Explanation

Famous quotes containing the word explanation:

“Natural selection, the blind, unconscious, automatic process which Darwin discovered, and which we now know is the explanation for the existence and apparently purposeful form of all life, has no purpose in mind. It has no mind and no mind’s eye. It does not plan for the future. It has no vision, no foresight, no sight at all. If it can be said to play the role of the watchmaker in nature, it is the blind watchmaker.”
—Richard Dawkins (b. 1941)

“How strange a scene is this in which we are such shifting figures, pictures, shadows. The mystery of our existence—I have no faith in any attempted explanation of it. It is all a dark, unfathomed profound.”
—Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1822–1893)

“Auden, MacNeice, Day Lewis, I have read them all,
Hoping against hope to hear the authentic call . . .
And know the explanation I must pass is this
MYou cannot light a match on a crumbling wall.”
—Hugh MacDiarmid (1892–1978)