable feeling, trying to explain. I can't... And that's okay.
Israel S. Dudley
Religion exists to explain the unexplained, to calm our fear of dying, but all it does is breed more fear and hatred.
Javier A. Robayo
… signs of a life that we cannot explain are everywhere, vibrating by the side of the life of every day.
Maurice Maeterlinck (The Treasure of the Humble)
When I started researching this book, I expected that women's stories would be similar and rooted in the same systemic problems, but I didn't anticipate finding that our fates are so intimately intertwined. In a medical system with a tendency to assume that anything it can't explain is psychogenic, as long as women have more "medically unexplained symptoms" thanks to the knowledge gap, women will continue to find that they are stereotyped as stressed-out somaticizers and their symptoms are not taken as seriously as men's.
Maya Dusenbery (Doing Harm: The Truth About How Bad Medicine and Lazy Science Leave Women Dismissed, Misdiagnosed, and Sick)
To understand this phrase properly, we have to understand that the word wind is, in the Greek, the same word as spirit. What Jesus explained to Nicodemus here is that conversion is simple but also profound. Out of heaven will come a wind of the Spirit, and though you might not be able to tell where it came from or where it is going, you will know it when it hits you, and it will change you forever.
Ron Phillips (Unexplained Mysteries of Heaven and Earth: Surprising Insights About Our World and Beyond)
There are no words, not in English, Spanish, Arabic, or Hebrew, that have been invented to explain what it’s like to lose a child. The nightmarish heartache of it. The unexplainable trepidation that follows. No mother loses a child without believing she failed as a parent. No father loses a child without believing he failed to protect his family from pain. The child may be gone, but the yearsthe child were meant to live remain behind, solid in the mind like an aging ghost. The birthdays, the holidays, the last days of school—they all remain, circled in red lipstick on a calendar nailed to the wall. A constant shadow that grows, even in the dark. As I was saying…there are no words.
D.E. Eliot (Ruined)
Silence explains a lot of things. It tells us why people are who they not supposed to be. It's the fear of being afraid. It's because of their own safety. Sometimes it becomes an unexplainable feeling. It shows the insecureties, acceptation, love and vulnerability inside everyone of us.
Tessa Vanluchene
People have trouble admitting when they act for purely selfish reasons. Telling the truth about something like that forces them to redefine their sense of self. So they make up a story. We all do it. Tell stories to explain the unexplainable. To get by. Sometimes the stories even help us survive that which would otherwise
Susan Mallery (Barefoot Season (Blackberry Island #1))
Human beings are always fighting about which version of God to worship, or whether any God exists at all. But it seems to me we are only likely to find answers about the nature of the universe, or the possibility of a creator, if we look. And we can’t do that in any meaningful way if our only commitment is to the answers we’ve presupposed.
Steve Volk (Fringe-ology: How I Tried to Explain Away the Unexplainable—And Couldn't)
When God shows up and the unexplainable happens, don’t attempt to explain it as something you did. Tell the story of how God has worked through you to change lives by His grace.
Dillon Burroughs (Faith Acts: A Provocative Call to Live What You Believe)
How do we explain God? Maybe we explain Him as unexplainable.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
The science is clear: if psi exists, the most reliable way to see it is through the lens of statistics. As a result, believers should stop and think before ever consulting a psychic.
Steve Volk (Fringe-ology: How I Tried to Explain Away the Unexplainable-And Couldn't)
He doesn’t know why he loves her. But does anyone know why they love? We don’t love people for their traits—traits are common. We love them for their unique ability to tug at our soul, to connect to us in a way that no other person can. Love is unexplainable, unpredictable, and often unreasonable. It doesn’t make sense, and doesn’t care to explain to us its thought process.
A.R. Torre
There is always a gap between when a symptom begins and when it is 'medically explained.' It is unreasonable to expect that doctors, who are fallible human beings doing a difficult job, can close this gap instantaneously - and, given that medical knowledge is, and probably always will be, incomplete, they may at times not be able to close it at all. But it shouldn't unreasonable to expect that, during this period of uncertainty, the benefit of the doubt be given to the patient, the default assumption be that their symptoms are real, their description of what they are feeling in their own bodies be believed, and, if it is 'medically unexplained,' the burden be on medicine to explain it. Such basic trust has been denied to women for far too long.
Maya Dusenbery (Doing Harm: The Truth About How Bad Medicine and Lazy Science Leave Women Dismissed, Misdiagnosed, and Sick)
You will never find a faery at a science fair. Why? Because science is all about proving theories and understanding the universe. Science folds everything into neat, logical, well-explained packages. The fey are magical, capricious, illogical, and unexplainable. Science cannot prove the existence of faeries, so naturally, we do not exist. That type of nonbelief is fatal to faeries.
Julie Kagawa (The Iron King (The Iron Fey, #1))
The Kingdom cannot be learned like other subjects, such as science, geography or history. The Kingdom is learned only through revelation by the Spirit. It cannot be explained, contained or controlled—thus it is unexplainable, uncontainable and uncontrollable. It is not taught as much as it is caught—and only through the Spirit can it be caught. It cannot be embraced, explained, applied, pursued or entered without the Spirit of God.
R.T. Kendall (Word Spirit Power: What Happens When You Seek All God Has to Offer)
Once we have isolated the computational and neurological correlates of access-consciousness, there is nothing left to explain. It's just irrational to insist that sentience remains unexplained after all the manifestations of sentience have been accounted for, just because the computations don't have anything sentient in them. It's like insisting that wetness remains unexplained even after all the manifestations of wetness have been accounted for, because moving molecules aren't wet.
