Source: Everybody’s Autobiography (1937), Ch. 4
Context: Explanations are clear but since no one to whom a thing is explained can connect the explanations with what is really clear, therefore clear explanations are not clear. Now this is a simple thing that anybody who has ever argued or quarreled knows perfectly well is a simple thing, only when they read it they do not understand it because they do not see that understanding and believing are not the same thing.
“It is between fifty and sixty years since I read it, and I then considered it merely the ravings of a maniac, no more worthy nor capable of explanation than the incoherences of our own nightly dreams. … what has no meaning admits no explanation.”
Letter to General Alexander Smyth, on the book of Revelation (or The Apocalypse of St. John the Divine) (17 January 1825) http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2005/02/04/opinion/main671823.shtml
1820s
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Thomas Jefferson 456
3rd President of the United States of America 1743–1826Related quotes
Source: The Province of Jurisprudence Determined (1832), p. 6
Preface To the 1983 Edition, p. xxvii
Adventures of a Mathematician - Third Edition (1991)
Source: Even a stone can be a teacher (1985), p. 20
1946 - 1963, interview with John Richardson' (1957)
Letter to John Adams (11 January 1817)
1810s