Reason Quotes - Page 3

I think the prime reason for existence, for living in this world, is discovery.

Fantasy, abandoned by reason, produces impossible monsters; united with it, she is the mother of the arts and the origin of marvels.

There are three people one can never reason with: a drunk, a crazy person, and a fool.

You have three types of friends in life: Friends for a reason, friends for a season, and friends for a lifetime.

Most reject the more repugnant or indefensible dogmas while still holding onto some core belief. Many believers will proudly describe themselves as "reasonable" or "rational" based on how little of their religion they still embrace versus how much they now reject. I think it's funny when people realize that the less you believe the more reasonable you are, but they stop before they reach the logical conclusion.

As many critics of religion have pointed out, the notion of a creator poses an immediate problem of an infinite regress. If God created the universe, what created God? To say that God, by definition, is uncreated simply begs the question. Any being capable of creating a complex world promises to be very complex himself. As the biologist Richard Dawkins has observed repeatedly, the only natural process we know of that could produce a being capable of designing things is evolution.

That is the trouble...You are a crowd of bits of boys all in the thing for what you will get. Demands, you call them. Well, I am against demands of any kind. You cannot reason with demand, and where there is no reason, there is no sense. As for your support, whatever you call it, some long word, what is the use of it?

Wherever and whenever a woman is harassed, abused and exploited there could be found a religion or some kind of irrational belief and suppression of reason among the minds of men or women who were responsible for the exploitation.

To think is an act of choice. The key to what you so recklessly call ‘human nature,’ the open secret you live with, yet dread to name, is the fact that man is a being of volitional consciousness. Reason does not work automatically; thinking is not a mechanical process; the connections of logic are not made by instinct.

Mathematics is not a deductive science - that's a cliche. When you try to prove a theorem, you don't just list the hypotheses, and then start to reason. What you do is trial and error, experimentation, guesswork.

The quality of life that you have is determined solely by the effort you put into giving your life value, purpose and a reason.

Emotion and instinct were the basis of all our decisions, our actions, everything we valued, the way we saw the world. Reason and rationality were a thin coat of paint on a ragged surface.

When the human mind exists in the light of reason and no more than reason we may say with absolute certainty that Man and all that made him will be in that instant gone.

Yeah. I know why she cuts. I just don’t know the seed-reason. It’s deep inside her, and it’ll take time and patience to get it out of her.

If there's something you really want to believe, that's what you should question the most.

[W]hen one has a religious experience, what is 'true' is only that one has had that experience, not that its contents convey anything about reality. To determine that, one needs a way to verify the contents of a revelation, and that means science.

Cognitive science has something of enormous importance to contribute to human freedom: the ability to learn what our unconscious conceptual systems are like and how our cognitive unconscious functions. If we do not realize that most of our thought is unconscious and that we think metaphorically, we will indeed be slaves to the cognitive unconscious. Paradoxically, the assumption that we have a radically autonomous rationality as traditionally conceived actually limits our rational autonomy. It condemns us to cognitive slavery - to an unaware and uncritical dependence on our unconscious metaphors. To maximize what conceptual freedom we can have, we must be able to see through and move beyond philosophies that deny the existence of an embodied cognitive unconscious that governs most of our mental lives.

Eating, drinking, dying - three primary manifestations of the universal and impersonal life. Animals live that impersonal and universal life without knowing its nature. Ordinary people know its nature but don't live it and, if they think seriously about it, refuse to accept it. An enlightened person knows it, lives it, and accepts it completely. He eats, he drinks, and in due course he dies - but he eats with a difference, drinks with a difference, dies with a difference.

...[R]eason of itself, independent on all experience, ordains what ought to take place, that accordingly actions of which perhaps the world has hitherto never given an example, the feasibility even if which might be very much doubted by one who founds everything on experience, are nevertheless inflexibly commanded by reason; that, for example, even though there might never yet have been a sincere friend, yet not a whit the less is pure sincerity in friendship required of every man...

It might have been the real reason I went out there at all, to hear all the nice things guys had to say when they got you alone, when they earned their shot in a booth with you.

Any man who neglects his conscience is a dangerous animal.

The fact that no limits exist to the destructiveness of this weapon [the 'Super', i.e. the hydrogen bomb] makes its very existence and the knowledge of its construction a danger to humanity as a whole. It is necessarily an evil thing considered in any light. For these reasons, we believe it important for the President of the United States to tell the American public and the world what we think is wrong on fundamental ethical principles to initiate the development of such a weapon.

...atheism leaves no room for excuses...

Error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it.

Thinking only begins at the point where we have come to know that Reason, glorified for centuries, is the most obstinate adversary of thinking.

One main reason why most dreamers cannot take their dreams off the ground is that they keep their ideas to themselves alone. The fact that you think you can make it alone is the first step to your failure!

...her very kindness was cruel because it was founded not on love but on reason...

People who praise a leader even when he is doing the wrong things are the main reasons why his fall is near.

There is a world of difference between being clever and being right.

You say that it is time to shake off the Mist, but Mankind walks in a Mist; that Reason which you cry up as the Glory of this Age is a Proteus and Cameleon that changes its Shape almost in every Man: there is no Folly that may not have a thousand Reasons produc'd to advance it into the Class of Wisdom. Reason itself is a Mist.