Steven Pinker (How the Mind Works)
It must be noted that there is no proof that it is justified to apply the label somatisation to such conditions as chronic fatigue syndrome and several more illnesses that established medicine has so for failed to explain scientifically. ……Don't hesitate to ask questions about scientific evidence behind this talk about somatisation. Be persistent, because a diagnosis of somatisation is definitely not an innocuous label. It will close various doors and lead (to) treatments that usually get nowhere.
Per Dalén
But love unexplained is clearer. When pen hasted to write, On reaching the subject of love it split in twain. When the discourse touched on the matter of love, Pen was broken and paper torn. In explaining it Reason sticks fast, as an ass in mire; Naught but Love itself can explain love and lovers! None but the sun can display the sun, If you would see it displayed, turn not away from it. Shadows, indeed, may indicate the sun's presence, But only the sun displays the light of life. Shadows induce slumber, like evening talks, But when the sun arises the "moon is split asunder." 3 In the world there is naught so wondrous as the sun, But the Sun of the soul sets not and has no yesterday. Though the material sun is unique and single, We can conceive similar suns like to it. But the Sun of the soul, beyond this firmament, No like thereof is seen in concrete or abstract.4
Rumi (Jalal ad-Din Muhammad ar-Rumi) (The Masnavi I Manavi of Rumi Complete 6 Books)
I pray that the world never runs out of dragons. I say that in all sincerity, though I have played a part in the death of one great wyrm. For the dragon is the quintessential enemy, the greatest foe, the unconquerable epitome of devastation. The dragon, above all other creatures, even the demons and the devils, evokes images of dark grandeur, of the greatest beast curled asleep on the greatest treasure hoard. They are the ultimate test of the hero and the ultimate fright of the child. They are older than the elves and more akin to the earth than the dwarves. The great dragons are the preternatural beast, the basic element of the beast, that darkest part of our imagination. The wizards cannot tell you of their origin, though they believe that a great wizard, a god of wizards, must have played some role in the first spawning of the beast. The elves, with their long fables explaining the creation of every aspect of the world, have many ancient tales concerning the origin of the dragons, but they admit, privately, that they really have no idea of how the dragons came to be. My own belief is more simple, and yet, more complicated by far. I believe that dragons appeared in the world immediately after the spawning of the first reasoning race. I do not credit any god of wizards with their creation, but rather, the most basic imagination wrought of unseen fears, of those first reasoning mortals. We make the dragons as we make the gods, because we need them, because, somewhere deep in our hearts, we recognize that a world without them is a world not worth living in. There are so many people in the land who want an answer, a definitive answer, for everything in life, and even for everything after life. They study and they test, and because those few find the answers for some simple questions, they assume that there are answers to be had for every question. What was the world like before there were people? Was there nothing but darkness before the sun and the stars? Was there anything at all? What were we, each of us, before we were born? And what, most importantly of all, shall we be after we die? Out of compassion, I hope that those questioners never find that which they seek. One self-proclaimed prophet came through Ten-Towns denying the possibility of an afterlife, claiming that those people who had died and were raised by priests, had, in fact, never died, and that their claims of experiences beyond the grave were an elaborate trick played on them by their own hearts, a ruse to ease the path to nothingness. For that is all there was, he said, an emptiness, a nothingness. Never in my life have I ever heard one begging so desperately for someone to prove him wrong. This is kind of what I believe right now… although, I do not want to be proved wrong… For what are we left with if there remains no mystery? What hope might we find if we know all of the answers? What is it within us, then, that so desperately wants to deny magic and to unravel mystery? Fear, I presume, based on the many uncertainties of life and the greatest uncertainty of death. Put those fears aside, I say, and live free of them, for if we just step back and watch the truth of the world, we will find that there is indeed magic all about us, unexplainable by numbers and formulas. What is the passion evoked by the stirring speech of the commander before the desperate battle, if not magic? What is the peace that an infant might know in its mother’s arms, if not magic? What is love, if not magic? No, I would not want to live in a world without dragons, as I would not want to live in a world without magic, for that is a world without mystery, and that is a world without faith. And that, I fear, for any reasoning, conscious being, would be the cruelest trick of all. -Drizzt Do’Urden
R.A. Salvatore (Streams of Silver (Forgotten Realms: Icewind Dale, #2; Legend of Drizzt, #5))
All science has one aim, namely, to find a theory of nature. We have theories of races and of functions, but scarcely yet a remote approach to an idea of creation. We are now so far from the road to truth, that religious teachers dispute and hate each other, and speculative men are esteemed unsound and frivolous. But to a sound judgment, the most abstract truth is the most practical. Whenever a true theory appears, it will be its own evidence. Its test is, that it will explain all phenomena. Now many are thought not only unexplained but inexplicable; as language, sleep, madness, dreams, beasts, sex.
Ralph Waldo Emerson (Nature)
By refusing randomness and unpredictability, conspiracy theories and paranoid reality tunnels reify the hubris of systematic rationality as such. “Maybe all systems—that is, any theoretical, verbal, symbolic, semantic, etc., formulation that attempts to act as an all-encompassing, all-explaining hypothesis of what the universe is about—are manifestations of paranoia.” As an “antidote” to such paranoia, Dick called for an injection of surprise into life—a cultivation, as it were, of noise on the line. “We should be content with the mysterious, the meaningless, the contradictory, the hostile, and most of all the unexplainably warm and giving.
Erik Davis (High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experiences in the Seventies)
He doesn’t know why he loves her. But does anyone know why they love? We don’t love people for their traits—traits are common. We love them for their unique ability to tug at our soul, to connect to us in a way that no other person can. Love is unexplainable, unpredictable, and often unreasonable. It doesn’t make sense, and doesn’t care to explain to us its thought process. He hears
Anonymous
At one conference Hameroff told Dennett, publicly, "You know, Dan, maybe the reason you like this [mechanistic] idea is because you're a zombie. And maybe the reason I see things differently is because, I'm not." Hameroff told me he was half-joking. But Dennett took offense. "I wound up apologizing," says Hameroff. "I guess he only likes the idea of being a zombie if we're all zombies.
