Self Explanatory Quotes

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Life in itself is sufficient, self-explanatory and complete.
Carlos Castaneda (Journey to Ixtlan: The Lessons of Don Juan)
if a book isn't self-explanatory, then it isn't worth reading.
Paulo Coelho (The Zahir)
When I caught up, I grabbed Jack’s arm. “What are you doing here?” “Hiding! That’s how you play the game, right? I thought the title hide-and-seek was fairly self-explanatory. Then again, you are blond.” “So are you, idiot. Again, what are you doing here?
Kiersten White (Supernaturally (Paranormalcy, #2))
The Art of War is self-explanatory
Sun Tzu
Facts are rarely self-explanatory; their significance, analysis, and interpretation—at least in the foreign policy world—depend on context and relevance.
Henry Kissinger (World Order)
A warrior must cultivate the feeling that he has everything needed for the extravagant journey that is his life. What counts for a warrior is being alive. Life in itself is sufficient, self-explanatory and complete. Therefore, one may say without being presumptuous that the experience of experiences is being alive.
Carlos Castaneda
Your objective should always be to eliminate instructions entirely by making everything self-explanatory, or as close to it as possible. When instructions are absolutely necessary, cut them back to a bare minimum.
Steve Krug (Don't Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability)
The Germans and the dog were engaged in a military operation which had an amusingly self explanatory name, a human enterprise which is seldom described in detail, whose name alone, when reported as new or history, gives many war enthusiasts a sort of post-coital satisfaction. It is, in the imagination of combat's fans, the divinely listless loveplay that follows the orgasm of victory. It is called "mopping up.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr. (Slaughterhouse-Five)
Oh, well, thanks an awful lot, Thomas, Myfanwy thought bitterly. It sounds like I'm the Defense Minister of Ghosts and Goblins, but as long as the job is "all fairly self-explanatory," I've no doubt it will be fine. The country might get overrun by brownies and talking trees, but what the hell--there's always Australia!
Daniel O'Malley (The Rook (The Checquy Files, #1))
If you can’t make something self-evident, you at least need to make it self-explanatory.
Steve Krug (Don't Make Me Think, Revisited: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability)
What are you doing here?" "Hiding! That's how you play the game, right? I thought the title hide-and-seek was fairly self-explanatory. Then again,you are blond." "So are you,idiot.
Kiersten White
Revenge of the Giant Grill Man.
Joan Bauer (Hope Was Here)
LYB NBC—which means “love ya, babe; nuts, back & critters”—the first half being pretty self-explanatory. Less obviously, “nuts, back, and critters” means watch out for crazy people, watch your back because you can’t trust anyone, and don’t run over any animals.
Tyler Oakley (Binge)
I have been using the word 'other' as though it were self-explanatory, yet who the 'other' is must always be something of a mystery. It is a mystery at an immediate level in the sense that no person is entirely knowable.
Stephanie Dowrick (Intimacy and Solitude: Balancing Closeness and Independence)
I’m a real bastard without him,” Jace apologized, and Nick gulped some water and nodded. “Yeah, I hear that. Why?” Jace looked at him in outrage because the question was… was self-explanatory. “Because! Because he’s… he’s Quent!
Amy Lane (Gambling Men)
Love is self-explanatory: the right person makes you feel well nigh immortal, vaccinating you with their affections. So long as you remain in their heart you are safe, or better than safe even, for a while at least. You are momentarily, in a state of grace.
Jonathan Hull (Losing Julia)
Kissing her just then felt perfectly normal and completely self-explanatory, the only possible course of action.
Tom Perrotta (Nine Inches)
Family comes first" is indeed a powerful principle, but so is the imperative for your own development. It is not a self-explanatory or self-applying principle, and it can collide with other principles.
Edward Rocklin
If anyone names me after a gemstone, I’m going to find out how well my new teeth work on them. I saw that movie too. I think I’ll stick with Dragon. At least it sounds badass and it’s self-explanatory.” - Jill Hammond
Thomas Cardin (Regression (Terminals #2))
Truth’s words are simple to utter and justice needs no subtle explanations. Justice is self explanatory. Injustice, however, being a sickness, requires complicated medicines and it is this sort of thinking that I have constructed about my father’s house (words by Polyneices).
Euripides (The Phoenician Women)
The whole set of stylizations that are known as "camp" (a word that I was hearing then for the first time) was, in 1926, self-explanatory. Women moved and gesticulated in this way. Homosexuals wished for obvious reasons to copy them. The strange thing about "camp" is that it has been fossilized. The mannerisms have never changed. If I were now to see a woman sitting with her knees clamped together, one hand on her hip and the other lightly touching her back hair, I should think, "Either she scored her last social triumph in 1926 or it is a man in drag.
Quentin Crisp (The Naked Civil Servant)
People generally suppose that they don't understand one another very well, and that is true; they don't. But some things they communicate easily and fully. Anger and contempt and hatred leap from one heart to another like fire in dry grass. The revelations of love are never complete or clear, not in this world. Love is slow and accumulating, and not matter how large or high it grows, it falls short. Love comprehends the world, though we don't comprehend it. But hate comes off in slices, clear and whole—self-explanatory, you might say.
Wendell Berry (Jayber Crow)
Remember, conservative means withholding and liberal means generosity. It's pretty self-explanatory.
Kevyn Aucoin (Face Forward)
A punishment is not self-explanatory. It serves no purpose until the person serving it knows the real reason for being punished.
Amit Pandey (The Retro Man)
The former can be very brief as the context is clearly the text they refer to. The latter need be written with more care and details as they need to be self-explanatory.
Sönke Ahrens (How to Take Smart Notes: One Simple Technique to Boost Writing, Learning and Thinking – for Students, Academics and Nonfiction Book Writers)
If a book isn’t self-explanatory, then the book isn’t worth reading.
Paulo Coelho (The Zahir)
The issue with our society is self-explanatory. They praise soldiers and show contempt toward the rich. In reality, they want someone else to become a soldier, and they want to become rich.
Abhishek Verma (Untruth, Untruth)
The English language has been thrust upon Americans. And it is wrong. As static and immobile as are the English, just so ever-moving are Americans. Here is a huge country. Not a mere island. Naturally people move. And they need a moving language. A language that can interpret American life. Nouns and adjectives won't express American life. They are too weak, too immobile. But verbs, adverbs, prepositions and the like, ah, they are moving, just as Americans. Obviously we cannot suddenly junk the English language and adopt some other tongue. English is too connotative, too close to us. Our problem is to adapt the English language to American needs. To make it move with us Americans. That is the problem--to write things as they are, not as they seem. our aim must be not to explain things, but to write the thing itself, and thereby in itself be self explanatory.
Gertrude Stein (How Writing Is Written : Volume II of the Previously Uncollected Writings of Gertrude Stein)
The mistake of all the religions is to look outside the world for explanations of the world, rather than rethinking the world itself, so that it offers up its own explanations for itself. The world itself must be self-explanatory.
Rebecca Goldstein (Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity)
Apollodorus, the leading classical authority on Greek myths, records a tradition that the real scene of the poem was the Sicilian seaboard, and in 1896 Samuel Butler, the author of Erewhon, came independently to the same conclusion. He suggested that the poem, as we now have it, was composed at Drepanum, the modern Trapani, in Western Sicily, and that the authoress was the girl self-portrayed as Nausicaa. None of his classical contemporaries, for whom Homer was necessarily both blind and bearded, deigned to pay Butler’s theory the least attention; and since he had, as we now know, dated the poem some three hundred years too early and not explained how a Sicilian princess could have passed off her saga as Homer’s, his two books on the subject are generally dismissed as a good-humoured joke. Nevertheless, while working on an explanatory dictionary of Greek myths, I found Butler’s arguments for a Western Sicilian setting and for a female authorship irrefutable. I could not rest until I had written this novel. It re-creates, from internal and external evidence, the circumstances which induced Nausicaa to write the Odyssey, and suggest how, as an honorary Daughter of Homer, she managed to get it included in the official canon. Here is the story of a high-spirited and religious-minded Sicilian girl who saves her father’s throne from usurpation, herself from a distasteful marriage, and her two younger brothers from butchery by boldly making things happen, instead of sitting still and hoping for the best.
