Reason Quotes - Page 2

There is a reason for every blessing that God gives a man.

Reason, ruling alone, is a force confining; and passion, unattended, is a flame that burns to its own destruction.

The objection to propaganda is not only its appeal to unreason, but still more the unfair advantage which it gives to the rich and powerful.

To think or not to think? That is the new question.

When magic through nerves and reason passes, Imagination, force, and passion will thunder. The portrait of the world is changed.

Faith consists in believing what reason cannot.

Atheism may be defined as the mental attitude which unreservedly accepts the supremacy of reason and aims at establishing a lifestyle and ethical outlook verifiable by experience and the scientific method, independent of all arbitrary assumptions of authority and creeds.

You will find that reason, which always ought to direct mankind, seldom does; but that passions and weaknesses commonly usurp its seat, and rule in its stead.

I believe that an orderly universe, one indifferent to human preoccupations, in which everything has an expla nation even if we still have a long way to go before we find it, is a more beautiful, more wonderful place than a universe tricked out with capricious, ad hoc magic.

If you can't win by reason, go for volume.

You know enough of me to believe me when I say I am not going anywhere. Not without you. You stay, I stay. You’re not a fling, Amelia. For me, you are the reason to stop running.

When everything has gone down, God wants youto look up

... and yet, to say the truth, reason and love keep little company together now-a-days...

Reading doesn't mean accepting everything you read, it means reasoning everything you read.

If I had a choice, if I had understood earlier that the reason my days were all the same was because I wanted them like that, perhaps...

The reason why most of your goals are probably not achieved is because you do not break down your goals into smaller units of work.

You can have all the right reasons in the world. They don’t mean shit, my friend, if what you do causes harm.

When reason has followed its road to the end, the point of crisis is reached and man is brought to the great question mark over his own existence.

Those who invalidate reason, ought seriously to consider, 'whether they argue against reason, with or without reason; if with reason, then they establish the principle, that they are laboring to dethrone;' but if they argue without reason, (which, in order to be consistent with themselves, they must do,) they are out of the reach of rational conviction, nor do they deserve a rational argument.

The phenomena of nature, especially those that fall under the inspection of the astronomer, are to be viewed, not only with the usual attention to facts as they occur, but with the eye of reason and experience.

Reason like a sphere? What type of reasoning does a wooden sphere do?""The circular type, I should think. And, by coincidence, it is my favorite type as well. Perhaps that's why I'm so good at the game.

The difference between impossible and possible is a willing heart.

Fantasy, an unflagging optimism is necessary for a writer at all stages of this rough game. A kind of madness is therefore necessary, when there is every logical reason for a state of depression and discouragement. Perhaps the fact that I can react with utter gloom to this is what keeps me from being psychotic and keeps me merely neurotic. I am doing quite a good day's work today. But I am also aware of the madness that actually sustains me, and I am not made more comfortable or happy by it.

... reason andlove keep little company together now-a-days...

Doubt is the archenemy of love. He is the scoundrel who accused her to reason

For a Westerner, it is usually sufficient for a proposition to be logically sound. For a Chinese it is not sufficient that a proposition be logically correct, but it must be at the same time in accord with human nature.

Sometimes I come up here at night, even when I'm not fixing the clocks, just to look at the city. I like to imagine that the world is one big machine. You know, machines never have any extra parts. They have the exact number and type of parts they need. So I figure if the entire world is one big machine, I have to be here for some reason. And that means you have to be here for some reason, too.

A singer can shatter glass with the proper high note," he said, "but the simplest way to break glass is simply to drop it on the floor.

Conversion and zealotry, just like revelation and apostasy, are flip sides of the same coin, the currency of a political culture having more in common with religion than rational discourse.

With Truth, Reason, and Morality off the board, we then capture their last Rook —that prissy little virtue, Temperance— for she depends on those other three for her beauty and was thus left wholly undefended.

All love is blind to reason, and maybe that's why some people are so strong.

Not to grow up properly is to retain our 'caterpillar' quality from childhood (where it is a virtue) into adulthood (where it becomes a vice). In childhood our credulity serves us well. It helps us to pack, with extraordinary rapidity, our skulls full of the wisdom of our parents and our ancestors. But if we don't grow out of it in the fullness of time, our caterpillar nature makes us a sitting target for astrologers, mediums, gurus, evangelists and quacks. The genius of the human child, mental caterpillar extraordinary, is for soaking up information and ideas, not for criticizing them. If critical faculties later grow it will be in spite of, not because of, the inclinations of childhood. The blotting paper of the child's brain is the unpromising seedbed, the base upon which later the sceptical attitude, like a struggling mustard plant, may possibly grow. We need to replace the automatic credulity of childhood with the constructive scepticism of adult science.