Steve Volk (Fringe-ology: How I Tried to Explain Away the Unexplainable-And Couldn't)
There is a final resource to which I’ve resorted when necessary—the imagination. I have done this with judicious care, imagining for my reader only what I already know is very likely, and even then only when an informed speculation can set these documents into their proper context. Where I have been unable to explain events or motives, I have left them unexplained, out of respect for their hidden realities.
Elizabeth Kostova (The Historian)
To succumb to the God Temptation in either of those guises, biological or cosmological, is an act of intellectual capitulation. If you are trying to explain something improbable, it can never suffice to invoke an entity that is, in itself, at least as improbable. If you’ll stoop to magicking into existence an unexplained peacock-designer, you might as well magic an unexplained peacock and cut out the middleman.
Richard Dawkins (The God Delusion: 10th Anniversary Edition)
Luck is not some esoteric, godlike phenomenon. Luck is countable but undefinable. Luck easily can be explained by a number of factors acting in favour of a person. These factors' behaviour could be statistically proved, and the probability of such a result is possible. So, it is not an unexplainable event. Actually, the miracle would be if these events (luck) are not in presence in our life. So, make your luck!"
Csaba Gabor
Sasquatch, he’s an old man, an old man that lives on a mountain,” he explained. “He just comes in and looks at people and then he goes back out again. He just lives there all his life, never takes care of himself, and just smells real bad. Almost like, almost like that guy, like he is dirty, dirty human being smell is what it smelled like…a real deep, bad odor…It smelled like dirty bad underarms…The closer I got, the worse the smell got.
Colm A. Kelleher (Hunt for the Skinwalker: Science Confronts the Unexplained at a Remote Ranch in Utah)
We are now so far from the road to truth, that religious teachers dispute and hate each other, and speculative men are esteemed unsound and frivolous. But to a sound judgment, the most abstract truth is the most practical. Whenever a true theory appears, it will be its own evidence. Its test is, that it will explain all phenomena. Now many are thought not only unexplained but inexplicable; as language, sleep, madness, dreams, beasts, sex.
Ralph Waldo Emerson (Nature)
The same day, after the lessons were over and Emma went out to the schoolyard, an unexplainable strange trepidation suddenly awoke inside her heart. Something was stopping her from going home. She trailed to the stadium situated behind the school building and took some rest leaning onto the shady branches of poplars. Emily could not explain it how, but she felt it that Mr. Fog is somewhere around, and that he needs to talk to her about something important… She just knew it, and that was it.
Sahara Sanders (The ADVENTURES of Emily Smith & Billy Fifer)
We can't tell you the origin of the experience. But we can tell you the brain does appear to be built to have these [mystical] experiences. There are examples of people reaching similar states, spontaneously. But for the most part, it takes work. Meditation and these powerful prayer experiences require dedication and practice. But people have figured out how to do this, and the question is, 'What is the source of that experience?' The answer is, 'We don't know.' Science doesn't really have an answer for you.
Andrew B. Newberg (Fringe-ology: How I Tried to Explain Away the Unexplainable-And Couldn't)
Frank White, who literally wrote the book on the overview effect, is also part of the Overview Institute. And he thinks of space travel largely as Mitchell does—an evolutionary step. "If fish could think at our level of intelligence," White said, "back before humanity existed, and some fish were starting to venture up on land, a lot of them would be saying, just as we do now about space: 'Why would we want to go there? What's the point?' And they'd have literally no idea of what venturing onto land was going to mean".
Steve Volk (Fringe-ology: How I Tried to Explain Away the Unexplainable-And Couldn't)
We think we know a lot about many things, including God. And we’ve created a box or a frame for this knowledge because it gives us some sort of context to explain what is unexplainable. But what if all that knowledge won’t fit in the box? What if we get a bigger box and it still won’t fit? What if all that we think we know has been forced into the wrong frame? We can keep looking at the picture, knowing there is something off about it, or we can take it down from the wall and reframe it. We need to rethink what we know about God and how we relate to Him. Then perhaps we can reframe the relationship. Maybe we can give it something a little roomier. Possibly a bigger frame for our understanding of God will mean a bigger life for us.
Brian Hardin (Reframe: From the God We've Made to God With Us)
Walt Whitman's proclamation that a leaf of grass was a miracle to confound all atheists did more justice to the findings of science than a positivism that stopped with the breaking down of the chemical reactions between sunlight and chlorophyll. This isolation of science from feeling, emotion, purpose, singular events, historic identity, endeared it to more limited minds. But it is not, perhaps, an accident that most of the great spirits in science, from Kepler and Newton to Faraday and Einstein, kept alive in their thought the presence of God-not as a mode of explaining events, but as a reminder of why they are ultimately as unexplainable today to an honest enquirer as they were to Job. (That thought has been admirably translated in Conrad Aiken's poetic dialogue with 'Thee.')
Lewis Mumford (The Pentagon of Power (The Myth of the Machine, Vol 2))
Perhaps it is unfair to expect such a high degree of scientific precision. But studies that conclude health disparities are caused by genetic difference do not even come close. These studies typically control for the socio-economic status (SES) of the research subjects in an attempt to compare subjects of different races who have the same SES. If there remains a difference in the prevalence or outcome of a disease, the researchers typically attribute the unexplained variation to genetic distinctions between racial groups. But this conclusion suffers from a basic methodological error. The researchers failed to account for many other unmeasured factors, such as the experience of racial discrimination or differences in wealth, not just income, that are related to health outcomes and differ by race. Any one of these unmeasured factors—and not genes—might explain why health outcomes vary by race.
