Explicate Quotes

“It's more than words & somehow more than actions could ever show. It's hard to explicate this feeling I have for you, but it's one I could live out the rest of my days trying to make you understand.”

— David Reeves

“Maybe it was teleportation. The Spirit took you there."
"That might explain my visit to the soccer game, but it doesn't elucidate why I was in two different editions of the bakery."
"Elucidate?"
"Clarify, expound, explicate ... "
"You should have stopped at expound."
"Brandon! I need assistance here.”

— James L. Rubart

“There is nothing in the Gospels to suggest that God causes the mob to come together against Jesus. Violent contagion is enough. Those responsible for the Passion are the human participants them-selves, incapable of resisting the violent contagion that affects them all when a mimetic snowballing1 comes within their range, or rather when they come within the range of this snowballing and are swept along by it. We don't have to invoke the supernatural to explicate this. The war of all against all that transforms communities into a war of all against one that gathers and unifies them is not limited solely to the case of Jesus.”

— René Girard

“Religion arose as an effort to explicate the inexplicable, control the uncontrollable, make bearable the unbearable. Belief in a higher power became the most powerful innovation in late human evolution. Tribes with religion had an advantage over those without. They had direction and purpose, motivation and a mission. The survival value of religion was so spectacular that the thirst for belief became embedded in the human genome.”

— Douglas Preston

“NOTICE
Persons attempting to find a "text" in this book will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a "subtext" in this book will be banished; persons attempting to explain, interpret, explicate, analyze, deconstruct, or otherwise "understand" it will be exiled to a desert island in the company only of other explainers.
BY ORDER OF THE AUTHOR”

— Wendell Berry

“Paradoxically, the simpler poetry is, the more difficult it becomes for a critic to discuss intelligently. Trained to explicate, the critic often loses the ability to evaluate literature outside the critical act. A work is good only in proportion to the richness and complexity of interpretations it provokes.”

— Dana Gioia

“Your death defines my life. I want to find the love we never had and explicate it in your name.
I want to take your secrets public. I want to burn down the distance between us.
I want to give you breath.”

— James Ellroy

“To explicate the uses of the Brain seems as difficult a task as to paint the Soul, of which it is commonly said, that it understands all things but itself.”

— Thomas Willis

“When it happeneth that a man signifieth unto us two contradictory opinions whereof the one is clearly and directly signified, andthe other either drawn from that by consequence, or not known to be contradictory to it; then (when he is not present to explicate himself better) we are to take the former of his opinions; for that is clearly signified to be his, and directly, whereas the other might proceed from error in the deduction, or ignorance of the repugnancy.”

— Thomas Hobbes

“Great critics do not explicate a text; they describe it and then report on what they have described, if the description itself is not the criticism.”

— Gore Vidal

“Any momentary triumph you think you have gained through argument is really a Pyrrhic victory. The resentment and ill will you stir up is stronger and lasts longer than any momentary change of opinion. It is much more powerful to get others to agree with you through your actions, without saying a word. Demonstrate, do not explicate.”

— Robert Greene

“Prana is implicate to matter but explicate to mind; mind is implicate to prana but explicate to soul; soul is implicate to mind but explicate to spirit; and the spirit is the source and suchness of the entire sequence.”

— Ken Wilber