c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
...I am, in short, a rationalist and believe only that which reason tells me is so. Mind you, this isn’t easy. We are so surrounded by tales of the supernatural, by the thunders of the powers to be who attempt with all their might to convince us of the existence of the supernatural, that the strongest among us may feel himself swaying.Something like that happened to me recently. In January 1990, I was lying in a hospital bed one afternoon and my dear wife, Janet, was not with me, but had gone home for a few hours to take care of some necessary chores. I was sleeping, and a finger jabbed at me. I woke, of course, and looked blearily to see who had awakened me and for what purpose.My room, however, had a lock, and the lock was firmly closed and there was a chain across the door too. Sunlight filled the room and it was clearly empty. So were the closet and the bathroom. Rationalist though I am, there was no way in which I could refrain from thinking that some supernatural influence had interfered to tell me that something had happened to Janet (naturally, my ultimate fear). I hesitated for a moment, trying to fight it off, and for anyone but Janet I would have. So I phoned her at home. She answered immediately and said she was perfectly well.Relieved, I hung up the phone and settled down to consider the problem of who or what had poked me. Was it simply a dream, a sensory hallucination? Perhaps, but it had seemed absolutely real. I considered.When I sleep alone, I often wrap myself up in my own arms. I also know that when I am sleeping lightly, my muscles twitch. I assumed my sleeping position and imagined my muscles twitching. It was clear that my own finger had poked into my shoulder and that was it.Now suppose that at the precise moment I had poked myself, Janet, through some utterly meaningless coincidence, had tripped and skinned her knee. And suppose I had called and she had groaned and said, "I just hurt myself".Would I have been able to resist the thought of supernatural interference? I hope so. However, I can't be sure. It's the world we live in. It would corrupt the strongest, and I don't imagine I'm in the strongest.
— Isaac Asimov, I. Asimov
People of great faith are almost always lacking in reason, while people possessed of great reason often suffer from a pitiful lack of faith. So it always happens that people of great faith can move the world but cannot steer it, while people possessed of great reason excel at steering the world but are hopeless at moving it
— Agona Apell, The Success Genome Unravelled: Turning Men from Rot to Rock
in the modern era, many thinkers began to mistrust faith, viewing it as 'blind' and an enemy of reason. Their watchword was 'reason alone.' One of the difficulties of this stance is that reason cannot test its own reliability, any more than soapstone can test its own hardness. Any argument, accomplished by reasoning, that what reasoning accomplishes can be trusted, would be circular, because it would take for granted the very thing that it was trying to prove.Suppose I am at the window of a burning building. Although I can hear the firemen calling to me from far below, I cannot see them because of all the smoke. They are telling me to jump. Though I may have every reason to believe that they will catch me in their net, I may not trust them enough to overcome my fear, and so, hesitating, I burn to death. Obviously, my reasons are not the same as trust; faith surpasses reason. Even so they are reasons for trust; though faith surpasses reason, it is not irrational.
— J. Budziszewski
I think the prime reason for existence, for living in this world, is discovery.
— James Dean
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.
— Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House
Reason is not always reasonable
— Bangambiki Habyarimana, The Great Pearl of Wisdom
Doubt is the archenemy of love. He is the scoundrel who accused her to reason
— Bangambiki Habyarimana, The Great Pearl of Wisdom
What is the purpose of reason, Richard Parker? Is it no more than to shine at practicalities - the getting of food, clothing and shelter? Why can't reason give greater answers? Why can we throw a question further than we can pull in an answer? Why such a vast net of there's so little fish to catch?
— Yann Martel, Life of Pi
God through Prophet Hosea is explaining to us reasons for destructions, calamities, failures and devastations among the people of God. That reason is not seen in demonic activities nor is it seen in prevailing economic situations of the land
— Sunday Adelaja
Running in the relay of life sometimes makes me notice that faith takes over the baton when reason finished its part.
— Hasse Jerner
[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.
— Jerry A. Coyne
In life don't complain about anything ifyou're the reason for the outcome
— Christian O. Ortiz, Classified: The Human Women Guide
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.
— Susan May Warren, The Wonder of You
Be in something for a reason for seasons weather.
— Goitsemang Mvula
Neglect is a major reason for some of the most painful experiences we suffer in life.
— Sunday Adelaja
You were placed there by God for a reason, which is to possess the land for the glory of the KING!