Dorothy Roberts (Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-First Century)
We also find *physics*, in the widest sense of the word, concerned with the explanation of phenomena in the world; but it lies already in the nature of the explanations themselves that they cannot be sufficient. *Physics* is unable to stand on its own feet, but needs a *metaphysics* on which to support itself, whatever fine airs it may assume towards the latter. For it explains phenomena by something still more unknown than are they, namely by laws of nature resting on forces of nature, one of which is also the vital force. Certainly the whole present condition of all things in the world or in nature must necessarily be capable of explanation from purely physical causes. But such an explanation―supposing one actually succeeded so far as to be able to give it―must always just as necessarily be burdened with two essential imperfections (as it were with two sore points, or like Achilles with the vulnerable heel, or the devil with the cloven foot). On account of these imperfections, everything so explained would still really remain unexplained. The first imperfection is that the *beginning* of the chain of causes and effects that explains everything, in other words, of the connected and continuous changes, can positively *never* be reached, but, just like the limits of the world in space and time, recedes incessantly and *in infinitum*. The second imperfection is that all the efficient causes from which everything is explained always rest on something wholly inexplicable, that is, on the original *qualities* of things and the *natural forces* that make their appearance in them. By virtue of such forces they produce a definite effect, e.g., weight, hardness, impact, elasticity, heat, electricity, chemical forces, and so on, and such forces remain in every given explanation like an unknown quantity, not to be eliminated at all, in an otherwise perfectly solved algebraical equation. Accordingly there is not a fragment of clay, however little its value, that is not entirely composed of inexplicable qualities. Therefore these two inevitable defects in every purely physical, i.e., causal, explanation indicate that such an explanation can be only *relatively* true, and that its whole method and nature cannot be the only, the ultimate and hence sufficient one, in other words, cannot be the method that will ever be able to lead to the satisfactory solution of the difficult riddles of things, and to the true understanding of the world and of existence; but that the *physical* explanation, in general and as such, still requires one that is *metaphysical*, which would furnish the key to all its assumptions, but for that very reason would have to follow quite a different path. The first step to this is that we should bring to distinct consciousness and firmly retain the distinction between the two, that is, the difference between *physics* and *metaphysics*. In general this difference rests on the Kantian distinction between *phenomenon* and *thing-in-itself*. Just because Kant declared the thing-in-itself to be absolutely unknowable, there was, according to him, no *metaphysics* at all, but merely immanent knowledge, in other words mere *physics*, which can always speak only of phenomena, and together with this a critique of reason which aspires to metaphysics." ―from_The World as Will and Representation_. Translated from the German by E. F. J. Payne. In Two Volumes, Volume II, pp. 172-173
Arthur Schopenhauer
For the next twenty minutes Elizabeth asked for concessions, Ian conceded, Duncan wrote, and the dowager duchess and Lucinda listened with ill-concealed glee.. In the entire time Ian made but one stipulation, and only after he was finally driven to it out of sheer perversity over the way everyone was enjoying his discomfort: He stipulated that none of Elizabeth’s freedoms could give rise to any gossip that she was cuckolding him. The duchess and Miss Throckmorton-Jones scowled at such a word being mentioned in front of them, but Elizabeth acquiesced with a regal nod of her golden head and politely said to Duncan, “I agree. You may write that down.” Ian grinned at her, and Elizabeth shyly returned his smile. Cuckolding, to the best of Elizabeth’s knowledge, was some sort of disgraceful conduct that required a lady to be discovered in the bedroom with a man who was not her husband. She had obtained that incomplete piece of information from Lucinda Throckmorton-Jones, who, unfortunately, actually believed it. “Is there anything more?” Duncan finally asked, and when Elizabeth shook her head, the dowager spoke up. “Indeed, though you may not need to write it down.” Turning to Ian, she said severely, “If you’ve any thought of announcing this betrothal tomorrow, you may put it out of your head.” Ian was tempted to invite her to get out, in a slightly less wrathful tone than that in which he’d ordered Julius from the house, but he realized that what she was saying was lamentably true. “Last night you went to a deal of trouble to make it seem there had been little but flirtation between the two of you two years ago. Unless you go through the appropriate courtship rituals, which Elizabeth has every right to expect, no one will ever believe it.” “What do you have in mind?” Ian demanded shortly. “One month,” she said without hesitation. “One month of calling on her properly, escorting her to the normal functions, and so on.” “Two weeks,” he countered with strained patience. “Very well,” she conceded, giving Ian the irritating certainty that two weeks was all she’d hoped for anyway. “Then you may announce your betrothal and be wed in-two months!” “Two weeks,” Ian said implacably, reaching for the drink the butler had just put in front of him. “As you wish,” said the dowager. Then two things happened simultaneously: Lucinda Throckmorton-Jones let out a snort that Ian realized was a laugh, and Elizabeth swept Ian’s drink from beneath his fingertips. “There’s-a speck of lint in it,” she explained nervously, handing the drink to Bentner with a severe shake of her head. Ian reached for the sandwich on his plate. Elizabeth watched the satisfied look on Bentner’s face and snatched that away, too. “A-a small insect seems to have gotten on it,” she explained to Ian. “I don’t see anything,” Ian remarked, his puzzled glance on his betrothed. Having been deprived of tea and sustenance, he reached for the glass of wine the butler had set before him, then realized how much stress Elizabeth had been under and offered it to her instead. “Thank you,” she said with a sigh, looking a little harassed. Bentner’s arm swopped down, scooping the wineglass out of her hand. “Another insect,” he said. “Bentner!” Elizabeth cried in exasperation, but her voice was drowned out by a peal of laughter from Alexandra Townsende, who slumped down on the settee, her shoulders shaking with unexplainable mirth. Ian drew the only possible conclusion: They were all suffering from the strain of too much stress.