Robert Graves (Homer's Daughter)
I am optimistic that the so-called hard problem of consciousness will be solved by empirical and conceptual advances - working in tandem - made in cognitive neuroscience. What is the hard problem? No-one has a clue (at the moment) how to answer the question of why the neural basis of the phenomenal feel of my experience of, for example red, is the neural basis of that particular phenomenal feel rather than a different one or none at all. There is an explanatory gap here that we do not know how to close now, but I have faith that we will someday. The hard problem is conceptually and explanatorily prior to the issue of what the nature of the self is, as can be seen in part by noting that the problem would persist even for experiences that aren't organised into selves. No doubt solving the hard problem (i.e closing the explanatory gap) will require ideas we cannot now anticipate. The mind-body problem is so singular that no appeal to the closing of past explanatory gaps justifies optimism. But I remain optimistic nonetheless.
Ned Block
The principal advantage of narrative writing is that it assists us place our life experiences in a storytelling template. The act of strict examination forces us to select and organize our past. Narration provides an explanatory framework. Human beings often claim to understand events when they manage to formulate a coherent story or narrative explaining what factors caused a specific incident to occur. Stories assist the human mind to remember and make decisions based on informative stories. Narrative writing also prompts periods of intense reflection that leads to more writing that is ruminative. Contemplative actions call for us to track the conscious mind at work rendering an accounting of our weaknesses and our strengths, folly and wisdom.
Kilroy J. Oldster (Dead Toad Scrolls)
Axioms have to be judged against how “self-evident” they really are, how useful they are, how little they assume, and in other such ways. This, then, is why the theistic worldview axioms seemed more reasonable in the past than now; we now see that the purported existence of God is not self-evident, has limited utility with little or no explanatory power, and yet assumes an awful lot.
James Lindsay (Dot, Dot, Dot: Infinity Plus God Equals Folly)
We are mammals who need sex, need companionship, who seek the protective enclave of the family for reasons of survival and reproduction. We select a so-called loved one for the most primitive reason - my hero's preference for a pear-shaped woman is self-explanatory, I think. The loved one laughs or smells like the parent who gave one youthful succor and all else is projected, all else is invented
Robert Galbraith
THE GERMANS AND THE DOG were engaged in a military operation which had an amusingly self-explanatory name, a human enterprise which is seldom described in detail, whose name alone, when reported as news or history, gives many war enthusiasts a sort of post-coital satisfaction. It is, in the imagination of combat’s fans, the divinely listless loveplay that follows the orgasm of victory. It is called “mopping up.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr. (Slaughterhouse-Five)
It struck Hsing suddenly that Masada didn't even understand the nature of his own genius. To him the patterns of thought and motive that he sensed in the virus were self-explanatory, and those who could not see them were simply not looking hard enough. Yet he would readily admit to his own inability to analyze more human contact, even on the most basic level. That was part and parcel of being iru. What a strange combination of skills and flaws. What an utterly alien profile. Praise the founders of Guera for having taught them all to nurture such specialized talent, rather than seeking to "cure" it. It was little wonder that most innovations in technology now came from the Gueran colonies, and that Earth, who set such a strict standard of psychological "normalcy," now produced little that was truly exciting. Thank God their own ancestors had left that doomed planet before they, too, had lost the genes of wild genius. Thank God they had seen the creative holocaust coming, and escaped it.
C.S. Friedman (This Alien Shore (Alien Shores, #1))
For I take it there are two things the imagination loves to do. It loves to embrace its objects completely, to take it in at a single glace, and see it as something harmonious, symmetrical, and self-explanatory. That is the classical imagination; the Parthenon was built for it. It also loves to lose itself in a labyrinth, to surrender to the inextricable. That is the romantic imagination; the Orlando Furioso was written for it. But Christian Theology does not cater very well for either. If Christianity is only a mythology, then I find the mythology I believe in is not the one I like best. I like Greek mythology much better, Irish better still, Norse best of all.
C.S. Lewis (The Weight of Glory)
Not that long ago I wrote in a poem that 'life is so filled with meaning, there is no reason to try to reduce it'. That is how I feel and have felt like for years. Some sense of meaninglessness can come from an attack from others, at times subconscious, slowly but surely eroding one's self-respect and therefore sense of self, on all the meanings, infinite as they are, that are already right there. You can even be “raised” to do this self-destructive work yourself. The so called absurdity of life is a construction that creates a template for meaninglessness in itself. Humans revolting in this way against self-made systems. Perhaps to remove some responsibility of being human, because it is, wrongly, seen as a burden. What is truly a burden is to feel as if nothing in life is important. It is also the easiest thing to do. If you don't find meaning in for instance seeing a black squirrel running up the trunk of a tree, you probably won't find any meaning in travelling to the end of the world. It is a kind of explanatory greed this “search for meaning” that can literally destroy a world, and it is the equivalent of replacing the deepest of life’s mysteries with a nice looking garage. To numb before being looked at and experienced as a kind of totally lost "translation" is how the written language can be used at its worst. Meaning is already everywhere, expressing, unfolding itself, living and dying, changing and breathing. The noise distracting from that is what is meaningless but luckily, happily, that is just a construct.
Rune Kjær Rasmussen
The argument from design, therefore, can be sustained only with the help of a supposedly a priori double-barrelled principle, that mental order (at least in a god) is self-explanatory, but that all material order not only is not self-explanatory, but is positively improbable and in need of further explanation...this double-barrelled principle is recognizable as the core of the cosmological argument...The argument will not take us even as far as Kant seems to allow without borrowing the a priori thesis that there is a vicious metaphysical contingency in all natural things, and, in contrast with this, the 'transcendental' concept of a god who is self-explanatory and necessarily existent. It is only with the help of these borrowings that the design argument can introduce the required asymmetry, that any natural explanation uses data which call for further explanation, but that the theistic explanation terminates the regress. Without this asymmetry, the design argument cannot show that there is any need to go beyond the sort of hypothesis that Hume foreshadowed and that Wallace and Darwin supplied... The dependence of the argument for design on the ideas that are the core of the cosmological one is greater than Kant realized.
J.L. Mackie (MIRACLE OF THEISM P: Arguments For and Against the Existence of God)
So many people now call themselves 'students of the University of life' as if experience theorized with lack of knowledge led to any wisdom or even less, such as the capacity to think and process information outside personal validation models. It's very easy to explain what you see. It's what humanity has done throughout history. However, real education ends in the last book you finished. And you can evaluate yourself by the amount of books you were able to read, understand and appreciate. Anything below that can only lead one to be certified in stupidity. And that's what the 'students of life' really are; fragile egos trying to justify their stupidity with arrogance, crystalizing their state of ignorance in time with pride. Because, even though humanity has confused itself with its own mechanics, the transitory fact remains, that knowledge, in any shape or form, comes from books. And more than 99% of all the books ever produced in human history are now, thanks to internet, available for free, in the public domain, and wherever a computer and electricity are present. This truth also extensively contributes to the fact, that humans are now, for the first time ever, deliberately choosing to remain ignorant. And that's what the "students of life" are; proud manifestos of ignorance. They don't know that, if you read enough to be smart, you're too smart to explain what you read, and too busy to share it. So what can we then say about the ones who obsess over their physical appearance whenever they have time for something. The premise is self-explanatory: The only real student is the 'student of self'.
Robin Sacredfire
The good news is that positive construal can be taught. “We can make ourselves more or less vulnerable by how we think about things,” Bonanno said. In research at Columbia, the neuroscientist Kevin Ochsner has shown that teaching people to think of stimuli in different ways—to reframe them in positive terms when the initial response is negative, or in a less emotional way when the initial response is emotionally “hot”—changes how they experience and react to the stimulus. You can train people to better regulate their emotions, and the training seems to have lasting effects. Training people to change their explanatory styles from internal to external (“Bad events aren’t my fault”), from global to specific (“This is one narrow thing rather than a massive indication that something is wrong with my life”), and from permanent to impermanent (“I can change the situation, rather than assuming it’s fixed”) made them more psychologically successful and less prone to depression. The same goes for locus of control: not only is a more internal locus tied to perceiving less stress and performing better but changing your locus from external to internal leads to positive changes in both psychological well-being and objective work performance. The cognitive skills that underpin resilience, then, seem like they can indeed be learned over time, creating resilience where there was none. Unfortunately, the opposite may also be true. “We can become less resilient, or less likely to be resilient,” Bonanno says. “We can create or exaggerate stressors very easily in our own minds. That’s the danger of the human condition.” Human beings are capable of worry and rumination: we can take a minor thing, blow it up in our heads, run through it over and over, and drive ourselves crazy until we feel like that minor thing is the biggest thing that ever happened. In a sense, it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. Frame adversity as a challenge, and you become more flexible and able to deal with it, move on, learn from it, and grow. Focus on it, frame it as a threat, and a potentially traumatic event becomes an enduring problem; you become more inflexible, and more likely to be negatively affected.
