Chris Cleave Quotes

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

If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough.

I cannot be understood in three minutes.

There is really nothing more to say-except why. But since why is difficult to handle, one must take refuge in how.

Those who understand only what can be explained understand very little.

Life is easy to chronicle, but bewildering to practice.

Many things complicated by nature are restored by reason.

If you can’t explain something simply, you don’t understand it.

Football isn't nuclear physics, but it's not so simple that you can make it simple. It takes some explaining to get it across.

Complex things, if you don't understand them, it seems complicated. If you understand them, and we know how to handle it, it became simple.

The fact that something is actually understandable and relatable doesn't mean that it's unsophisticated or banal. It just means that it's crystal-clear. And if you can't explain it, that doesn't necessarily mean it's so brilliant that ordinary mortals can't fathom it. It might just mean that it makes no sense.

Life is weird and complex but very simple at the same time. It's all about perception.

I love the challenge of taking these really complicated subjects and trying to humanise them.

Facts are often complicated.

Explaining something makes it go away, so to speak; what's important is left after you have explained everything else.

You do not really understand something unless you can explain it to your grandmother.

the world is just as concrete, ornery, vile, and sublimely wonderful as before, only now I better understand my relation to it and it to me.

I wanted to understand things and then be free of them. I needed to learn how to telescope things, ideas. Things were too big to see all at once, like all the books in the library-everything laying around on all the tables. You might be able to put it all into one paragraph or into one verse of a song if you could get it right.

The more one knows, the more one simplifies.

The things best to know are first principles and causes, but these things are perhaps the most difficult for men to grasp, for they are farthest removed from the senses.

They understand but a little who understand only what can be explained.

Books say: She did this because. Life says: She did this. Books are where things are explained to you; life is where things aren't. I'm not surprised some people prefer books.

What is the alternative to understanding the complexity of the world?

As far as I'm concerned, if something is so complicated that you can't explain it in 10 seconds, then it's probably not worth knowing anyway.

A part is always too limited to explain the whole. You might picture a worldview as trying to stuff the entire universe into a box. Invariably, something will stick out of the box. Its categories are too "small" to explain the world.