— Sunday Adelaja
if every one is left to judge of his own religion, there is no such thing as a religion that is wrong; but if they are to judge of each other’s religion, there is no such thing as a religion that is right; and therefore all the world is right, or all the world is wrong.
— Thomas Paine, Rights of Man
They say that it’s hard for men to agree. You’d be surprised how easy it is—when both parties hold as their moral absolute that neither exists for the sake of the other and that reason is their only means of trade.
— Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged
There are other ways of knowing than just through reason.
— Gerald Morris
But all remains unchanged.
— Franz Kafka
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.
— Brandon Sanderson, Warbreaker
Intuitions are like migratory birds, they come without a map without a reason.
— Amit Ray, Walking the Path of Compassion
Not everyone understands what a completely rational process this is, this maintenance of a motorcycle. They think it's some kind of "knack" or some kind of "affinity for machines" in operation. They are right, but the knack is almost purely a process of reason, and most of the troubles are caused by what old time radio men called a "short between the earphones," failures to use the head properly. A motorcycle functions entirely in accordance with the laws of reason, and a study of the art of motorcycle maintenance is really a miniature study of the art of rationality itself.
— Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values
A faith without some doubts is like a human body without any antibodies in it. People who blithely go through life too busy or indifferent to ask hard questions about why they believe as they do will find themselves defenseless against either the experience of tragedy or the probing questions of a smart skeptic. A person's faith can collapse almost overnight if she has failed over the years to listen patiently to her own doubts, which should only be discarded after long reflection. Believers should acknowledge and wrestle with doubts — not only their own but their friends' and neighbors'. It is no longer sufficient to hold beliefs just because you inherited them. Only if you struggle long and hard with objections to your faith will you be able to provide the grounds for your beliefs to skeptics, including yourself, that are plausible rather than ridiculous or offensive. And, just as important for our current situation, such a process will lead you, even after you come to a position of strong faith, to respect and understand those who doubt.
— Timothy J. Keller
When we find out an Idea, by whose Intervention we discover the Connexion of two others, this is a Revelation from God to us, by the voice of Reason.
— John Locke
The reason for our limitation is only inside us.
— Sunday Adelaja
For my part, I prefer the ontological argument, the cosmological argument and the rest of the old stock-in-trade, to the sentimental illogicality that has sprung from Rousseau.
— Bertrand Russell
Moral philosophers say things like, ‘What is actually wrong with cannibalism?’ There are two ways of responding to that: one is to shrink back in horror and say, ‘Cannibalism! Cannibalism! We can’t talk about cannibalism!’ The other is to say, ‘Well, actually, what is wrong with cannibalism?’ Then you work it out and you tease it out and you decide yes, actually, cannibalism is wrong, but for the following reasons. So I’d like to think that my moral values at least partly come from reasoning. Trying to suppress the gut reaction as much as possible. ["Is Richard Dawkins destroying his reputation?", The Guardian, 9 June 2015]
— Richard Dawkins
But it works that way if it works.
— Jeffery Deaver, Edge
Are you going to give me a reason to stay?
— Elle Cosimano, Nearly Gone
We survive, in the confusionof a life reborn beyond reason.
— Pier Paolo Pasolini, Roman Poems
There is a delicate ridge one must ride between fear and reason on a motorcycle—lean too far in either direction and there will be consequences.
— Lily Brooks-Dalton, Motorcycles I've Loved: A Memoir
In the average, want overcomes reason. In the magnificent, reason is the want.
— Justin K. McFarlane Beau
fear doesn't listen to reason it takes it own counsel
— Richard Paul Evans, The Mistletoe Promise
War has no longer the justification that it makes for the survival of the fittest
—  it involves the survival of the less fit. The idea that the struggle between nations is a part of the evolutionary law of man's advance involves a profound misreading of the biological analogy.The warlike nations do not inherit the earth
The Creator did not speak man into existence as He did all else which He made, but He began with previously made material. So in the restoration process He did not speak the restoration into reality by fiat. Rather He began the process through a series of connected acts and events. And certainly no act of the Eternal Creator would ever be without purpose or reason.
— Dr. J. Otis Yoder, He that Should Come
At this point it may be objected: well, then, if even the crabbed sceptics admit that the statements of religion cannot be confuted by reason, why should not I believe in them, since they have so much on their side:­ tradition, the concurrence of mankind, and all the consolation they yield? Yes, why not? Just as no one can be forced into belief, so no one can be forced into unbelief. But do not deceive yourself into thinking that with such arguments you are following the path of correct reasoning. If ever there was a case of facile argument, this is one. Ignorance is ignorance; no right to believe anything is derived from it.
— Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion
Faith and reason are indeed complementary faculties that we use to think about the truth. When any winged creature (or mechanism) tries to fly on just one wing, it falls to the ground. In a similar way, when we human beings try to wing it with just one faculty, we crash.
— Scott Hahn
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.
— George Lakoff, Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and its Challenge to Western Thought
What I can and cannot imagine is a psychological fact about me. It is not a deep metaphysical fact about the nature of the universe.
— Patricia S. Churchland
In philosophy, metaphorical pluralism is the norm. Our most important abstract philosophical concepts, including time, causation, morality, and the mind, are all conceptualized by multiple metaphors, sometimes as many as two dozen. What each philosophical theory typically does is to choose one of those metaphors as "right," as the true literal meaning of the concept. One reason there is so much argumentation across philosophical theories is that different philosophers have chosen different metaphors as the "right" one, ignoring or taking as misleading all other commonplace metaphorical structurings of the concept. Philosophers have done this because they assume that a concept must have one and only one logic. But the cognitive reality is that our concepts have multiple metaphorical structurings.
— George Lakoff, Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and its Challenge to Western Thought
Keep in mind, we are past the age of enlightenment. This is past reason. We are pretty deep into modern history and the decline of religion. This is when nature itself has been stripped bare of its cozy personality and we all feel homeless in our natures as well."The Limits Of The World
— Diane Williams, Some Sexual Success Stories: Plus Other Stories in Which God Might Choose to Appear
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.
— Ludwig von Mises
In asking philosophical questions, we use a reason shaped by the body, a cognitive unconscious to which we have no direct access, and metaphorical thought of which we are largely unaware. The fact that abstract thought is mostly metaphorical means that answers to philosophical questions have always been, and always will be, mostly metaphorical. In itself, that is neither good nor bad. It is simply a fact about the capacities of the human mind. But it has major consequences for every aspect of philosophy. Metaphorical thought is the principal tool that makes philosophical insight possible and that constrains the forms that philosophy can take.
— George Lakoff
Our reasons are not prophets When oft our fancies are.
— William Shakespeare, The Two Noble Kinsmen
Human life is a series of mistakes justified by reason
—  there is no escape from it since the reason is the first mistake born out of a process subsequently understood as the very life by the very reason!
In the court of reason man is always a claimant and God is always a respondent. The original intention of the reason for creation of God is to make Him as a respondent as and when the need arises. Hence when a man is in trouble his reason tries to save him by acting as an arbitrator
—  the reason sitting as sole judge asks the man for his claims and makes the God to respond.
...[P]hilosophical theories are structured by conceptual metaphors that constrain which inferences can be drawn within that philosophical theory. The (typically unconscious) conceptual metaphors that are constitutive of a philosophical theory have the causal effect of constraining how you can reason within that philosophical framework.
— George Lakoff, Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and its Challenge to Western Thought
The deliberate habituation of patriotism has a bearing upon the problem of peace. Knowledge of other peoples will not bring harmony and mutual goodwill unless it is sympathetic knowledge, and, if it is to be sympathetic, our mental prepossessions must be shaped so as to open our minds to a just appreciation of unwelcome facts and ways at variance with our own.
— Clarence Reidenbach
Every little or big problem has a reason,Every year there is a winter season,Every trouble goes away with time,After winter spring comes with rhyme.
— Debasish Mridha
This is not a new idea; this is the idea of the age of reason. This is the philosophy that guided the men that made the democracy that we live under. The idea that no one really knew how to run a government led to the idea that we should arrange a system by which new ideas could be developed, tried out, and tossed out if necessary, with more new ideas brought in—a trial and error system.
— Richard Feynman, What Do You Care What Other People Think?
Can reason lead us in directions that are good or decent or moral? After all, you pointed out that reason is just a means to an end, and the end depends on the reasoner's passions. Reason can lay out a road map to peace and harmony if the reasoner wants peace and harmony, but it can also lay out a road map to conflict and strife if the reasoner delights in conflict and strife. Can reason force the reasoner to want less cruelty and waste?
— Steven Pinker
Art works to satisfy the instinct and the science works to satisfy the reason.
— Thiruman Archunan
We love and reason because God Loves and reasons and holds our hand while we do it.
— C.S. Lewis, The Business of Heaven: Daily Readings from C. S. Lewis
[T]he vast majority of human beings are not interested in reason or satisfied with what it teaches.