Judith McNaught (Almost Heaven (Sequels, #3))
He knew perfectly well (even if he wasn’t inclined to admit it) that the material body had a spiritual aspect. He knew that “spirit,” however explained, was real, because of his own undeniable experiences—which, though he might suppress them, he couldn’t altogether erase from memory.
Sol Luckman (Snooze: A Story of Awakening)
De Bono argues that the West's tradition of settling disagreement by debate or argument is an example of overreliance on logic.
Steve Volk (Fringe-ology: How I Tried to Explain Away the Unexplainable-And Couldn't)
She arrives in Rome prepared, as ever. She brings five guidebooks, all of which she has read already, and she has the city pre-mapped in her head. She was completely oriented before she even left Philadelphia. And this is a classic example of the differences between us. I am the one who spent my first weeks in Rome wandering about, 90 percent lost and 100 percent happy, seeing everything around me as an unexplainable beautiful mystery. But this is how the world kind of always looks to me. To my sister's eyes, there is nothing which cannot be explained if one has access to a proper reference library. This is a woman who keeps The Columbia Encyclopedia in her kitchen next to the cookbooks—and reads it, for pleasure.
Anonymous
Man created religion so he could explain the unexplainable. But what he really did is that he chose to deny the unknown. Science, on the other hand, tries to explain the unknown until there is nothing unexplainable left to deny.
Fons Jena
This country has a UFO problem, after all. You might not have been aware we have one, or thought about it in these terms, but we do have a UFO problem: namely, we don't seem to understand what UFO really means. So here it is: a UFO is an unidentified flying object. So any time we see some object flying in the sky that we can't positively identify, we've seen a UFO. But in the same way the words paranormal and supernatural have been conflated, we now equate UFO with alien spacecraft. How this came to be is easily understandable. If we've learned one thing in this book already, people don't like the unknown very much. And so, if we believe we're being visited by other civilizations, we read the piles of books and articles on unexplained lights in the sky, then fill in the massive gaps—with wild tales of alien races, interstellar technology, and government conspiracies. If we don't believe, we hear someone saw an unexplained light in the sky and assume, first, that he's claiming to have seen E.T. Then we figure what he really saw was an airplane, Venus, swamp gas, or a helicopter, and he must be a bit foolish—maybe even a UFO nut. Then we laugh.
Steve Volk (Fringe-ology: How I Tried to Explain Away the Unexplainable-And Couldn't)
The Fiddle Creek Steakhouse [in Stephenville, TX] started selling what they called an 'Alien Secretion' shot: ¾ shot of Malibu rum, ¾ shot of melon or Midori liqueur, ½ ounce of sweet and sour mix, ½ ounce of pineapple juice.
Steve Volk (Fringe-ology: How I Tried to Explain Away the Unexplainable-And Couldn't)
It is the finding of neuroscience, in fact, that belief is at least in part a matter of emotion. Whatever we believe to be true lights up areas of our brain responsible for self-identification and the processing of feelings and sentiments. If we believe something, then, the object of our belief becomes an emotionally potent aspect of our own self-image. There is some common sense to this, too: the most passionate of believers and the most strident of New Atheists are palpably, visibly fired up and ready to defend their positions.
Steve Volk (Fringe-ology: How I Tried to Explain Away the Unexplainable-And Couldn't)
cognitive scientists studying human perception agree: we don’t experience objective reality; we experience a model of objective reality that our brain creates for us.
Steve Volk (Fringe-ology: How I Tried to Explain Away the Unexplainable—And Couldn't)
I was able to confess the Apostles' Creed, but only with deep ambiguity. But I stumbled over "he arose from the dead." I had to demythologize it and could say it only symbolically. I could not inwardly confess the resurrection as a factual historical event. I was assigned the task of teaching theology, but when I came to the resurrection, I honestly had to say at that stage that is was not about an actual event of a bodily resurrection but a community memory of an unexplained event. I could talk about the writings of the people who were remembering and proclaiming it as the saving event, but I could not explain to myself or to others how Christianity could be built on an event that never happened...That was my credo in my early thirties. It was new birth without bodily resurrections and forgiveness without atonement. Resurrection and atonement were words i choked on . That mean that the gospel was not about an event of divine salvation but about a human psychological experience of trust and freedom from anxiety, guilt and boredom
Thomas C. Oden (A Change of Heart: A Personal and Theological Memoir)
When we truly love someone, we would respect the person. No matter the wrongs done by the person, we would always try to see reasons why the wrongs were done, we would always try to understand the explained and unexplained reasons behind the person's wrong actions. We wouldn't mind justifying the wrongs simply cos the love has brought upon us a great understanding which has made us tolerant of many things about the person loved. With love, comes respect; with respect comes fair hearing; with fair hearing, comes understanding. There is no love without respect, tolerance or understanding
OMOSOHWOFA CASEY
Our sense of self, the sensation of eating an apple, all these things we call consciousness, are just illusions triggered by the mechanistic computations of different collections of neurons.
Steve Volk (Fringe-ology: How I Tried to Explain Away the Unexplainable—And Couldn't)
settlement gone and no evidence of fighting or anything else that might have explained the disappearance of the inhabitants. White found the word “Croatoan” carved on a tree nearby, which he figured might mean the colonists moved to a nearby island, but he was
Charles River Editors (Mysteries of the South: Ghosts, Legends, and Unexplained Phenomena in Dixie)
Our eyes see only that which language can explain, but our hearts see that which is invisible and unexplainable.