Just 'cause something isn't true is no reason to not believe in it...

If where we are now and whatever we are going through does not motivate us to leave this world better than the way we met it, we are in this world for wrong reasons.

Je me rends parfaitement compte du desagreable effet que produit sur la majorite de l'humanité, tout ce qui se rapporte, même au plus faible dègré, á des calculs ou raisonnements mathematiques.I am well aware of the disagreeable effect produced on the majority of humanity, by whatever relates, even at the slightest degree to calculations or mathematical reasonings.

To the extent to which a man is rational, life is the premise directing his actions. To the extent to which he is irrational, the premise directing his actions is death.

Rousseau identified reason as the disease for which it pretended to be the cure.

Misuse of reason might yet return the world to pre-technological night; plenty of religious zealots hunger for just such a result, and are happy to use the latest technology to effect it.

Instinct ensures animals to have society. Reason ensures society to have animals

The knowledge of Christ which is produced by man's own cleverness and wisdom is not a rock that can stand firm.

We can all be clockmakers, or astronomers. But if we all wanted to be Pushkin. . .if the question is, how do you make a poem by Pushkin?- or, what exactly makes one poem or painting or piece of music greater than another?- or, what is beauty?, or liberty?, or virtue?- if the question is, how should we live?. . . then, reason gives no answer or different answers. So something went wrong. The divine spark in man is not reason after all, but something else, some kind of intuition or vision, perhaps like the moment of inspiration experienced by the artist . . .

Reason is an outcome of frailty and resentment. When Will fails to cope with the labour of life, or the life of labour, its fragile remnants are set to construct a slighter world of justifications.

...faith must recognize the autonomy of reason and its ability to produce a rational, secular ethics. By the same criterion, reason must accept that it is legitimate for the heart, consciousness and faith to believe in an order and ends thar exist prior to its observation, discoveries and hypotheses. Once the distinction between the realms of faith and reason, and religion and science, has been accepted, it is therefore futile to debate, and still less to dispute, the hierarchy of first truths or the nature of the authority granted to their methods and their references.

Rationality belongs to the cool observer, but because of the stupidity of the average man, he follows not reason, but faith, and the naive faith requires necessary illusion and emotionally potent oversimplifications which are provided by the myth-maker to keep ordinary person on course.

Emotion as well as reason belongs to the very stuff of history.

Never do something for just one reason.

Politically, the goal of today’s dominant trendis statism. Philosophically, the goal is theobliteration of reason;psychologically, it is theerosion of ambition.

We must remember that there is a great difference between a myth and a miracle. A myth is the idealization of a fact. A miracle is the counterfeit of a fact. There is the same difference between a myth and a miracle that there is between fiction and falsehood -- between poetry and perjury. Miracles belong to the far past and the far future. The little line of sand, called the present, between the seas, belongs to common sense to the natural.

To kill an error is as good a service as, and sometimes even better than, the establishing of a new truth or fact.

The feast of reason and the flow of soul.

Ideals make reason inaccessible.

I believe that all of us have a little bit of "crazy" in us, even if just a pinch. It could manifest out of extreme enthusiasm, foolish behavior or downright insanity. Aside from its legal concept, insanity or "crazy" is a personality trait, a neurotic emotional state that can surprisingly be beneficial to us in many ways--especially when it comes to creativity, increasing consciousness, as well as problem-solving. However, when your crazy outweighs your rationale, it is definitely time to seek professional help.

Wisdom or accident, at length, recall us from our error, and offers to us some object capable of producing a pleasing, yet lasting effect, which effect, therefore, we call happiness. Happiness has this essential difference from what is commonly called pleasure, that virtue forms its basis, and virtue being the offspring of reason, may be expected to produce uniformity of effect.

There are three sources of belief: reason, custom, inspiration.

The top 10% of the people who are most creative, constructive and thoughtful, do not have much to do with churches. To them the canons of reason come first, making faith secondary and questionable.

The voices of cold reason were talking, as usual, to deaf ears.

... for miracles to happen, God, need our cooperation. As Pastor Charles once told me, God can throw us a rope to save us, but we have to hold to it.

If I go to heaven I want to take my reason with me.

The power of reason is thought small in these days, but I remain an unrepentant rationalist. Reason may be a small force, but it is constant, and works always in one direction, while the forces of unreason destroy one another in futile strife. Therefore every orgy of unreason in the end strengthens the friends of reason, and shows afresh that they are the only true friends of humanity.

Perhaps not everything happens for a reason. That is, until you make it so; because for everything there is a season, which can, in fact, become beautiful.