— Aldous Huxley
Instinct ensures animals to have society. Reason ensures society to have animals
— Thiruman Archunan
Reason is overrated. Many pundits have argued that a good heart and steadfast moral clarity are superior to triangulations of overeducated policy wonks, like the best and brightest and that dragged us into the quagmire of Vietnam. And wasn't it reason that gave us the means to despoil the planet and threaten our species with weapons of mass destruction? In this way of thinking, it's character and conscience, not cold-hearted calculation, that will save us. Besides, a human being is not a brain on a stick. My fellow psychologists have shown that we're led by our bodies and our emotions and use our puny powers of reason merely to rationalize our gut feelings after the fact
— Steven Pinker
We always need a sound reason to move on, and we always pretend to have it.
— Junaid Raza
Only human beings have come to a point where they no longer know why they exist.
— Lame Deer
This was the bonus to liberal Christianity: I could use my reason and believe at the same time.
— Nadia Bolz-Weber, Pastrix: The Cranky, Beautiful Faith of a Sinner & Saint
Emotion lay at the very heart of the process of perception, intertwined with intellectual functions, yet adding to perception a quality that reason lacked.
— John Corrigan
Maybe it's not finding a reason, it's trusting that there is one.
— Anonomyous.
Our greater beastliness lies not in a penchant for brute force,but in our greater corruption, nihilism, and decadence; in our servitude to the overwhelming systems we create; in the sociopathic rationalism we adopt to master natural forces and to compete with the machines we build;and in the scientistic idolatry that co-opts the religious impulse. Of course the ancients resorted more to brute force: they lacked the infrastructure to punish their enemies and victims in a safer, more sophisticated fashion, with advanced legal regimes and mass-produced, maximum security prisons; with engineered propaganda for social conditioning; and with economic, cyber, and drone warfare. We channel our aggression with more sophisticated instruments, but the use of those instruments doesn’t ennoble us.
— Benjamin Cain, Rants Within The Undead God
When we need reasons to do something, we pretend to have it.
— Junaid Raza
Ours was the age of enlightenment, he said, when the battle cry was, ‘We must know, we shall know!’, and reason would depose superstition and we be liberated by it.
— Claire Robertson, The Spiral House
The mark of the truly civilized is their (truly baffling to the likes of you and me) patience with what truly baffles.
— Samuel R. Delany, Tales of Nevèrÿon
Never! while heaven spares my reason,’ replied I, snatching away the hand he had presumed to seize and press between his own.
— Anne Brontë, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall
Do you know, I sometimes, catch myself wishing that I too were blind to the facts of life and only knew its fancies and illusions. They're wrong, all wrong, of course, and contrary to reason; but in the face of them my reason tells me, wrong and most wrong, that to dream and live illusions gives greater delight. And after all, delight is the wage for living. Without delight living is a worthless act. To labor at living and be unpaid is worse than to be dead. He who delights the most lives the most, and your dreams and unrealities are less disturbing to you and more gratifying than are my facts to me. I often doubt, I often doubt, the worthwhileness of reason. Dreams must be more substantial and satisfying. Emotional delight is more filling and lasting than intellectual delight by having the blues. Emotional delight is followed by no more than jaded senses which speedily recuperate. I envy you, I envy you
— Jack London
In asking for a relic of Descartes, the chevalier de Terlon was standing at the crossroads of the ancient and modern. He was applying to a modern thinker - the inventor of analytic geometry, no less - a primitive tradition that extends back not only to the institutionalization of Christianity in the fourth century, when Christians first broke into the tombs of saints to gather relics, but farther still, beyond the horizon of recorded history. The request is all the stranger for the fact that the man whose remains were treated in this quasisaintlike way would go down in history as the progenitor of materialism, rationalism, and a whole tradition that looked on such veneration as nonsense.
— Russell Shorto, Descartes' Bones: A Skeletal History of the Conflict Between Faith and Reason
It is no consolation to reflect that every cause itself is an effect, making the search for causes and reasons a fool’s errand.
— Zia Haider Rahman
Forget all the reasons why it wont work and believe the one reason why it will
— Ain Eineziz
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.
— Ann Radcliffe, A Sicilian Romance
People falling in love for one reason may fall out of love due to another reason. However, if faith or trust is the basis of love, it does not break easily. Often people use all their reasoning to understand each other and even live together for years to satisfy themselves that they are in love. However, marriages based on such logical love, the love based on reason, do not last long. Quite to the contrary, marriages where the partners do not even know each other, survive for life—being based on mutual trust and faith.