Maria Konnikova
His phone dinged again. “This crazy-ass voicemail. It’s all jacked—Wait, when did you call me?” “Please don’t listen to that,” I blurted. He grinned. “Okay, now I have to hear it. Was this last night? Were you drunk? Did you drunk-dial me?” he teased. But it was too late, he’d already lifted the phone. Bile rose in my throat and the room became a thousand degrees hotter. “Please. Don’t.” “Why? What’s wrong?” He grew quiet and listened. “I don’t hear anything. Wait. You didn’t mean to call, did you? Is that another guy?” I put my face in my hands. Cade was quiet as he listened. And I prayed for a giant black hole to open and swallow me. His phone made a soft thump as he tossed it onto the coffee table. The couch moved with him as he settled back. “You can uncover your face now.” His tone didn’t sound angry but I still couldn’t face him. His hands slid around my wrists and gently tugged, forcing me to lower them. I swallowed the lump in my throat, annoyed that I didn’t even have my own car to leave. “Was that your roommate?” he asked. I nodded, my face still tucked down. “And…her boyfriend?” “No, her best friend.” “So you told your roommate about me?” I could hear the smile in his voice and looked up. “I mean, I assume you don’t know a bunch of ‘therapy dog’ guys named Cade, but I could be wrong.” “You aren’t pissed about what you heard?” “All I heard were some friends teasing you…about me. They think you want me. Bad.” He grinned. “And what I said?” “Were you serious? Because to me you sounded annoyed, maybe even defensive. And considering you stayed home last night and are with me tonight, I don’t think you really planned a, how did you put it? ‘Weekend fuckfest.’ ” He bit back a smile. “You were never supposed to hear that.” I crossed my arms. “And I expected you to be upset, not tease me about it.” He grabbed my hand. “C’mon, I’m sorry. Did you want to have a weekend fuckfest? I don’t want to interfere with your plans.” He tugged my hand, urging me to look up. “Look, we can have one. I’m game. Don’t stop on account of me.” “Shut up.” His hand made its way to my arm and he slid me along the leather couch, and tucked me into him. “Quit being all grumpy. I’m RSVPing to your fuckfest. I mean, I’ve never had one, but it seems pretty self-explanatory.” “You’re an asshole.” And by that I really meant the most perfect fucking guy ever. Who hears something like that and plays it totally cool? “So, am I also supposed to bend you over a table or something? Because I think your roommate might have mentioned that as well.” I shoved him back while trying hard not to smile. “I hate you.” He laughed and scooped me into his lap. “If it makes you feel any better, my roommate knows I have the hots for you too.” I rolled my eyes
Renita Pizzitola (Just a Little Flirt (Crush, #2))
Well before the end of the 20th century however print had lost its former dominance. This resulted in, among other things, a different kind of person getting elected as leader. One who can present himself and his programs in a polished way, as Lee Quan Yu you observed in 2000, adding, “Satellite television has allowed me to follow the American presidential campaign. I am amazed at the way media professionals can give a candidate a new image and transform him, at least superficially, into a different personality. Winning an election becomes, in large measure, a contest in packaging and advertising. Just as the benefits of the printed era were inextricable from its costs, so it is with the visual age. With screens in every home entertainment is omnipresent and boredom a rarity. More substantively, injustice visualized is more visceral than injustice described. Television played a crucial role in the American Civil rights movement, yet the costs of television are substantial, privileging emotional display over self-command, changing the kinds of people and arguments that are taken seriously in public life. The shift from print to visual culture continues with the contemporary entrenchment of the Internet and social media, which bring with them four biases that make it more difficult for leaders to develop their capabilities than in the age of print. These are immediacy, intensity, polarity, and conformity. Although the Internet makes news and data more immediately accessible than ever, this surfeit of information has hardly made us individually more knowledgeable, let alone wiser, as the cost of accessing information becomes negligible, as with the Internet, the incentives to remember it seem to weaken. While forgetting anyone fact may not matter, the systematic failure to internalize information brings about a change in perception, and a weakening of analytical ability. Facts are rarely self-explanatory; their significance and interpretation depend on context and relevance. For information to be transmuted into something approaching wisdom it must be placed within a broader context of history and experience. As a general rule, images speak at a more emotional register of intensity than do words. Television and social media rely on images that inflamed the passions, threatening to overwhelm leadership with the combination of personal and mass emotion. Social media, in particular, have encouraged users to become image conscious spin doctors. All this engenders a more populist politics that celebrates utterances perceived to be authentic over the polished sound bites of the television era, not to mention the more analytical output of print. The architects of the Internet thought of their invention as an ingenious means of connecting the world. In reality, it has also yielded a new way to divide humanity into warring tribes. Polarity and conformity rely upon, and reinforce, each other. One is shunted into a group, and then the group polices once thinking. Small wonder that on many contemporary social media platforms, users are divided into followers and influencers. There are no leaders. What are the consequences for leadership? In our present circumstances, Lee's gloomy assessment of visual media's effects is relevant. From such a process, I doubt if a Churchill or Roosevelt or a de Gaulle can emerge. It is not that changes in communications technology have made inspired leadership and deep thinking about world order impossible, but that in an age dominated by television and the Internet, thoughtful leaders must struggle against the tide.
Henry Kissinger (Leadership : Six Studies in World Strategy)
ICAO Annex 17 Standard 3.2.2 On States ensuring an authority at each airport serving civil aviation is responsible for coordinating the implementation of security controls is clear and self-explanatory. But for a regulator to usurp from the operator, security control measures such as the issuance of airport passes. It is simply power play, airport passes are a power tool and can easily be used to gain favors from the who is who.
Taib Ahmed ICAO AVSEC PM
That the recollection of God’s deeds constitutes thanksgiving and praise to him is understandable. What is amazing, however, is that Old Testament psalmody also includes, in Ps. 78, teaching material (see vv. 1-4) consisting of a mere recitation of divine deeds. Since this psalm essentially ‘defines’ God and Israel for the congregation, it must be that the very act of definition became a necessary liturgical action in nascent Judaism. And it became necessary because the divine deeds and history that were to be remembered were in fact anti-deeds and anti-history, i.e. an impossibility from the human perspective. Whereas the simple appellation “God” or “Lord” was self-explanatory and thus sufficient in pre-exilic Jerusalem, where the deity was enthroned in the visible temple of a tangible nation, the anti-historical God of nascent Judaism had to be constructed time and again as a reality in the mind of the gathered congregation. This action was an absolute necessity because this congregation of Israel was itself a product of God in that it came into being against its own will. Without this definition of God there would be no congregation to begin with! Put otherwise, the recollection of the divine anti-deeds and Israel’s stubborn resistance to them was the sine qua non condition, the basis for every prayer in nascent Judaism; in such recollection lay the definition and ultimately the very presence of both Israel’s God and God’s Israel.
Paul Nadim Tarazi (Psalms and Wisdom)
So many people now call themselves 'students of the University of life' as if experience theorized with lack of knowledge led to any wisdom or even less, such as the capacity to think and process information outside personal validation models. It's very easy to explain what you see. It's what humanity has done throughout history. However, real education ends in the last book you finished. And you can evaluate yourself by the amount of books you were able to read, understand and appreciate. Anything below that can only lead one to be certified in stupidity. And that's what the 'students of life' really are; fragile egos trying to justify their stupidity with arrogance, crystalizing their state of ignorance in time with pride. Because, even though humanity has confused itself with its own mechanics, the transitory fact remains, that knowledge, in any shape or form, comes from books. And more than 99% of all the books ever produced in human history are now, thanks to internet, available for free, in the public domain, and wherever a computer and electricity are present. This truth also extensively contributes to the fact, that humans are now, for the first time ever, deliberately choosing to remain ignorant. And that's what the "students of life" are; proud manifestos of ignorance. They don't know that, if you read enough to be smart, you're too smart to explain what you read, and too busy to share it. So what can we then say about the ones who obsess over their physical appearance whenever they have time for something? The premise is self-explanatory: The only real student is the 'student of self'.
