"Explainable" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Egypt, the monastic recluses of the Middle Ages, the ecstatics of the seventeenth and early part of the eighteenth century exhibited many symptoms that were, and are still, attributed by religious enthusiasts to supernatural agencies, but which are explainable by what we know of hypnotism. The Hesychasts of Mount Athos who remained motionless for days with their gaze directed steadily to the navel; the Taskodrugites who remained statuesque for a long period with the finger applied to the nose; the Jogins who could hibernate at will; the Dandins ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... identified himself with the fallacy now under consideration, or has embodied it in more distinct terms, than Leibnitz. In his view, unless a thing was not merely conceivable, but even explainable, it could not exist in nature. All natural phenomena, according to him, must be susceptible of being accounted for a priori. The only facts of which no explanation could be given but the will of God, were miracles properly so called. "Je reconnais," says he,(237) "qu'il n'est pas permis ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... I knew that the "every one" mentioned by the poor girl meant ourselves, and possibly her unknown employer, we were none the less touched by her words. The more we studied the mystery, the deeper and less explainable ...
— The Old Stone House and Other Stories • Anna Katharine Green
... place in the world where human nature shows to such sad disadvantage as in waiting-rooms at railway stations, especially in the "Ladies' Room." In the "Gentlemen's Room" there is less of that ghastly, apathetic silence which seems only explainable as an interval between two terrible catastrophes. Shall we go so far as to confess that even the unsightly spittoons, and the uncleanly and loquacious fellowship resulting from their common use, seem here, for the moment, redeemed from a little of their ...
— Bits About Home Matters • Helen Hunt Jackson
... pleasure was afforded during the Middle Ages by songs, dances, and carols, when performed in consecrated places, such as cemeteries, cloisters, churches. A preference for such places may seem scarcely credible; still it cannot be doubted, and is besides easily explainable. To the unbridled instincts of men as yet half tamed, the Church had opposed rigorous prescriptions which were enforced wholesale. To resist excessive independence, excessive severity was needful; buttresses had to be raised equal in strength ...
— A Literary History of the English People - From the Origins to the Renaissance • Jean Jules Jusserand
... suffered from a very genuine and explainable wave of indignant jealousy. As Ann, she admitted he ought not to have done it, but felt there was excuse for him. Between the two she feared her mind would eventually give way. On the morning of the second day ...
— Malvina of Brittany • Jerome K. Jerome
... this strange proceeding is easily explainable by any one with sufficient imagination to put himself in the bird's place. It is the rule of a sitting bird to sit tight, not to be scared off by trifles, and to take great risks rather than expose her eggs ...
— The Minds and Manners of Wild Animals • William T. Hornaday
... physical and the intellectual and moral, to declare for nought the free action of the human will, and to resolve the whole story of the fates of mankind into a series of purely material effects, produced by assignable physical causes, and explainable in the past, or determinable in the future, by an intimate knowledge of those causes, by a recognition of the action of compulsory motives upon the passively obedient nature of man. With such, language will naturally pass, along with the rest, ...
— Chips from a German Workshop - Volume IV - Essays chiefly on the Science of Language • Max Muller
... nearly as enviable; it is not that it is spiritual, which would strengthen its appeal for some, neither that it is sensuous, which would make it alluring to others; it is that it breathes love,—love, indefinable but unmistakable, mysterious but absolute, understood of all, explainable by none, and of greater, or at least more universal, interest than any other emotion. Those equally fitted to enjoy all Wagner's operas show, it is observed, a predilection usually for Tristan and Isolde. If the pre-eminent beauty ...
— The Wagnerian Romances • Gertrude Hall
... day for their wedding, he had entirely failed to obtain any satisfactory reply. When he grew importunate, the only effect was to set her to crying, as if her heart would break. He was completely perplexed. If she did not love him her conduct would be readily explainable; but that she was in love with him, and very much in love with him, he had ...
— Miss Ludington's Sister • Edward Bellamy
... went on. "He—he must have been killed instantaneously. And you'll see in a minute or two why the body wasn't found before—when we made that first search. It's quite explainable. ...
— Scarhaven Keep • J. S. Fletcher
... strong organize and drill for the purpose of attacking people who are rich and weak; and while one would shrink from declaring that nations which are poor and strong do the same, it may nevertheless be stated that they have often been accused of doing so, and that some wars are explainable on that ground and on ...
— The Navy as a Fighting Machine • Bradley A. Fiske
... apparently occult methods of communication among the natives of India, between whom, it is said, news flies by means too strange and subtle to be humanly explainable, is no more difficult a problem to solve than that of the lightning rapidity with which a knowledge of the transpiring of any new local event darts through the slowest, and, as far as outward signs go, the least ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... borne in mind that the solution of the problem depends on finding evidence of degeneracy or impairment in the offspring of persons who have used alcohol, and that this relation might be explainable in one ...
