#explanation

Right, you see that girl over there, the one in that group that keeps looking right at you?'...'Right, let's say I'm convinced she's wearing black knickers - she looks like a black knickers kind of gal to me - and I'm so sure that's what she's wearing, so positive of that sartorial fact, I want to bet a million dollars on it. The trouble is, if I'm wrong, I'm wiped out. So I also bet she's wearing knickers that aren't black, but are any one of a whole basket of colours - let's say I put nine hundred and fifty thousand dollars on that possibility: that's the rest of the market; that's the hedge. This is a crude example, okay, in every sense, but hear me out. Now if I'm right, I make fifty K, but even if I'm wrong I'm going to lose fifty K, because I'm hedged. And because ninety-five per cent of my million dollars is not in use - I'm never going to be called on to show it: the only risk is in the spread - I can make similar bets with other people. Or I can bet it on something else entirely. And the beauty of it is I don't have to be right all the time - if I can just get the colour of her underwear right fifty-five per cent of the time I'm going to wind up very rich... ↗

— Robert Harris

#finance #beauty

In ancient times people weren't just male or female, but one of three types: male/male, male/female, or female/female. In other words, each person was made out of the components of two people. Everyone was happy with this arrangement and never really gave it much thought. But then God took a knife and cut everybody in half, right down the middle. So after that the world was divided just into male and female, the upshot being that people spend their time running around trying to locate their missing other half. ↗

— Haruki Murakami

#life #love #religion #theory #life

Hopefully my music is medicine, some type of antidote for something or some kind of explanation or just to feel good. ↗

— Erykah Badu

#explanation #feel #feel good #good #hopefully

There is no waste of time in life like that of making explanations. ↗

— Benjamin Disraeli

#life #like #making #time #waste

Children need explanations and they deserve explanations. ↗

— Todd Bridges

#deserve #explanations #need

In all the antique religions, mythology takes the place of dogma; that is, the sacred lore of priests and people... and these stories afford the only explanation that is offered of the precepts of religion and the prescribed rules of ritual. ↗

— William Robertson Smith

#antique #dogma #explanation #lore #mythology

If some really acute observer made as much of egotism as Freud has made of sex, people would forget a good deal about sex and find the explanation for everything in egotism. ↗

— Wallace Stevens

#acute #deal #egotism #everything #explanation

People struggling with life in a fallen world often want explanations when what they really need is imagination. ↗

— Paul David Tripp

#fallen #imaginations #people #struggling #change

It was so easy to be wise in the explanation of an experience one has not personally witnessed. ("The Wendigo") ↗

— Algernon Blackwood

#explanation #explanations #experience

We have, as human beings, a storytelling problem. We're a bit too quick to come up with explanations for things we don't really have an explanation for. ↗

— Malcolm Gladwell

#problems