Robin Sacredfire
The secret staircase, simply by virtue of not being immediately self-explanatory, renders the entire house even more uncanny. Its meaning, then, can shift with the times.
Colin Dickey (Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places)
If Kennedy hadn't been shot we would never have had LBJ, and without Johnson, Nixon wouldn't have happened. I am fascinated by the swerves, the chances, but also the inevitability. You look at the line of presidents, America does get what reflects it--it becomes self-explanatory.
A.M. Homes
It's Gods Eden, the fountain of youth, the water of Truth and yes it shall set thee free of this world-wide mental misery. It's a pleasure to me to introduce the God that sets you free, sets you high, air castles in the cosmos that make you fly. Make you cry cause you know your recognition of your unworthiness; God comforted me in my loneliness, it's redemption from rags to riches in Gods holiness. These riddles are self-explanatory, explaining the exploration of this planet from the beginning of His story. Open your eyes for God's the one that abides.
Jose R. Coronado (The Land Flowing With Milk And Honey)
When you tapped the zoom button on our iPad demo, the keyboard you were looking at (say, mine) transitioned to the other one (his), much like clicking to go to the next slide in presentation software like Keynote or PowerPoint. The image of one keyboard disappeared to nothingness to reveal the other underneath. Bas added scaling to his animation—the keys of the departing keyboard changed size to match the one coming into view. He also tuned the timing of the animation, so it started slowly and sped up as it went, making you feel you had definitively landed once the animation finished. These effects were subtle, given that his animation was a mere fraction of a second, but Bas had a way of making these details count. When you looked at this zoom key animation, it appeared as if the keyboards were undergoing a complex morph. They weren’t. From an engineering perspective, this was significant, since the simplicity of the design meant I could write the code for his animation in just a couple hours. The magic was in the overall effect. The animation didn’t look like clicking from one slide to another in a presentation deck. When you tapped on the zoom button, it made you feel like one keyboard was becoming the other. The effect registered viscerally. It was exactly the kind of self-explanatory touch that made Apple software easy to use.
Ken Kocienda (Creative Selection: Inside Apple's Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs)
The door opened to reveal a room with walls consisting mostly of inset mahogany bookcases covered by leaded glass doors. Intricate plasterwork adorned the ceiling in a flowered medallion style that matched the thick Aubusson carpet on the floor. "Are all of these books for sale?" Amanda asked in a hushed voice, feeling as if she had entered a king's treasure room. Fretwell nodded. "You'll find everything from antiques to zoology. We have a wide selection of antique maps and celestial charts, original folios and manuscripts..." He gestured around them, as if the extensive rows of books were self-explanatory. "I would love to lock myself in here for a week," she said impulsively.
Lisa Kleypas (Suddenly You)
as if any one but a fool imagined that he could compress a thing like art or religion or science into an epigram which could be lifted from its context and, so lifted, continue to make sense. Giving and collecting definitions is not philosophy but a parlour game. The writer’s definition of religion (as of art and so forth) is coextensive with this entire book, and will nowhere be found in smaller compass. Nor will it be found in its completeness there; for no book is wholly self-explanatory, but solicits the co-operation of a reasonably thoughtful and instructed reader. Religion,
R.G. Collingwood (Speculum Mentis)
(...) and turned his head for an instant to look back at his pursuers'.
Charles Dickens
Level 4: Getting Intimate (Complete 2 of 3) Kiss two women: Make sure they’re women you’ve met since reading this book. Go on a second date with the same woman: Self-explanatory. Successfully get a woman back to your place: Usually can be done on the second date.
Mark Manson (Models: Attract Women Through Honesty)
Level 5: Getting Sexual (Complete 2 of 2) Have sex with a woman you’ve never had sex with before: Self explanatory Go on three first dates with new women: Self-explanatory.
Mark Manson (Models: Attract Women Through Honesty)
The tiny red-hatted gnome held a stack of books, the titles delicately carved onto the spines and painted in gold. Each book represented a different part of her. Outlander for their love across time and because it was one of her favorites. Fairy Tales by Hans Christian Andersen because she had found it in the bookstore. A Christmas Carol because they both loved Christmas. Lily and the Octopus, presumably because of Bernie, and lastly Circle of Friends, which seemed self-explanatory.
Amy E. Reichert (Once Upon a December)
If we were to make a list of the goals that are most important in life, surely the desire for close relationships, success in life (e.g., a career), and power would make most people’s short list. There is a long tradition in personality psychology of studying these three motives; indeed, psychologists such as H. A. Murray and David McClelland have argued that people’s level of needs for affiliation, achievement, and power are major components of human personality. There is growing evidence that these motives are an important part of the personality of the adaptive unconscious. Murray and McClelland assumed that these basic motives are not necessarily conscious and must therefore be measured indirectly. They advocated the use of the Thematic Apperception Test (TAT), in which people make up stories about a set of standard pictures, and these stories are then coded for how much of a need for affiliation, power, or achievement people expressed. Other researchers have developed explicit, self-report questionnaires of motives, with the assumption that people are aware of their motives and can freely report them. A controversy has ensued over which measure of motivation is the most valid: the TAT or self-report questionnaires. The answer, I suggest, is that both are valid measures but tap different levels of motivation, one that resides in the adaptive unconscious and the other that is part of people’s conscious explanatory system. David McClelland and his colleagues made this argument in an influential review of the literature. First, they noted that the self-report questionnaires and the TAT do not correlate with each other. If Sarah reports on a questionnaire that she has a high need for affiliation, we know virtually nothing about the level of this need that she will express, nonconsciously, on the TAT. Second, they argued that both techniques are valid measures of motivation, but of different types. The TAT assesses implicit motives, whereas explicit, self-report measures assess self-attributed motives.
Timothy D. Wilson (Strangers to Ourselves: Discovering the Adaptive Unconscious)
Implicit motives are needs that people acquire in childhood that have become automatic and nonconscious. Self-attributed motives are people’s conscious theories about their needs that may often differ from their nonconscious needs. McClelland reports a study, for example, that measured people’s need for affiliation with both the TAT and a self-report questionnaire. People’s affiliation needs, as assessed by the TAT, predicted whether they were talking with another person when they were beeped at random intervals over several days, whereas a self-report measure of affiliation did not. Affiliation needs as assessed with the self-report measure were a better predictor of more deliberative behavioral responses, such as people’s choices of which types of behaviors they would prefer to do alone or with others (e.g., visit a museum). The picture McClelland paints is of two independent systems that operate in parallel and influence different types of behaviors. In our terms, the adaptive unconscious and the conscious explanatory system each has its own set of needs and motives that influence different types of behaviors.
Timothy D. Wilson (Strangers to Ourselves: Discovering the Adaptive Unconscious)
We may still insist that space, although mainly emptiness, is completely “contaminated” by all the forces in the Universe—particles, waves, and so on. Still, based on this deduction or inference, we cannot prove that what is curved is space since nothing remains nothing and cannot be transformed into something based on the laws of physics. If the Nothing does not convert into something, the curvature of space is impossible. To prove the curvature of nothing (space), we must prove that nothing can transform itself into something based on the laws of physics. Suppose we further insist that this is only a problem of linguistics and philosophy and not physics since we stated that space is how we define it and not as it is. This reasoning would be insufficient because we must first prove that actual space is what it is and not what we say it is to fit our arguments. There can be no answers to the most critical questions of contemporary science, physics, philosophy, and even religions if we are not as precise as possible, linguistically, experimentally, or in any other way. These questions appear to be self-evident, self-explanatory truths and axioms, yet they are neither self-evident nor clear and precise to reflect the actual underlying reality. If we are not as precise as possible, we create theories and paradigms presented as facts, although the starting premises are undefined and unanswered. However, if we do not answer the starting causes and premises, we cannot adequately describe the laws of nature, nor can we understand them. Regardless of how sure we are about space and the curvature of space, we still cannot claim we are correct without describing the nature of nothing. Without the Nothing, there can be no space. There will be an immediate argument, though, that the Nothing has no nature and, therefore, there is nothing to describe. The answer is that its passivity and lack of properties are its most potent “property” because they enable creation and existence. Without the Nothing or void, there is no creation and no existence. We converted nothing into something by our thoughts and language, using deduction or inference, and concluded that space is the consequence of this thought process, not the actual process. We applied our definite language to our indefinite “understanding,” ideas, or reasoning to prove the “fact.” However, the fact is or is not, regardless of our ideas, language, or reasoning. We must use the opposite and apply language to the facts rather than our understanding. Our understanding is limited, and facts are impersonal and independent of our knowledge. We cannot falsify the language to fit and understand the facts better. We cannot change facts or affect them with our ideas, but facts are verifiable up to a point. There are facts beyond the verifiable point by humans since human beings are limited. Still, language is verifiable, and our theories are both falsifiable and verifiable to a large extent.