— Applied Eugenics • Paul Popenoe and Roswell Hill Johnson
... may be accounted for by elisions and contractions not expressed in writing (as is often the case in Latin), and some of the short lines contain diphthongs which may be meant to count as two syllables, but by no means all are explainable by anything but the influence of English, or, as is less probable, a reversion to some such archaic idea of rhythm as that of the Add. ...
— A Handbook of the Cornish Language - chiefly in its latest stages with some account of its history and literature • Henry Jenner
... pupils had produced the fatal effects she did not stop to explain. But she was too old, and had suffered too deeply from the war, in body and mind and estate, ever to reconcile herself to the changed order of things following the return of peace; and, with an unsound yet perfectly explainable logic, she visited some of her displeasure upon those who had profited most, though passively, by ...
— The Wife of his Youth and Other Stories of the Color Line, and - Selected Essays • Charles Waddell Chesnutt
... bewildered but on the whole a relieved and happier party than they had been in the morning. Helen Wingate's long sorrow in the mysterious disappearance of her husband had ennobled and purified her character, and greatly endeared her to her friends; but that which had seemed to them to be explainable only by the fact of his death or his unworthiness she knew was explainable by her own folly ...
— Between Whiles • Helen Hunt Jackson
... and cheerful manner which gave him a rest from his gloomy thoughts, I soon had a chance to see for myself the condition of those pockets. The result was quite satisfactory. In one of them I found a frayed lining, easily explainable on the theory I had advanced. That pocket can be seen ...
— The House of the Whispering Pines • Anna Katharine Green
... his Modern Views of Electricity, is even more explicit in his statement of the case. On page 338 he states: "Gravitation is explainable by differences of pressure in the medium (i. e. the Aether) caused by some action between it and matter not yet understood." Further, Newton himself suggested that the physical cause of ...
— Aether and Gravitation • William George Hooper
... is easily explainable by simple natural laws; it arose from the conductibility of the rock. There are many instances of this singular propagation of sound which are not perceptible in its less mediate positions. In the interior gallery of St. Paul's, and amid the curious ...
— A Journey to the Centre of the Earth • Jules Verne
... least a few definite cases. This impulse will explain to the criminalist a large number of phenomena, especially the accommodation of woman to man's desires; and from this along he may deduce a number of otherwise difficultly explainable ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... there may not be a perfectly explainable connection between the decay or disappearance of the forests and the evaporation, so to speak, of man's rugged sincerity and earnestness. Why should not the simple ingredients that make up the worldly part of ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, August, 1885 • Various
... Tabnit's face, as he looked at her, came once more that indefinable change—only this time nearer and more intimately explainable, as if something ethereal, trained to delicate lines, like smoke, should suddenly shape itself to a menace. St. George saw the woman step close to the dais, he saw Olivia's eyes questioning him, and in the hurried rising ...
— Romance Island • Zona Gale
... she had tried in vain to fathom. Foreign letters came frequently, no two of them from the same person, and the lamp in the attic window had burned steadily every night for five years. Otherwise, everything was explainable ...
— Lavender and Old Lace • Myrtle Reed
... what I believe to have been the tendencies of the Kaiser's and the Chancellor's policies, thus succeeded at last in their fateful and atrocious design—although the manifest interests and, doubtless, the inclination of the masses of your people were for the maintenance of peace—is explainable only by the Germans' amazing lack of understanding for the deeper qualities, sentiments, ideals, modes of thought and characteristics of other nations as distinguished from their ...
— Right Above Race • Otto Hermann Kahn
... language at this period revealed an equally determined intellectualist attitude. Grammar was held to be an exact science, and grammatical variations to be explainable by the ellipse, by abbreviation, and by failure to grasp the typical logical form. In France, with Arnauld (1660), we have the rigorous Cartesian intellectualism; Leibnitz and Locke both, speculated upon this subject, and the former all his life nourished the thought of a universal ...
— Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic • Benedetto Croce
... said he, "broke his neck one day that he'd been boozing. I can't say that it was deserved, but anyhow it was explainable. I had had nothing since my lunch, was perfectly quiet, and without a drop of liquor in my body; and yet I came to grief just because I wanted to turn round to smile at Nana! Don't you think that's too much? If there ...
— L'Assommoir • Emile Zola
... remain here on probation, developing like young animals or children, till, by gradually acquired power, resulting from their wills, they are able to rise again into space, to revisit the earth, and in time to explore the universe? It might easily come about that, by some explainable sympathy, the infant good souls are drawn to this planet, while the condemned pass on to Cassandra, which holds them by some property peculiar to itself, until perhaps they, too, by virtue of their wills, acquire new power, unless involution ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds - A Romance of the Future • John Jacob Astor
... Contradiction in the Emotional Attitude of Women Toward Men—Relative Insensibility to Pain of the Organic Sexual Sphere in Women—The Significance of the Use of the Ampallang and Similar Appliances in Coitus—The Sexual Subjection of Women to Men in Part Explainable as the Necessary Condition for ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 3 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... the sun was so scorching we quailed at the thought of that long ride. There was an ominous oppression in the air, and heat waves made the ground appear to waver before our eyes. Here and there flames flared up without any explainable origin, as though from the heat of the ...