Debasish Mridha
Although cosmologists call the current orthodox model the Standard Cosmological Model or the Concordance Model, it is perhaps more accurately described as the Quantum-Fluctuation-Group-of-Inflationary-ConjecturesEither-Before-Or-After-the-Hot-Big-Bang-Unknown-27-per-cent-Dark-MatterUnknown-68-per-cent-Dark-Energy Model. The versions with inflation occurring before a Big Bang are more internally self-consistent than either the ones in which the Big Bang is the start of everything or else the internally inconsistent Judaeo-Christian and Islamic divine creation myths.† However, since they do not offer a convincing account of what dark matter and dark energy are, they can hardly claim parsimony or even great explanatory power since they currently leave 95 per cent of even the claimed minute observable part of the universe unexplained. Moreover, since these versions don’t explain where the quantum vacuum, the laws of quantum mechanics, and the inflation field came from, it is difficult to argue that they are more reasonable than the insight that Brahman or the Dao is ultimate reality that exists out of space and time, from which everything springs and of which everything consists.
John Hands (Cosmosapiens: Human Evolution from the Origin of the Universe)
What is there to life?", I asked with great desolation, 'You answered' to my surprise, "It is full of equations", I tried to write it down, But found no pen on the ground, I stared upon the stars and clouds, My heart was so chilly, as night enshrouds, Your words melted me to my very bones, It has brought me closer to the unknown, You explained the unexplainable, Even if we are all small and irrational, We have judged the universe in quite amiss, "How rare and beautiful it is to even exist.
Joshua the poetic penguin
Simply asserting that life after death and communications from the dead are not possible or cannot exist because they cannot be proved scientifically is the critics’ weakest response to unexplained phenomena. Every day we live with and depend on countless phenomena that scientists freely admit not being able to understand or explain fully—memory, personality factors, how DNA works, the ability to comprehend ideas by looking at black marks on a page. We live in a world of wonder, and it is naïve to conclude that we know or even could comprehend all the mysteries of life, death, and human consciousness.
Joel Martin (We Don't Die: George Anderson's Conversations with the Other Side)
Something that is unexplainable is either a miracle or you're just not that good at explaining.
Tablo (Blonote(Korean Edition))
do, she knew that. She should have attempted to explain herself, explain the unexplainable. But
Caro LaFever (Baby By Accident (International Billionaires, #3))
When scientists are unable to explain a certain phenomenon, it does not prove that the phenomenon belongs in the paranormal domain. It means that we need more data and we need to carry out more analyses. If you ask a five-year old to define calculus, and the kid has no idea what you are talking about, it does not mean that calculus is something supernatural. It means that the kid’s brain needs to grow further in order to comprehend calculus. The same goes for various unexplained phenomena of the world.
Abhijit Naskar (Lord is My Sheep: Gospel of Human)
Terence McKenna once famously said that science asks “Give us one free miracle and we’ll explain the rest.” That miracle is the instantaneous arrival of all the laws of nature and all the matter and energy in the universe, appearing out of nowhere at the moment of the Big Bang, before going on to expand in uneven and unexplained ways.
Gordon White (Pieces of Eight: Chaos Magic Essays and Enchantments)
If computer science is unexplainable to laypeople, why would anyone ever try to know more about it or understand it?
Martin Erwig (Once Upon an Algorithm: How Stories Explain Computing (The MIT Press))
Man creates myths not to explain the unexplainable, but to light torches in the dark. Their false light is reassuring because it allows us to pretend that the darkness-the darkness of fear, of uncertainty, of chaos-can no longer hurt us. We create myths because we fear chaos.
Craig Schaefer (A Time for Witches (The Ghosts of Gotham Saga #2))
Now, for your final lesson of the day, it's essential that you know why your title was created. Do you have any idea?" I shake my head sheepishly. "One of your ancestors, Randolph Henry Rockford, proved to be one of England's greatest military heroes at the turn of the eighteenth century. After he won a number of crucial battles for England, King George I expressed his gratitude by granting him a dukedom over the settlement of Wickersham, along with the massive funds to build a palace worthy of such a hero," Basil explains. "Of course, the papers scoffed that King George was cruel to choose Wickersham, for the land was notoriously barren, especially in comparison to Oxfordshire's other, far more verdant towns. But eventually the fifth Duchess of Wickersham, Lady Beatrice, changed all of that." "What did she do?" I ask. "I suppose you could say she was the ultimate green thumb. Within a year, ugly old Wickersham was transformed into one of the most beautiful, frequently painted landscapes in England." This is the first moment of our lesson where I feel a flicker of interest. "How did she do it?" Basil hesitates. "It's hard to separate truth from fiction on that account. I suppose we'll never know.
Alexandra Monir (Suspicion)
By assuming that a gas consists of tiny lumps, molecules, that are in constant motion, Boltzmann had showed that its entropy will increase by chance alone. Einstein uses these arguments to show that the way the entropy of light changes can also be explained if it is considered, like a gas, to consist of discrete particles. Just as the air in the room you’re sitting in is made up of tiny particles, so, too, is the light that illuminates it. Having established the particulate nature of light with arguments that mirror Boltzmann’s statistical analysis of a gas, Einstein concludes his paper by showing how this idea can render hitherto unexplained optical behavior “readily understood.
Paul Sen (Einstein's Fridge: How the Difference Between Hot and Cold Explains the Universe)
In ancient cultures—in the days before Facebook and even the printing press, if you can fathom that—society fought the feeling of being alone with story. Each culture developed a set of tales, a mythology and surrounding lore that filled in the cracks. These stories explained the unexplainable, filled the dark night with figures and shapes, and gave people—lonely or not—something else to talk about.
Aaron Mahnke (The World of Lore: Monstrous Creatures (The World of Lore, #1))
Paranormal experiences have been with us since the beginning of recorded history. And they don’t seem inclined to go away any time soon.
Steve Volk (Fringe-ology: How I Tried to Explain Away the Unexplainable—And Couldn't)
Atoms, elements and molecules are three important knowledge in Physics, chemistry and Biology. mathematics comes where counting starts, when counting and measurement started, integers were required. Stephen hawking says integers were created by god and everything else is work of man. Man sees pattern in everything and they are searched and applied to other sciences for engineering, management and application problems. Physics, it is required understand the physical nature or meaning of why it happens, chemistry is for chemical nature, Biology is for that why it happened. Biology touch medicine, plants and animals. In medicine how these atoms, elements and molecules interplay with each other by bondage is being explained. Human emotions and responses are because of biochemistry, hormones i e anatomy and physiology. This physiology deals with each and every organs and their functions. When this atom in elements are disturbed whatever they made i e macromolecules DNA, RNA and Protein and other micro and macro nutrients and which affects the physiology of different organs on different scales and then diseases are born because of this imbalance/ disturb in homeostasis. There many technical words are there which are hard to explain in single para. But let me get into short, these atoms in elements and molecules made interplay because of ecological stimulus i e so called god. and when opposite sex meets it triggers various responses on body of each. It is also harmone and they are acting because of atoms inside elements and continuous generation or degenerations of cell cycle. There is a god cell called totipotent stem cell, less gods are pluripotent, multi potent and noni potent stem cells. So finally each and every organ system including brain cells are affected because of interplay of atoms inside elements and their bondages in making complex molecules, which are ruled by ecological stimulus i e god. So everything is basically biology and medicine even for animals, plants and microbes and other life forms. process differs in each living organisms. The biggest mystery is Brain and DNA. Brain has lots of unexplained phenomenon and even dreams are not completely understood by science that is where spiritualism/ soul touches. DNA is long molecule which has many applications as genetic engineering. genomics, personal medicine, DNA as tool for data storage, DNA in panspermia theory and many more. So everything happens to women and men and other sexes are because of Biology, Medicine and ecology. In ecology every organisms are inter connected and inter dependent. Now physics - it touch all technical aspects but it needs mathematics and statistics to lay foundation for why and how it happened and later chemistry, biology also included inside physics. Mathematics gave raise to computers and which is for fast calculation on any applications in any sciences. As physiological imbalances lead to diseases and disorders, genetic mutations, again old concept evolution was retaken to understand how new biology evolves. For evolution and disease mechanisms, epidemiology and statistics was required and statistics was as a data tool considered in all sciences now a days. Ultimate science is to break the atoms to see what is inside- CERN, but it creates lots of mysterious unanswerable questions. laws in physics were discovered and invented with mathematics to understand the universe from atoms. Theory of everything is a long search and have no answers. While searching inside atoms, so many hypothesis like worm holes and time travel born but not yet invented as far as my knowledge. atom is universe, and humans are universe they have everything that universe has. ecology is god that affects humans and climate. In business these computerized AI applications are trying to figure out human emotions by their mechanism of writing, reading, texting, posting on social media and bla bla. Arts is trying to figure out human emotions in art way.
Ganapathy K
While Smith tried to explain how the records of two Hebrew prophets came into the possession of an Egyptian royal family, he left unexplained why, after being handed down for several generations, they should be buried with mummies.
Dan Vogel (Book of Abraham Apologetics: A Review and Critique)
Understanding this relationship is fairly straight forward. RSS represents the variability that your model explains. Higher is usually good. SSE represents the variability that your model does not explain. Smaller is usually good. TSS represents the variability inherent in your dependent variable. Or, Explained Variability + Unexplained Variability = Total Variability
Jim Frost (Regression Analysis: An Intuitive Guide for Using and Interpreting Linear Models)
Why does lightning strike on a humid day? Why does the sun follow the moon, trailing at dawn on its pale heels? The flakes on a butterfly's wings are not as vital or delicate as you. There are things in this world that we simply can't explain. Your beauty is unexplainable.
Nick Oliveri (Her)
I can’t explain what happened and I am not even going to try. Let’s just forget that this ever happened and have a meal in town.
Colm A. Kelleher (Hunt for the Skinwalker: Science Confronts the Unexplained at a Remote Ranch in Utah)
became clear that mirror neurons explained many previously unexplainable aspects of the mind, such as empathy, imitation, synchrony, and even the development of language. One writer compared mirror neurons to “neural WiFi”9—we pick up not only another person’s movement but her emotional state and intentions as well. When people are in sync with each other, they tend to stand or sit in similar ways, and their voices take on the same rhythms. But our mirror neurons also make us vulnerable to others’ negativity, so that we respond to their anger with fury or are dragged down by their depression.
Bessel van der Kolk (The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma)
U2’s music was never really rock ’n’ roll. Under its contemporary skin it’s opera—a big music, big emotions unlocked in the pop music of the day. A tenor out front who won’t accept he’s a baritone. A small man singing giant songs. Wailing, keening, trying to explain the unexplainable. Trying to release himself and anyone who will listen from the prison of a human experience that cannot explain grief.
Bono (Surrender: 40 Songs, One Story)
These experiences, called “psychic” or psi, suggest the presence of deep, invisible interconnections among people, and between objects and people. The most curious aspect of psi experiences is that they seem to transcend the usual boundaries of time and space. For over a century, these very same experiences have been systematically dismissed as impossible, or ridiculed as delusionary, by a small group of influential academics and journalists who have assumed that existing scientific theories are inviolate and complete. This has created a paradox. Many people believe in psi because of their experiences, and yet the defenders of the status quo have insisted that this belief is unjustified. Paradoxes are extremely important because they point out logical contradictions in assumptions. The first cousins of paradoxes are anomalies, those unexplained oddities that crop up now and again in science. Like paradoxes, anomalies are useful for revealing possible gaps in prevailing theories. Sometimes the gaps and contradictions are resolved peacefully and the old theories are shown to accommodate the oddities after all. But that is not always the case, so paradoxes and anomalies are not much liked by scientists who have built their careers on conventional theories. Anomalies present annoying challenges to established ways of thinking, and because theories tend to take on a life of their own, no theory is going to lie down and die without putting up a strenuous fight. Though anomalies may be seen as nuisances, the history of science shows that each anomaly carries a seed of potential revolution. If the seed can withstand the herbicides of repeated scrutiny, skepticism, and prejudice, it may germinate. It may then provoke a major breakthrough that reshapes the scientific landscape, allowing new technological and sociological concepts to bloom into a fresh vision of “common sense.” A long-held, commonsense assumption is that the worlds of the subjective and the objective are distinct, with absolutely no overlap. Subjective is “here, in the head,” and objective is “there, out in the world.” Psi phenomena suggest that the strict subjective-objective dichotomy may instead be part of a continuous spectrum, and that the usual assumptions about space and time are probably too restrictive. The anomalies fall into three general categories: ESP (extrasensory perception), PK (psychokinesis, or mind-matter interaction), and phenomena suggestive of survival after bodily death, including near-death experiences, apparitions, and reincarnation (see the following definitions and figure 1.1). Most scientists who study psi today expect that further research will eventually explain these anomalies in scientific terms. It isn’t clear, though, whether they can be fully understood without significant, possibly revolutionary, expansions of the current state of scientific knowledge.