Dejan Stojanovic (ABSOLUTE (THE WORLD IN NOWHERENESS))
Instead, I finish him off with three more letters: A-S-S. Self-explanatory.
Sarah A. Parker (When the Moon Hatched (Moonfall, #1))
From the point of existence itself, it is not essential (crucial or philosophically viable) if existence is an illusion or even if the whole existence, in its absolute totality, would be an “illusion,” for the existence of existence is self-explanatory and self-confirmatory, even if it were an illusion.
Dejan Stojanovic (ABSOLUTE (THE WORLD IN NOWHERENESS))
But the idea that this world is not self-explanatory and that revelation from beyond it is necessary to understand it is profoundly distasteful to us humans. It means that we are not in control of our own destiny or able to make our own disposition of things for our own benefit. This thought, the thought that we cannot supply our ultimate needs for ourselves, that we are dependent on someone or something utterly beyond us, is deeply troublesome.
John N. Oswalt (The Bible among the Myths: Unique Revelation or Just Ancient Literature? (Ancient Context, Ancient Faith))
Choosing a religion, says philosopher Ernest Gellner, has become akin to choosing a wallpaper pattern or menu item—an area of life where it is considered acceptable to act on purely personal taste or feelings. Most people do not look to spirituality for an explanatory system to answer the cosmic questions of life. Instead they choose their spirituality based on what meets their emotional needs and helps them cope with personal issues, from losing weight to gaining self-confidence. But, when “serious issues are at stake” like making money or meeting medical needs, Gellner says, then people want solutions based on “real knowledge.”7 They want to know the tested outcomes of objective science and research.
Nancy R. Pearcey (Saving Leonardo: A Call to Resist the Secular Assault on Mind, Morals, and Meaning)
Be true to yourself, be positive, always keep a clear mind and don’t stress. Be goal driven and with a strong will power, your career will surely kick off. Relationship wise – be faithful and love your man, and the rest is self explanatory because it’s not rocket science.
Jenelle Joanne Ramsami
Learned Optimism: Expecting a Positive Outcome In Learned Optimism, Martin Seligman provides information that has tremendous implications for teams that want to develop the persistence to achieve their business goals. Optimistic team members believe they will be successful and believe they are responsible for their success. Pessimistic team members do not believe they will be successful and believe that nothing they do will improve their results. For these reasons, optimistic team members are resilient and will persist when things get tough, while pessimistic team members give up. Seligman led a research team that demonstrated that optimism and helplessness are learned. His work suggests that when team members decide that nothing they do matters, they feel helpless and will do little to improve their situation. The good news that came from discovering that helplessness can be learned is the revelation that optimism can also be learned. Of particular importance is how team members explain setbacks to themselves. Optimistic team members explain setbacks as temporary, specific, and, where appropriate, externally caused. They do not view the event as long-lasting or permanent. They believe that the event is a temporary setback that can be corrected and refuse to consider it a catastrophe. For them, it is a single event with a specific negative impact. Finally, they only own the result if they should. Optimistic team members don't own the negative returns if the market goes down. Pessimistic team members are on the other end of the continuum. They explain setbacks as permanent, pervasive, and personal. They believe the negative setback is long-lasting. They globalize the setback and believe “all hell is breaking loose.” Pessimistic team members also believe that they are responsible for the setback even when they are not. To make matters worse, pessimistic team members tend to play the setback over and over again in their minds. Because we tend to move toward those things we think about, this ruminating can lead to a self-fulfilling prophecy. Teams reflect the attitudes of the individual team members. If team members explain setbacks as temporary, specific, and (where appropriate) externally caused, the team will be optimistic about their future success and will continue to persist. However, if as a group a team tends to explain setbacks as permanent, pervasive, and caused by the team members, the team will develop a pessimistic explanatory style and will quit, giving up on their goals. What seems to be of lesser importance in developing team persistence is how teams and their members explain successes to themselves. It is interesting that explanatory styles are completely turned around when they experience success. Optimistic teams explain the success as permanent, pervasive, and personally caused. Pessimistic teams explain successes as temporary, specific, and externally caused.
Steve Moore (Ineffective Habits of Financial Advisors (and the Disciplines to Break Them): A Framework for Avoiding the Mistakes Everyone Else Makes)
Hooker argued that while the Scriptures are to be our primary source of authority, they are not to be isolated from reason and tradition. Why? Because God communicated his revelation as contained in the Scriptures in a manner sensitive to the specific needs of a specific group in a specific time in history and, therefore, intended that they be interpreted to make sense to a different people in a different time. God’s revelation was, therefore, to be both inside and outside of the Scriptures, guarded and guided by the Holy Spirit. The Scriptures are intended, Hooker asserted, to be a living word and not a collection of dead letters. That is, the Scriptures (and tradition) are not self-explanatory but require the use of reason to determine their meaning. Reason, of course, is not autonomous or individualistic. Nor are there three different authorities. Rather, there is a single authority composed of three intersecting sources: the Scriptures being the normative authoritative source; reason and tradition being necessary interpretive authoritative sources.
John H. Westerhoff III (A People Called Episcopalians: A Brief Introduction to Our Way of Life (Revised Edition))
Next come the magickally important Hebrew letters Yud-Heh-Vahv-Heh, YHVH for short, the Tetragrammaton. I have already discussed it, but let’s add some more information. The Yud looks like this: . The upper tip of the Yud is associated with the first Sephira. The rest of the Yud, along with the Heh (which looks like this: ), is associated with the second through fourth Sephiroht. The Vahv is an elongated Yud and looks like this: . It is related to the fourth through ninth Sephiroht. Notice the overlap between the Vahv and Heh. The second or last Heh is related to the tenth Sephira. The first Heh is known as the Heh Superior (Sup.) and the second Heh is known as the Heh Inferior (Inf.). Hebrew is read from right to left, and the Tetragrammaton looks like this: Vertically, it looks like this: The creatures in the next column are both real and unreal, while the tools of the following column are magickal tools. The lamen is a medallion hung around the neck to represent a certain power or quality. The names are the various God, archangelic, and angelic names, along with other words of power. The traditional magician of the Middle Ages wore two robes: an outer robe, representing the silence necessary to being a magician, which concealed a hidden, inner robe of truth. Today, most magicians wear only one robe, the two robes being more symbolic than actual. Finally, the last column is self-explanatory with the sole added note that the plant associated with the first Sephira is an almond “aflower.” That is, it should be blooming. This list of Kabalistic correspondences is by no means complete. But it is a good start. I suggest that you make up a series of Trees of Life, each one filled out with one of the columns. You may wish also to make up a very large Tree of Life putting many of the correspondences associated with a Sephira in the drawing of that Sephira. I urge a deep study of the correspondences now. Their importance will become clearer to you as we move into the study of Grey Magick. For a far more complete version
Donald Michael Kraig (Modern Magick: Twelve Lessons in the High Magickal Arts)
those who tend to get depressed following setbacks in life differ from others in how they explain such events to themselves.  They take them as confirmation of lack of self-worth, instead of seeing them merely as temporary reversals of fortune.  This difference in explanatory styles turns out to be the key difference between optimists and pessimists.   One
D.E. Boyer (Master Your Mind: The More You Think, The Easier It Gets)
As soon as I was through the door, Brandon was hugging me and reaching for the pictures. “Look at him! He was asleep, but look at him sucking his thumb!” I exclaimed. Mom and Bree giggled when they passed us. Yeah, not fooling them. He dropped down to a squat and put his hands tenderly on my stomach, “Hey little man!” Brandon’s deep husky voice was warm and melodic whenever he spoke to him. “How could you sleep through the whole appointment, huh? Your momma was hoping to see you moving around today. Next time, right buddy?” I watched the one sided conversation, biting my lip to keep from grinning like an idiot. Brandon would be such a good father. Whoa. Where did that come from? Don’t go down that road Harper. Brandon stood back up and absentmindedly began tracing shapes along my stomach. “What did Dr. Lowdry say?” “She said everything’s great!” That was another thing, he always asked how I felt and how the appointments went. Even Konrad and Dad didn’t do that, “I go back in another two weeks, she said he’s still big, so there’s a possibility she’s going to put me on bedrest after my next appointment to try to keep him in there as long as possible.” “Bedrest?” His hazel eyes looked worried, “But she said everything is okay?” I smoothed out his furrowed brow, and stared at his eyes. I’d finally figured them out. They were brown if he was shirtless, or wearing a brown or white shirt. Gray if he was wearing a black or gray shirt. Green was pretty self-explanatory, he had to be wearing green, and any other color would make his eyes the perfect mix of the three. “It’s fine, don’t worry about it. If I have to, it’s just to make sure he doesn’t come too early.