— Land of the Burnt Thigh • Edith Eudora Kohl
... the horn, I should not by any means be driven to accept your spirit-hypothesis. There are men, and very great investigators, who would say that your daughter's trances and all phenomena connected therewith were pathologic, explainable on the grounds of some obscure neural derangement. I do not say this is the case, but I do say that if she persists in these practices she will lose control of her mental faculties. I have had a ...
— The Tyranny of the Dark • Hamlin Garland
... Staff supposedly conducted a comprehensive study of the incidents and concluded that they were all explainable in terms of astronomical phenomena. Since this was UFO history, I made several attempts to get some detailed and official information on this report and the sightings, ...
— The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects • Edward Ruppelt
... letter paper was almost uniform in size—post quarto, and the watermark is invariably very distinct, explainable by the fact that the art of close weaving the wire mould was not then brought to ...
— The Detection of Forgery • Douglas Blackburn
... have already been mentioned in the preceding paragraphs; but besides the 'tone-color' of assonance and consonance and rime proper there are also effects of pitch and of tempo and of repetition, and imitative effects, more or less concrete and explainable. It is true that many trained readers find subtleties of sound and suggestiveness where others find none, and also that many find rich beauties that the poet himself was not aware of and did not intend. This latter case may be accounted for in two ways: sometimes ...
— The Principles of English Versification • Paull Franklin Baum
... the professor, had often hinted at the abilities of Ramsey Burr, given her the idea that his employer was practically a necromancer, yet a magician whose advanced scientific knowledge was correct and explainable in the light ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science April 1930 • Various
... village. How shipped he had not been able to understand from his previous survey of the building. But he thought he could see now. At low tide, or better, at half-tide, access could be got to the floor of the extension and, if this floor held a trap, the mystery would be explainable. So would be the hovering boat—the signal-light and—yes! this sound overheard of steps on a ...
— The Woman in the Alcove • Anna Katharine Green
... noscitur a sociis, mercifully set aside in law, many facts might be elicited that would corroborate a suspicion of participation in his crime; but it would be monstrous that they should suffer from that theory when the same facts are rationally explainable ...
— The World's Best Orations, Vol. 1 (of 10) • Various
... class of working girls with whom I toiled in those early months of my apprenticeship. The flower-manufactory in Broadway was the one glorious exception. I do not attempt to account for this exception to the general rule, unless it be explainable upon the logical theory that the skill necessary for the making of artificial flowers is found only in a vastly superior class of girls. The flower-girls I met at Rosenberg's were, without exception, wholesome-minded and ...
— The Long Day - The Story of a New York Working Girl As Told by Herself • Dorothy Richardson
... well, but the author hasn't told us anything about the construction of these {mekhanai}, these battering engines, before, to prepare us for this. Is that a slip, or how explainable? I think he is betrayed into the description by reason of his interest in such strategic matters. The expression is intelligible enough to any one who knows about engines, just as we might speak of the butt or the stanchion, or whatever ...
— Cyropaedia - The Education Of Cyrus • Xenophon
... dehypnotizing yourself is extremely rare. Should it happen, keep calm, and repeat the suggestions with emphasis. Even in hetero-hypnosis, where the hypnotist hypnotizes a subject, it is extremely rare. There are explainable psychodynamic factors for this. However, they can be met adequately while the ...
— A Practical Guide to Self-Hypnosis • Melvin Powers
... subject; but, strangely enough, no single leader, writer or casual contributor remarked upon the oddness of the composition or the absence of the Infant from the Madonna's arms. In the course of time—that is to say, on the eleventh day—the matter passed from the public mind, a circumstance explainable perhaps by the decent interment of the canvas in the National Gallery, where it affected no one save those mysterious folk who look at pictures for their pleasure and the umbrellaless refugee who is driven to take shelter from the ...
— The Best British Short Stories of 1922 • Various
... marrying her in 1814 had discreetly severed the connection in 1816. Madame Evangelista, to all appearance the best-hearted woman in the world, had, in the depths of her nature, a fearful quality, explainable only by Catherine de Medici's device: "Odiate e aspettate"—"Hate and wait." Accustomed to rule, having always been obeyed, she was like other royalties, amiable, gentle, easy and pleasant in ordinary life, but terrible, implacable, if the pride of the woman, the Spaniard, and the Casa-Reale ...
— The Marriage Contract • Honore de Balzac |