— Awdhesh Singh, Good and Evil: Two Sides of the Same Coin
Modernity gone wrong has isolated humanity and made human reason autonomous of (and dismissive toward) revelation.
— John Mark Reynolds, The Great Books Reader: Excerpts and Essays on the Most Influential Books in Western Civilization
Limitations can be reasonably expanded. We are constantly challenging our limitations. But a hobbled mind is not going anywhere.
— Bryant McGill, Simple Reminders: Inspiration for Living Your Best Life
Reasoning can take you wherever you want to go.
— Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion
Women are so caring, kindhearted and soft creatures; I wonder how one could harm or hurt them for any reason.
— M.F. Moonzajer, LOVE, HATRED AND MADNESS
Metaphysics... is nothing but the inventory of all we possess through pure reason, ordered systematically. Nothing here can escape us, because what reason brings forth entirely out of itself cannot be hidden, but is brought to light by reason itself as soon as reason's common principle has been discovered. The perfect unity of this kind of cognition, and the fact that it arises solely out of pure concepts without any influence that would extend or increase it from experience or even particular intuition, which would lead to a determinate experience, make this unconditioned completeness not only feasible but also necessary. Tecum habita, et noris quam sit tibi curta supellex. Dwell in your own house, and you will know how simple your possessions are. - Persius
— Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason
Your ultimate reason for staying in this crooked world is not to imitate its devastating physique, but trying do something about its ugly appearance.
— Michael Bassey Johnson
I took the plug out of the chemical bath of lust that my wits were soaking in and waited for it to empty. I smoked a cigarette while I contemplated the return of reason.
— John Dolan, Everyone Burns
It is necessary, first of all, to find a correct logical starting point, one which can lead us to a natural and sound interpretation of the empirical facts.
— Ernst Cassirer, An Essay on Man: An Introduction to a Philosophy of Human Culture
If women patronize the wheel the number of buyers will be twice as large. If women ride they must, when riding, dress more rationally than they have been wont to do. If they do this many prejudices as to what they may be allowed to wear will melt away. Reason will gain upon precedent and ere long the comfortable, sensible, and artistic wardrobe of the rider will make the conventional style of woman's dress absurd to the eye and unenduring to the understanding. A reform often advances most rapidly by indirection. An ounce of practice is worth a ton of theory; and the graceful and becoming costume of woman on the bicycle will convince the world that has brushed aside the theories, no matter how well constructed, and the arguments, no matter how logical, of dress-reformers.
— Frances E. Willard, How I Learned to Ride the Bicycle: Reflections of an Influential 19th Century Woman
Jesus' willingness to accommodate Thomas' unbelief is a reminder that God can handle our doubt. And that the rationalist doesn't need to see, touch, or run a lab test in order to believe in the resurrected Christ. Jesus told him, “You believe because you have seen me. Blessed are those who believe without seeing me” (Jn 20:29) This is not a plea to accept what goes against reason, but it is an invitation to discover a faith that goes beyond it. The example of Thomas is for the stubborn skeptic in us all.
— David D. Flowers
In the presence of death reason and philosophy are silent
— Ambrose Bierce
A body of ten ounces raised in any scale may serve as a proof, that the counterbalancing weight exceeds ten ounces; but can never afford a reason that it exceeds a hundred.
— David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding
While reason steers a man, it is faith alone that moves him
— Agona Apell, The Success Genome Unravelled: Turning Men from Rot to Rock
...Reason should take on anew the most difficult of all its tasks, namely, that of self-knowledge, and to institute a court of justice, by which reason may secure its rightful claims while dismissing all its groundless pretensions, and this not by mere decrees but according to its own eternal and unchangeable laws; and this court is none other than the critique of pure reason itself.
— Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason
Finally, let them recognise that there are two kinds of people one can call reasonable; those who serve God with all their heart because they know Him, and those who seek Him with all their heart because they do not know Him.
— Blaise Pascal, Pensées
Energy is the only life and is from the Body and Reason is the bound or outward circumference of Energy.
— William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
In his opinion, all the world’s misfortunes stemmed from the countless untruths, both deliberate and unintentional, which people told because of haste or carelessness.
— Michael Ende, Momo
But dogmatism—or the inclination "to identify the goal of our thinking with the point at which we have become tired of thinking"—is so natural to man that it is not likely to be a preserve of the past. [Citing Lessing's January 9, 1771 letter to Mendelssohn.]
— Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History
What am I but a little flesh, a little breath, and the thinking part that rules the whole?
— Marcus Aurelius, The Emperor's Handbook
Your heart influences your art.
— Ifeanyi Enoch Onuoha
We're obliged to acknowledge the limits of reason
—  and to acknowledge the necessary reality of the realms to which reason has no access.
The purpose of computation is insight, not numbers.
— Richard Hamming
It's difficult to know where to begin, sir.''Yes, the beginning is the tricky part. But perhaps there is no beginning, perhaps we can't look that far back.' He got up from his desk and went over to the window, from where he could see thin pillar of smoke rising into the clouds. 'I never know where anything comes from, Walter.''Comes from, sir?''Where you come from, where I come from, where all this comes from.' And he gestured at the offices and homes beneath him. He was about to say something else but he stopped, embarrassed; and in any case he was coming to the limits of his understanding. He was not sure if all the movements and changes in the world were part of some coherent development, like the weaving of a quilt which remains one fabric despite its variegated pattern. Or was it a more delicate operation than this - like the enlarging surface of a balloon in the sense that, although each part increased at the same rate of growth as every other part, the entire object grew more fragile as it expanded? And if one element was suddenly to vanish, would the others disappear also - imploding upon each other helplessly as if time itself were unravelling amid a confusion of Sights, calls, shrieks and phrases of music which grew smaller and smaller? He thought of a train disappearing into the distance, until eventually only the smoke and the smell of its engine remained.
— Peter Ackroyd, Hawksmoor
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.
— Peter Ackroyd, Hawksmoor
Animals are not supposed to have the power to reason and therefore don't care whether there is life after death. But imagine animals trying to cheer themselves up in the same way that our own ancestors did when faced with death, by believing that there is life after death. How would they resolve the problem that in the afterlife they might once more be eaten by man?
— Pramoedya Ananta Toer, The Mute's Soliloquy: a Memoir
Reason is inherently expansionist. It seeks universal application.
— Peter Singer, The Expanding Circle: Ethics and Sociobiology
We went back into the Mens Apartments where there were others raving of Ships that may fly and silvered Creatures upon the Moon: Their Stories seem to have neither Head nor Tayl to them, Sir Chris. told me, but there is a Grammar in them if I could but Puzzle it out.This is a mad Age, I replied, and there are many fitter for Bedlam than these here confin'd to a Chain or a dark Room.A sad Reflection, Nick.And what little Purpose have we to glory in our Reason, I continu'd, when the Brain may so suddenly be disorder'd?
— Peter Ackroyd, Hawksmoor
The reader of these reflections of mine on the Trinity should bear in mind that my pen is on the watch against the sophistries of those who scorn the starting-point of faith, and allow themselves to be deceived through an unseasonable and misguided love of reason.
— Augustine of Hippo, The Trinity
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.
— Elizabeth Gilbert, The Signature of All Things
Reason is not some external power which dictates how we should behave, but an internal power, integral to who we are ... Reason does not command that we love anyone. Nonetheless, reason is vital in determining whom we love and why we love them.
— Hugh LaFollette, Personal Relationships: Love, Identity, and Morality
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?
— Richard Llewellyn, How Green Was My Valley
In passing, we should note this curious mark of our own age: the only absolute allowed is the absolute insistence that there is no absolute.
— Francis A. Schaeffer
I don't think I'm being harassed by little green stalkers. I don't know what's really going on, but I'd rather try to eliminate all rational excuses before blaming intergalactic monkeys from the fourth dimension who are somehow interested in this really boring town.
— Thomm Quackenbush, Artificial Gods
Passion has helped us; but can do so no more. It will in future be our enemy. Reason, cold, calculating, unimpassioned reason, must furnish all the materials for our future support and defence.
— Abraham Lincoln, Speeches and Writings, 1832-1858
It is always more easy to discover and proclaim general principles than to apply them.
— Winston S. Churchill, The Gathering Storm
Reason will always be logical, Logic not always reasonable, For truth from reason derivable, And logic falsehood multipliable.
— Munindra Misra, PT. Kanhaiya Lal Misra - My Father
Religion is a means of exploitation employed by the strong against the weak; religion is a cloak of ambition, injustice and vice . . . . Truth breaks free, science is popularized, and religion totters; soon it will fall, in the course of centuries--that is, tomorrow. . . . In good time we shall only have to deal with r
— Georges Bizet
In the woods, we return to reason and faith. There I feel that nothing can befall me in life, — no disgrace, no calamity, (leaving me my eyes,) which nature cannot repair.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
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.