Molly McAdams (Taking Chances (Taking Chances, #1))
I refuse to join any club that would have me as a member.—Groucho Marx —Self-explanatory
Tiffany Nicole Smith (Bex Carter 1: Aunt Jeanie's Revenge (The Bex Carter Series))
There is no explaining the "pure" experience. There is only the completely unwarranted presupposition that others should others should somehow "understand" that it has taken place. but the judgement whether a "pure" rather than a secondary "experience" has actually occurred can, by definition, only be self-referential.&that would be in order if, simultaneously, there were not the presumption that something objectively meaningful about phenomenal reality had been illuminated.Or, putting it another way,the problem is not what James Joyce termed the "epiphany," the momentary glimpse of meaning experienced by an individual, but rather the refusal to define its existential "place" or recognize its explanatory limits....Insisting upon the absolute character of revelatory truth obviously generates a division between the saved & the damned.There arises the simultaneous desire to abolish blasphemy and bring the heathen into the light.Not every person in quest of the "pure experience,"of course,is a religious fanatic or obsessed with issues of identity.Making existential sense of reality through the pure experience,feeling a sense of belonging, is a serious matter & a legitimate undertaking.But the more the preoccupation with the purity of the experience, it only follows,the more fanatical the believer. In political terms,therefore,the problem is less the lack of intensity in the lived life of the individual than the increasing attempts by individuals and groups to insist that their own,particular,deeply felt existential or religious or aesthetic experience should be privileged in the public realm.Indeed, this runs directly counter to the Enlightenment.... Different ideas have a different role in different spheres of social action.Subjectivity has a pivotal role to play in discussing existential or aesthetic experience while the universal subject is necessary understanding of citizenship or the rule of law.From such a perspective,indeed,the seemingly irresolvable conflict between subjectivity and the subject becomes illusory: it is instead a matter of what should assume primacy in what realm....From the standpoint of a socially constructed subjectivity,however, only members of a particular group can have the appropriate intuition or "experience," to make judgements about their culture or their politics...This stance now embraced by so many on the left,however, actually derives from arguments generated first by the Counter-Enlightenment & then the radical right during the Dreyfus Affair.These reactionaries, too, claimed that rather than introduce "grand narratives" or "totalizing ambitions" or "universal" ideas of justice, intellectuals should commit themselves to the particular groups with whose unique discourses and experiences they, as individuals, are intimately and existentially familiar.The "pure"-or less contaminated- experience of group members was seen as providing them a privileged insight into a particular form of oppression. Criticism from the "outsider" loses its value and questions concerning the adjudication of differences between groups are never faced, ...Not every person who believes in the "pure experience" -again-was an anti-Semite or fascist.But it is interesting how the "pure experience," with its vaunted contempt for the "public" and its social apathy,can be manipulated in the realm of politics.Utopia doesn't appear only in the idea of a former "golden age" located somewhere in the past or the vision of future paradise...history has shown the danger of turning "reason" into an enemy and condemning universal ideals in the name of some parochial sense of "place" rooted in a particular community, Or, put another way, where power matters the "pure" experience is never quite so pure and no "place" is sacrosanct.Better to be a bit more modest when confronting social reality and begin the real work of specifying conditions under which each can most freely pursue his or her existential longing &find a place in the sun.
Stephen Eric Bronner (Reclaiming the Enlightenment: Toward a Politics of Radical Engagement)
We've fooled around. I guess he's kind of a fuck buddy." "Fuck buddy?" "Oh, you don't know that term? Well, it's a friend-" "You don't have to explain. It's vividly self-explanatory.
Marshall Thornton (Bloodlines (Boystown #7))
RAIN. R: recognize A: allow I: investigate N: non-identification “Recognize” was self-explanatory. Using my David Westin example, in those moments after our—even in the best light—quite ambivalent meeting, job number one was simply to acknowledge my feelings. “It’s like agreeing to pause in the face of what’s here, and just acknowledge the actuality,” said Brach. The first step is admitting it. “Allow” is where you lean into it. The
Dan Harris (10% Happier)
So there are logical problems, such as building a bridge. And there are psycho-logical ones: whether to paint the lines on the road or not. The rules for solving both are different; just as I make a distinction between nonsense and non-sense, I also use a hyphen to distinguish between logical and psycho-logical thinking. The logical and the psycho-logical approaches run on different operating systems and require different software, and we need to understand both. Psycho-logic isn’t wrong, but it cares about different things and works in a different way to logic. Because logic is self-explanatory, our preference is to use it in all social and institutional settings, even where it has no place. The result is that we end up using inappropriate software for the operating system, neglecting the psycho-logical approach.
Rory Sutherland (Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life)
Kin selection theory is one of the great theories in the history of science. It places human beings within an explanatory framework that embraces the rest of the biological world – a framework that links suicidal nest defense in bees and patterns of root growth in plants with the loving bonds and quiet self-sacrifice found in human families. I’m willing to go out on a limb and say that no psychologist or social scientist who lacks a detailed understanding of kin selection theory, and an awareness of the importance of relatedness throughout the living world, can claim to be an expert on behavior. Furthermore, any student of psychology or the social sciences who isn’t taught Hamilton’s ideas in some depth has been short-changed and should immediately ask for a refund.
Steve Stewart-Williams (The Ape that Understood the Universe: How the Mind and Culture Evolve)
For instance, it means that as far as is humanly possible, when I look at a Web page it should be self-evident. Obvious. Self-explanatory. I should be able to “get it”—what it is and how to use it—without expending any effort thinking about it.
Steve Krug (Don't Make Me Think, Revisited: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability (Voices That Matter))
We must retain for the event its radical definition and its impact in the imagination. It is characterized entirely, in a paradoxical way, by its uncanniness, its troubling strangeness - it is the irruption of something improbable and impossible - and by its troubling familiarity: from the outset it seems totally self-explanatory, as though predestined; as though it could not but take place. There is something here that seems to come from elsewhere, something fateful that nothing can prevent. It is for this reason, both complex and contradictory, that it mobilizes the imagination with such force. It breaks the continuity of things and, at the same time, makes its entry into the real with stupefying ease.
Jean Baudrillard (The Intelligence of Evil or the Lucidity Pact (Talking Images))
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)
When you know the secret to mastering self and this world, then you must have understood that it is wiser to keep it to yourself, and just pretend to be a happy moron. Otherwise, be prepared to go through hard times. .. This is the explanatory logic for why people nowadays have rarely heard wisdom directly from true masters.
Toba Beta (Master of Stupidity)
I am an enthusiastic and hard worker, I would like to believe, but often the lack of support or the unnecessary questioning by those around me can cause feelings of self-questioning and lowering of self-esteem, even when I know I am doing my job to the best of my ability, professionally and ethically. This environmental atmosphere can lead to immense self-stress. I'm a harsh critic to myself and the positivity is stifled when there is a lack of external support to appease the self-critic. Things I say to myself: Is that good enough? Clarified enough? I thought I was pretty clear on my thoughts, processes and justifications, so why am I having to justify myself? Is what I'm saying not reasonable? The explanatory ramble that I often go on feels like an internal friction burn. Like a cramp no one can see.' - Rebecca Cunningham
Emma Gannon (Sabotage)
Unexpected family shit,” he said. “That’s the text you should have sent me. Succinct. Self-explanatory. You’re not responsible for your brother’s actions.
Madelynne Ellis (Reflex (Off the Record, #1))
The first act of intuitionism enables us to construct the linear rational grid. On the basis of this, by virtue of the second act of intuitionism, we introduce the linear continuum in the following way : By a limiting number we understand a (not necessarily predeterminate) convergent sequence of rational numbers. Then, regarding as self-explanatory the meaning of a coincidence of two limiting numbers, we call the species of limiting numbers coinciding with a given limiting number, a limiting number core. A predeterminate limiting number is also called a sharp limiting number, and a limiting number core containing a sharp limiting number is called a sharp limiting number core. The species of the limiting number cores is called the linear continuum or the continuum.
L.E.J. Brouwer
Nature – simple, ordinary and profound – is self-explanatory and self-sufficient.
KRISHNA MURTHY ANNIGERI VASUDEVA RAO (FLOWERS OF STARDUST)
...this account has small explanatory value, for the notion of self-contradictoriness, in the quite broad sense needed for this definition of analyticity, stands in exactly the same need of clarification as does the notion of analyticity itself. The two notions are the two sides of a single dubious coin.
Rich Lusk
which begs a question. What precisely is genius? I believe that genius is not a person but a process, a process in which someone determines to uncover their gift and, for a period, is able to step inside it. The “gift” is a self-explanatory state, and like a prize awarded in a DNA lotto—say, being born into beauty or into wealth—genius is no reason for arrogance.
Bono (Surrender: 40 Songs, One Story)
The name of the lesson is “Look What We Can Do to You Any Time We Fucking Want.” The point of the lesson is self-explanatory.The USA taught the world this lesson when it nuked Hiroshima and Nagasaki. GloboCap (and the US military) taught it again when they invaded Iraq and destabilized the entire Greater Middle East. It is regularly taught in penitentiaries when the prisoners start to get a little too unruly and remember that they outnumber the guards. That’s where the “lockdown” concept originated. It isn’t medical terminology. It is penal institution terminology.
C.J. Hopkins (The Rise of the New Normal Reich: Consent Factory Essays, Vol. III (2020-2021))
We identify six explanatory threads: the rising political polarization and cross-party animosity of U.S. politics, which has led to rising hate crimes and harassment on campus; rising levels of teen anxiety and depression, which have made many students more desirous of protection and more receptive to the Great Untruths; changes in parenting practices, which have amplified children’s fears even as childhood becomes increasingly safe; the loss of free play and unsupervised risk-taking, both of which kids need to become self-governing adults; the growth of campus bureaucracy and expansion of its protective mission; and an increasing passion for justice, combined with changing ideas about what justice requires.
Jonathan Haidt (The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting up a Generation for Failure)
The whole set of stylizations that are known as 'camp' (a word that I was hearing then for the first time) was, in 1926, self-explanatory. Women moved and gesticulated in this way. Homosexuals wished for obvious reasons to copy them. The strange thing about 'camp' is that it has become fossilized. The mannerisms have never changed. If I were now to see a woman sitting with her knees clamped together, one hand on her hip and the other lightly touching her back hair, I should think, 'Either she scored her last social triumph in 1926 or it is a man in drag.' Perhaps 'camp' is set in the 'twenties because after that differences between the sexes—especially visible differences—began to fade. This, of course, has never mattered to women in the least. They know they are women. To homosexuals, who must, with every breath they draw, with every step they take, demonstrate that they are feminine, it is frustrating. They look back in sorrow to that more formal era and try to re-live it. The whole structure of society was at that time much more rigid than it has ever been since, and in two main ways. The first of these was sexual. The short skirts, bobbed hair and flat chests that were in fashion were in fact symbols of immaturity. No one ever drew attention to this, presumably out of politeness. The word 'boyish' was used to describe the girls of that era. This epithet they accepted graciously. They knew that they looked nothing like boys. They also realized that it was meant to be a compliment. Manliness was all the rage. The men of the 'twenties searched themselves for vestiges of effeminacy as though for lice. They did not worry about their characters but about their hair and their clothes. Their predicament was that they must never be caught worrying about either. I once heard a slightly dandified friend of my brother say, 'People are always accusing me of taking care over my appearance.' The sexual meaning of behaviour was only sketchily understood, but the symbolism of clothes was recognized by everyone. To wear suede shoes was to be under suspicion. Anyone who had hair rather than bristle at the back of his neck was thought to be an artist, a foreigner or worse. A friend of mine who was young in the same decade as I says that, when he was introduced to an elderly gentleman as an artist, the gentleman said, 'Oh, I know this young man is an artist. The other day I saw him in the street in a brown jacket.' The other way in which society in the 'twenties was rigid was in its class distinctions. Doubtless to a sociologist there were many different strata merging here and there but, among the people that I was now getting to know, there were only two classes. They never mingled except in bed. There was 'them', who acted refined and spoke nice and whose people had pots of money, and there was 'us', who were the salt of the earth.
Quentin Crisp (The Naked Civil Servant)
The guy sighed. “The contents are self-explanatory.
Gary D. Schmidt (Pay Attention, Carter Jones)
expliquer /ɛksplike/ I. vtr 1. (enseigner) to explain • explique-leur comment marche le chauffage | explain to them how the heating works 2. (donner la raison) to explain • je vais tout t'~ | I'll explain everything 3. (être la raison) to account for • le hasard n'explique pas tout | chance doesn't account for everything 4. to comment on, to analyze [passage] II. vpr 1. (comprendre) s'expliquer qch • to understand sth • je m'explique/ne m'explique pas pourquoi il a menti | I understand ou see/I can't understand ou see why he lied • je m'explique qu'elle veuille rester | I can quite see that she might want to stay 2. (être compréhensible) to be understandable • leur amertume s'explique | their bitterness is understandable • tout s'explique par le fait que les habitudes ont changé | it's understandable, because times have changed • tout finira par s'~ | everything will become clear • la chose s'explique d'elle-même | it is self-explanatory 3. (exposer sa pensée) • je m'explique | let me explain • elle s'explique bien/mal | she expresses herself well/badly • sans doute me suis-je mal expliqué | perhaps I didn't make myself clear • expliquez-vous sur ce point | what do you mean exactly? 4. (se justifier) to explain (oneself) (auprès de, devant "to") • le secrétaire devra s'~ auprès du comité | the secretary will have to explain himself to the committee • s'~ sur son retard | to explain one's late arrival 5. (résoudre un conflit) • ils se sont expliqués | they talked things through • allez vous ~ ailleurs | go and sort it out somewhere else • s'~ à coups de poings | to fight it out • s'~ à coups de revolver | to shoot it out
Synapse Développement (Oxford Hachette French - English Dictionary (French Edition))
Third, in our addiction to the rational consciousness and its countless props we believe the myth that we are really powerless to do anything about it. Addicts typically feel disempowered. The object to which they are addicted seems to them bigger and more powerful than their will. Similarly, stuck as we are in the lopsided worldview spawned by the rational consciousness, which tends to discredit other forms and states of consciousness, we do not believe that there is anything we can do about our situation. As addicts of the rational consciousness we do not believe in a universe that is inherently benign. We refuse to consider that the world we live in is actually comprised of the kinds of dimensions of reality that religions and spiritual traditions talk about. We disallow ourselves the possibility of inner or spiritual growth, because our view of human potential is limited to the capacities of the rational mind, which is viewed as the finest product of evolution. Fourth, like the typical addict, we tend to weave all kinds of explanatory tales to justify our present condition to ourselves and to each other. In this category belongs the “everybody thinks so” attitude, which is modeled not on the few exceptional men and women who can see farther than the rest, but on the lowest common denominator of understanding and living: a flagrant perversion of the democratic ideal. In other words, through word magic we engage in an act of massive repression by which we deny ourselves the opportunity to grow; we deny ourselves access to those forms and states of consciousness that our rational consciousness forces us to deny and belittle. Thus our experiential repertoire remains limited, even truncated. Fifth, addicts tend to be inflexible, dogmatic, and arrogant about defending their position, and we addicts of the rational consciousness are subject to the same mood. Because we have entrenched ourselves in an untenable position, in which the rational ego rules supreme, we meet any challenge to our unviable approach to life with haughty intransigence. We need to be right, because our entire worldview and life-style are at stake. And yet, sixth, like true addicts, those of us who are transfixed in the rational consciousness are deeply suffering our mood of separation, self-centeredness, and self-fragmentation. All life, observed Gautama the Buddha, is suffering. But there is suffering and then there is suffering. It appears that whenever we take the presumed independence of the human personality too seriously, cutting ourselves off from other beings and regarding the world as an enemy to be conquered, we become our own source of suffering. This suffering is superimposed on any adversity and pain we may experience as part of our human adventure on this planet. It is a psychological malaise from which we can recover only when we stop pinching ourselves. Our addiction to the “normal” rational consciousness is so potent that we cannot easily shake this habit even when we have realized that our habit of egoic self-encapsulation is artificial and self-inflicted and resting on a denial of the essential interconnectedness and interdependence of everything.