It opens the mind toward an understanding of humannature and destiny. It increases wisdom. It is the veryessence of that much misinterpreted concept, a liberaleducation. It is the foremost approach to humanism,the lore of the specifically human concerns that distinguishman from other living beings. . . . Personal cultureis more than mere familiarity with the presentstate of science, technology, and civic affairs. It ismore than acquaintance with books and paintings andthe experience of travel and of visits to museums. It isthe assimilation of the ideas that roused mankind fromthe inert routine of a merely animal existence to a lifeof reasoning and speculating. It is the individual’seffort to humanize himself by partaking in the traditionof all the best that earlier generations havebequeathed.

I’ve often wondered how the term “'New Atheism”' gained such currency. It is a misnomer. There is nothing new about nonbelief. All of us, without exception, are born knowing nothing of God or gods, and acquire notions of religion solely through interaction with others – or, most often, indoctrination by others, an indoctrination usually commencing well before we can reason. Our primal state is, thus, one of nonbelief. The New Atheists (most prominently Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and the late Christopher Hitchens) have, in essence, done nothing more than try to bring us back to our senses, to return us to a pure and innate mental clarity.

Back therefore we find ourselves returning. Back to the wisdom of the plough; back to the wisdom of those who follow the sea. It is all a matter of the wheel coming full-circle. For the sophisticated system of mental reactions to which we finally give our adherence is only the intellectualised reproduction of what more happily constituted natures, without knowing what they possess, possess. Thus between true philosophers and the true simple people there is a magnetic understanding; whereas, the clever ones whose bastard culture only divorces them from the wisdom of the earth remain pilloried and paralysed on the prongs of their own conceit".

I survive by finding the sweet spot between reason and unreason, between the rational and irrational.

You may only get this one life – but lived free of submissive reverence – that is still a thing of rampant beauty.

I believe despite my doubts, belief gives me power reason takes away

God can make a cow out of a tree, but has He ever done so? Therefore show some reason why a thing is so, or cease to hold that it is so.

As to women, I agree that each has three or four souls, but none of them a reasoning one.

After you have made the discovery of your own significance, you would then be able to find the reason to stay alive.

There are other ways of knowing than just through reason.

Nihil est sine ratione.[There is nothing without a reason.]

Every worldview has to bring together reason and faith.

For there is but one essential justice which cements society, and one law which establishes this justice. This law is right reason, which is the true rule of all commandments and prohibitions. Whoever neglects this law, whether written or unwritten, is necessarily unjust and wicked.

Without the voice of reason, every faith is its own curse.")

The mechanic, when a wheel refuses to turn, never thinks of dropping on his knees and asking the assistance of some divine power. He knows there is a reason. He knows that something is too large or too small; that there is something wrong with his machine; and he goes to work and he makes it larger or smaller, here or there, until the wheel will turn.

Religion should be subject to commonsense appraisal and rational review, as openly discussible as, say, politics, art and the weather. The First Amendment, we should recall, forbids Congress both from establishing laws designating a state religion and from abridging freedom of speech. There is no reason why we should shy away from speaking freely about religion, no reason why it should be thought impolite to debate it, especially when, as so often happens, religious folk bring it up on their own and try to impose it on others.

Some men have thousands of reasons why they cannot do something, when all they need is one reason why they can.

Being Happy is important ,not the reason.

I am more touched, still, that you are trying to understand - through rational thought - that which cannot be understood at all. The divine, as Boehme said, is unground, unfathomable, something outside the world as we experience it. But this is a difference of our minds, dearest one. I wish to arrive on wings, while you advance steadily on foot, magnifying glass in hand. I am a smattering wanderer, seeking God within the outer contours, searching for a new way of knowing. You stand upon the ground, and consider the evidence inch by inch. Your way is more rational and more methodical, but I cannot change my way.

I admit that reason is a small and feeble flame, a flickering torch by stumblers carried in the star-less night, -- blown and flared by passion's storm, -- and yet, it is the only light. Extinguish that, and nought remains.

There is no season and no reason for love. Love is not seasonal its perennial.

Talk sense to a fool and he calls you foolish.

It's said that people who give excuses for the reason not do something always formulate those excuses, waiting for the reason to surface to justify their excuses!

There is nothing 'honorable' or 'reasonable' in giving a pass to those who want to discriminate.

I know how men in exile feed on dreams of hope.

I am older than you. Believe me, there is no other way to live on earth. Men are not open to truth or reason. They cannot be reached by a rational argument. The mind is powerless against them. Yet we have to deal with them. If we want to accomplish anything, we have to deceive them into letting us accomplish it. Or force them. They understand nothing else. We cannot expect their support for any endeavor of the intellect, for any goal of the spirit. They are nothing but vicious animals. They are greedy, self-indulgent, predatory dollar-chasers

Why do people kill themselves?I think they do it when they can no longer find a reason to keep going. When nothing in heir lives is good enough to balance out the bad. And they do it when they no longer have the courage to carry on past some recent painful experience. They commit what is, in the end, a desperate, final call for help, that is hopefully heard in time by someone else. And what if it's not heard in time? I ask although I know the answer.Then they die.

The relationship between truth and reason:"Truth cannot be reached by reason alone!

We have grown to trust blindly in our senses of balance and reason, and I can see where the mind might fight wildly to preserve its own familiar stable patterns against all evidence that it was leaning sideways.

Where the senses fail us, reason must step in.