Dean Radin (The Conscious Universe: The Scientific Truth of Psychic Phenomena)
Tom felt like it could have been a tear or a rent in the sky about a mile away, and through the rent he could see a different world or perhaps a different time. He swore that he actually saw a blue sky through the rent. It was nighttime as he gazed through and it was daytime “on the other side.” For Gorman, this was a rare glimpse into what might actually be happening on his property. After seeing the blue sky, Gorman began to think that the strange events on the ranch might be explained in terms of different dimensions, alternate realities, and such.
Colm A. Kelleher (Hunt for the Skinwalker: Science Confronts the Unexplained at a Remote Ranch in Utah)
Evil is unspectacular and always human, and shares our bed and eats at our own table,’ Jane said almost under her breath. ‘Auden,’ she explained, nodding to the book in Gabri’s hand and flashing a smile that broke the unexpected, and unexplained, tension.
Louise Penny (Still Life (Chief Inspector Armand Gamache, #1))
Shannon took her hand and squeezed it tightly. "We're here for you, Tianna. We're family now, just like Mary said." "You were an emergency placement-" Mary began. "Placement?" Tianna asked. "I'm a foster mother," Mary explained. "I have no home?" Tianna felt her heart drop, but it wasn't as much of a shock as it should have been. Part of her had known she had been running for a long time. Still, she had hoped. "I'm sorry," Mary answered with true concern. "They called two weeks ago and asked if I could take..." She stopped. "What?" Tianna asked, wondering if there was something wrong with her. Mary regarded her kindly. "The social worker wanted to know if there was any way I could handle a problem teen." Tianna waited for Mary to explain. "She said you kept running away from your placement homes and she thought maybe I could make a difference because I had been so successful with others in the past. Tianna knew immediately that there was something Mary wasn't saying.
Lynne Ewing (The Lost One (Daughters of the Moon, #6))
The role of science should be to investigate the unexplained, not explain the uninvestigated.
Stephen Rorke
Unable to retain all the details, they latched on to whatever for them explained the unexplainable and went on.
Diane Vaughan (The Challenger Launch Decision: Risky Technology, Culture, and Deviance at NASA)
A Universal Fact The problem before us now is this: if the reality behind the UFO phenomenon is both physical and psychic in nature, and if it manipulates space and time in ways our scientific concepts are inadequate to describe, is there any reason for its effects to be limited to our culture or to our generation? We have already established that no country has had the special privilege of these manifestations. Yet we must carry the argument further: if the UFO phenomenon is not tied to social conditions specific to our time, or to specific technological achievements, then it may represent a universal fact. It may have been with us, in one form or another, as long as the human race has existed on this planet. Something happened in classical times that is inadequately explained by historical theories. The suggestion that the same thing might be happening again should make us extremely interested in bringing every possible light to bear on this problem. Beginning in the second century B.C. and continuing until the fall of the Roman Empire, the intellectual elites of the Mediterranean world, raised in a spirit of scientific rationalism, were confronted and eventually defeated by irrational element similar to that contained in modern apparitions of unexplained phenomena, an element that is amplified by their summary rejection by our own science. It accompanied the collapse of ancient civilizations. Commenting on this parallel, French science writer Aime Michel proposes the following scene. Consider one of the Alexandrian thinkers, a man like Ptolemaeus, the second-century astronomer thoroughly schooled in the rational methods of Archimedes, Euclid, and Aristotle. And imagine him reading the Apocalypse, various writings about Armageddon. How would he react to such an experience? He would merely shrug, says Aime Michel: "It would never occur to him to place the slightest credence in such a compendium of what must regard as insanities. Such a scene must have taken place thousands of times at the end of classical antiquity. And we know that every time there was the same rejection, the same shrugging, because we have no record of any critical examination of the doctrines, ideas, and claims of the counterculture that expressed itself through the Apocalypse. This counterculture was too absurd to retain the attention of a reader of Plato. A short time – a very short time – elapsed, the counterculture triumphed, and Plato was forgotten for a thousand years. Could it happen again?" Only a thorough examination of the ancient records can save us from the effects of such cultural myopia.
Jacques F. Vallée (Dimensions: A Casebook of Alien Contact)
Is there a way to grasp what love means without becoming a lover first? Love cannot be explained. It can only be experienced. Love cannot be explained, yet it explains all.
Elif Shafak (The Bastard of Istanbul)
Man creates myths not to explain the unexplainable, but to light torches in the dark. Their false light is reassuring because it allows us to pretend that the darkness—the darkness of fear, of uncertainty, of chaos—can no longer hurt us. We create myths because we fear chaos.
Craig Schaefer (A Time for Witches (The Ghosts of Gotham Saga #2))