Georg Feuerstein (The Deeper Dimension of Yoga: Theory and Practice)
The capacity to grasp and manipulate complex ideas is enough to define intellect, but not enough to encompass intelligence, which involves combining intellect with judgment and care in selecting relevant, explanatory factors and in establishing empirical tests of any theory that emerges. Intelligence minus judgment equals intellect. Wisdom is the rarest quality of all—the ability to combine intellect, knowledge, experience, and judgment in a way to produce a coherent understanding. Wisdom is the fulfillment of the ancient admonition, “With all your getting, get understanding.” Wisdom requires self-discipline and an understanding of the realities of the world, including the limitation of one’s own experience and of reason itself. The opposite of intellect is dullness or slowness, but the opposite of wisdom is foolishness, which is far more dangerous.
Thomas Sowell
In a pinch, one need merely wave expansively at the universe and declare that the theory shares its structure. Unfortunately, getting any farther than this entails a few difficulties. For example, we must decide how reality should be studied in order to discover its structure, and by whom. But this gives rise to yet another problem: physics is not self-explanatory. If physics is regarded as an expression of the structure of reality, then clearly it is real, and a comprehensive theory of reality must explain its every part and aspect. But then in order to qualify as a comprehensive theory of reality, physics must explain itself, its correspondence to reality, and arguably the biological origins and mental activity of physicists in whose minds it exists.
Council of Human Hybrid-Attractors (Incessance: Incesancia)
On the Kantian conception logic as a whole is concerned with investigating the form of the understanding: that is, the form of the intellectual aspect of our overall cognitive faculty to represent objects. Pure general and transcendental logic, in turn, are each concerned with investigating a dimension of that form. On this conception, the source of logical form is not to be comprehended apart from the role of our capacity for thought in the achievement of forms of cognition that are not merely logical. And the source of the notion of mere form of which pure general logic treats is not to be comprehended apart from its internal relation to the full-blooded form of that unified general cognitive capacity - and hence to the forms of the understanding or the categories. This means that on a Kantian understanding of the order of explanatory priority, we must first comprehend the inner logical dimension of form of which transcendental logic treats if we wish to arrive at a proper appreciation of how, via an abstraction, we may arrive at a proper comprehension of the comparatively outer logical dimension of mere form of which pure logical treats - that dimension of form which the rationalist logician, in accordance with his logically thin conception of reason, takes to be self-standingly available.
James Ferguson Conant (The Logical Alien: Conant and His Critics)
After an era of lunar mortification, we are entering an era of solar mystification. Every great thought is of the order of the lapsus. When Benjamin pronounces this terrifying sentence: 'Fascism is made up of two things: fascism properly so called and anti-fascism', is this not thought sliding, letting itself slide beyond truth, into the fundamental ambiguity of discourse, an ambiguity far greater than any political or ideological explanation, and which alone explains why there has never been any plausible explanation of fascism, whilst anti-fascism is self explanatory? Whatever hypothesis you propose about it, fascism poses more problems than anti-fascism. From the very start, it is more interesting than - and itself encompasses - anti-fascism. This is what Benjamin's statement is saying. And it should not be made to say what it is not saying. Though it surely will be.
Jean Baudrillard (Cool Memories)
Level 2: Meeting Women (Complete 4 of 5) Figure out demographics: Figure out your demographics based on the recommendations in. Write down the type of women you’d like to meet and the places you enjoy going most. Then find venues or events where those two things intersect. It could be independent rock concerts, it could be art gallery showings, it could be salsa nights. Whatever it is, find your niche and pursue it. Meet 5 women in one day: Self-explanatory Meet 20 women in one week: Also self-explanatory. Join an online dating site and email 10 women: Also self-explanatory. If you’re under 30 years old, I recommend free dating sites. If you’re over 30 years old, I recommend pay sites. Sign up for a singles or speed dating event: If you have trouble doing the approaching tasks, then this may give you a needed boost in the right direction.
Mark Manson (Models: Attract Women Through Honesty)
The difference between the sacred — be it an object or religious method — and the profane is self explanatory (Durkheim 1965:52-54), so let us move on to magic, which I define as production without labor.
Walter A. Jensen (Sociology of Religion: A Critical Primer)
Neff’s definition of self-kindness is contained and self-explanatory: “being warm and understanding toward ourselves when we suffer, fail, or feel inadequate, rather than ignoring our pain or flagellating ourselves with self-criticism.” In my own life, this translates to one simple mandate: Talk to yourself the way you’d talk to someone you love.
Brené Brown (Dare to Lead: Brave Work. Tough Conversations. Whole Hearts.)
The whole shtick of scientism revolves around sensory evidence. How many times must it be said that there is no such thing as self-explanatory sensory evidence? All evidence must be interpreted, and the interpretation is not a perceiving activity but a judging activity. The catastrophic error that worshipers of scientism (autistic sensing types) commit is that they privilege perceiving over judging. They believe that perception is the most important thing, and that judgment must be directed to the maximum degree possible at the perception, and minimize and indeed eliminate any reference to anything that has not been perceived. For worshipers of scientism, perception comes first, and judging is secondary, determined by perceiving. That is what empiricism is all about. It claims that all knowledge comes from experience, that there are no innate ideas, and it revolves around synthetic propositions and a posteriori knowledge. Rationalism, by total contrast, asserts that knowledge comes from logical, rational deduction and that innate ideas form the only secure basis for knowledge. It deals with analytic propositions and a priori knowledge.
Thomas Stark (Extra Scientiam Nulla Salus: How Science Undermines Reason (The Truth Series Book 8))
Katia, Shelby, Tim, Shiro and I are doing our best to play cards in the lounge.  Shelby got some adhesive so we can stick them to the coffee table, but it’s still a challenge and some of them escape to float away.  We’d be in the Centrifuge Module, but we don’t want to end up, you know, dead. Shiro says, “So, now that we’re on our way, I think it’s time we start getting real.  We need to be prepared for what’s out there.” “I think we’re about as prepared as we can get,” Shelby comments, discarding. “In all the training, we never had any discussions about motives.” “Motives?” Tim asks. “Yes,” Shiro says. “For example, look at the crew the aliens chose.  With the exception of Jim, all of us are young.” “Well that’s self-explanatory, isn’t it?” says Tim.  “Why send older, less physically fit individuals on such a physically rigorous journey?  No offense, Jim.” “The females are younger than the males, but all of us are of reproductive age.”  He looks up from his cards, “Doesn’t that make you a little curious what they have in mind?” “Shiro!  You’re making me uncomfortable,” Shelby says. Looking at Katia, Shiro says, “And you’re the youngest, Katia.  Very young, in fact, and intelligent on a scale beyond the reach of the vast majority of humans.”  He glances from side to side, “All of us, in fact, are exceptional.  With the exception of you, Jim.  No offense, of course.” “None taken,” I say.  “Full house.” Everyone groans and I collect all the chips we have placed in a Ziploc bag. Tim asks, “Are you suggesting that they intend to keep us as pets and breed us, or something?  Because that’s impossible.  You know all the men on the crew have been sterilized.” “Yes, I know.  But do you think that, if they have the technology to do what they have already done, they might also be able to overcome such a hurdle?  They will have our DNA, and three perfectly viable wombs to work with.  That should be enough.” Shelby exclaims, “That is enough!  Good grief, Shiro.  Are you trying to give us nightmares?” “I just want us all to be prepared for all eventualities.” Blinking, her brows furrowed, Shelby says, “How considerate of you.  That’s enough preparation for today.” ∆v∆v∆v∆v∆
B.C. Chase (Pluto's Ghost)