— Ethan Allen, Reason the Only Oracle of Man or a Compendious System of Natural Religion
But science can only be created by those who are thoroughly imbued with the aspiration toward truth and understanding. This source of feeling, however, springs from the sphere of religion. To this there also belongs the faith in the possibility that the regulations valid for the world of existence are rational, that is, comprehensible to reason. I cannot conceive of a genuine scientist without that profound faith. The situation may be expressed by an image: science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.
— Albert Einstein, Ideas and Opinions
When you lose reasoning you forget humanity,When you forget laughter you lose Divinity. Munindra Misra
— Munindra Misra, PT. Kanhaiya Lal Misra - My Father
This success permits us to hope that after thirty or forty years of observation on the new Planet [Neptune], we may employ it, in its turn, for the discovery of the one following it in its order of distances from the Sun. Thus, at least, we should unhappily soon fall among bodies invisible by reason of their immense distance, but whose orbits might yet be traced in a succession of ages, with the greatest exactness, by the theory of Secular Inequal
— Urbain Le Verrier
The first questions naturally raised by a person emerging from the fog of childhood are the same questions that led Aristotle and other great philosophers to think and write deeply on the subjects of first philosophy and ethics.
— Alan E. Johnson, First Philosophy and Human Ethics : A Rational Inquiry
Reason shows us there is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so.
— Seneca, Letters from a Stoic
But dogmatism--or the inclination 'to identify the goal of our thinking with the point at which we have become tired of thinking'--is so natural to man that it is not likely to be a preserve of the past. [Citing "Ame," Dictionnaire philosophique, ed. J. Benda, I, 19]
— Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History
It's irresponsible to think things are just going to work out because you believe things happen for a reason. I refuse to accept these things. I refuse to give in to that absurdity. You saw what happened in Lucille and you lived with Col all those years. You know the suffering they went through. Even this place. There are so many empty houses yet so many homeless. Society is breaking. The kingdoms are failing them.
— Celia McMahon, Skye
Enlightenment is man's emergence from his self-imposed immaturity. Nothing is required for this enlightenment except freedom; and the freedom in question is the least harmful of all, namely, the freedom to use with and publicly in all matters.
— Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason
Yet not so strictly hath our Lord impos'd /Labor, as to debar when we need /Refreshment, whether food, or talk between,/ food of the mind, or this sweet intercourse/Of looks and smiles, for smiles from Reason flow,/To brutes denied, and are of Love the food, Love not the lowest end of human life. For not to irksome toil, but to delight/ He made us, and delight to reason join'd.
— John Milton
If he [Thomas Edison] had a needle to find in a haystack, he would not stop to reason where it was most likely to be, but would proceed at once with the feverish diligence of a bee, to examine straw after straw until he found the object of his search. … Just a little theory and calculation would have saved him ninety percent of his labor.
— Nikola Tesla
That not adhering to those notions Reason dictates (concerning the nature of God), has been the occasion of all superstition, and those innumerable mischiefs that mankind (on account of religion) have done to themselves or to one another.
— Matthew Tindal, Christianity as Old as the Creation
Einstein, twenty-six years old, only three years away from crude privation, still a patent examiner, published in the Annalen der Physik in 1905 five papers on entirely different subjects. Three of them were among the greatest in the history of physics. One, very simple, gave the quantum explanation of the photoelectric effect—it was this work for which, sixteen years later, he was awarded the Nobel prize. Another dealt with the phenomenon of Brownian motion, the apparently erratic movement of tiny particles suspended in a liquid: Einstein showed that these movements satisfied a clear statistical law. This was like a conjuring trick, easy when explained: before it, decent scientists could still doubt the concrete existence of atoms and molecules: this paper was as near to a direct proof of their concreteness as a theoretician could give. The third paper was the special theory of relativity, which quietly amalgamated space, time, and matter into one fundamental unity. This last paper contains no references and quotes to authority. All of them are written in a style unlike any other theoretical physicist's. They contain very little mathematics. There is a good deal of verbal commentary. The conclusions, the bizarre conclusions, emerge as though with the greatest of ease: the reasoning is unbreakable. It looks as though he had reached the conclusions by pure thought, unaided, without listening to the opinions of others. To a surprisingly large extent, that is precisely what he had done.
— C.P. Snow, Variety of Men
Some men have thousands of reasons why they cannot do something, when all they need is one reason why they can.
— Willis R. Whitney
I do not think anyone can read the letters which passed between Clarke and [Anthony] Collins without admitting that Collins, who writes with wonderful Power and closeness of reasoning, has by far the best of the argument, so far as the possible materiality of the soul goes; and that in this battle the Goliath of Freethinking overcame the champion of what was considered orthodoxy.
— Thomas Henry Huxley
As I see it the world is undoubtedly in need of a new religion, and that religion must be founded on humanist principles. When I say religion, I do not mean merely a theology involving belief in a supernatural god or gods; nor do I mean merely a system of ethics, however exalted; nor only scientific knowledge, however extensive; nor just a practical social morality, however admirable or efficient. I mean an organized system of ideas and emotions which relate man to his destiny, beyond and above the practical affairs of every day, transcending the present and the existing systems of law and social structure. The prerequisite today is that any such religion shall appeal potentially to all mankind; and that its intellectual and rational sides shall not be incompatible with scientific knowledge but on the contrary based on it.
— Julian Huxley
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.
— Jeffrey Tayler
The sleep of reason encourages the elections.
— Janusz Korwin-Mikke
There is no place in a fanatic's head where reason can enter.
— Napoléon Bonaparte
Reason and free inquiry are the only effectual agents against error.
— Thomas Jefferson, Writings: Autobiography/Notes on the State of Virginia/Public & Private Papers/Addresses/Letters
We men of intelligence will learn to harness the insanities of reason. We can't leave the world any longer to the direction of chance. We can't allow dangerous maniacs like Luther, mad about dogma, like Napoleon, mad about himself, to go on casually appearing and turning everything upside down. In the past it didn't so much matter; but our modern machine is too delicate. A few more knocks like the Great War, another Luther or two, and the whole concern will go to pieces. In future, the men of reason must see that the madness of the world's maniacs is canalised into proper channels, is made to do useful work, like a mountain torrent driving a dynamo...
— Aldous Huxley, Crome Yellow
Further, the same Arguments which explode the Notion of Luck, may, on the other side, be useful in some Cases to establish a due comparison between Chance and Design: We may imagine Chance and Design to be, as it were, in Competition with each other, for the production of some sorts of Events, and many calculate what Probability there is, that those Events should be rather be owing to the one than to the other.
— Abraham de Moivre, The Doctrine of Chances: Or a Method of Calculating the Probability of Events in Play
Wherever a choice has had to be made between the man of reason and the madman, the world has unhesitatingly followed the madman. For the madman appeals to what is fundamental, to passion and the instincts; the philosophers to what is superficial and supererogatory - reason.
— Aldous Huxley, Crome Yellow
There were no scruples, no feelings of respect or loyal affection that would stop us from making up our minds by the pure light of reason - and of our own desires.
— Simone de Beauvoir, Prime of Life
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".
— John Cowper Powys, The Art Of Forgetting The Unpleasant
In short, this or that behavior wasn't good because scripture said so. Scripture mandated this or that behavior because it was good, and if it was already good before scripture said so, then it was good for some reason inherent to itself, some reason that reason could discover.
— Tamim Ansary, Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World through Islamic Eyes
Happiness has to do with reason, and only reason earns it.
— Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
Shows itself in the notion that what may be objectively true may in the mouth of certain people become false.
— Søren Kierkegaard
Nihil est sine ratione.[There is nothing without a reason.]
— Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
The reason the very concept of God has become at once so impoverished, so thoroughly mythical, and ultimately so incredible for so many modern persons is not because of all the interesting things we have learned over the past few centuries, but because of all the vital things we have forgotten.
— David Bentley Hart, The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss
Reason is the first victim of strong emotion," Scytale murmured.
— Frank Herbert, Dune Messiah
Reasoning with a drunkard is likeGoing under water with a torch to seek for a drowning man.
— Thiruvalluvar, Holy Kural - Thirukkural in Tamil with English Translations
This world, for aught he knows, is very faulty and imperfect, compared to a superior standard; and was only the first rude essay of some infant deity, who afterwards abandoned it, ashamed of his lame performance: it is the work only of some dependent, inferior deity; and is the object of derision to his superiors: it is the production of old age and dotage in some superannuateddeity; and ever since his death, has run on at adventures, from the first impulse and active force which it received from him.
— David Hume, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion