Quotes About Rationality

Those who are accustomed to judge by feeling do not understand the process of reasoning, for they would understand at first sight, and are not used to seek for principles. And others, on the contrary, who are accustomed to reason from principles, do not at all understand matters of feeling, seeking principles, and being unable to see at a glance.

Nothing is so conformable to reason as to disavow reason.

When we are accustomed to use bad reasons for proving natural effects, we are not willing to receive good reasons when they are discovered.

Two excesses: to exclude reason, to admit nothing but reason.

All of our reasoning ends in surrender to feeling.

There is nothing so conformable to reason as to disavow reason

How well the man reasoned. Lunatics always do within their own scope.

what I eventually concluded was that it was necessary to cleanse one's vision in order to see the door. To do this one must return to the place, the geographical location where one last believed the world to be fluid, responsive to oneself. In short one must return to the last place in which one had stood before the iron hand of modern rationality gripped one's mind.

RAND scientists tried to tell their wives that the decision whether to buy or not to buy a washing machine was an "optimization problem.

a decade as notable for its supreme faith in human rationality as for its dark anxieties about mankind's survival [...]

Adrenaline dulls reason; panic kills it.

Imagination without reason is mere fancy, but reason without imagination is sterile.

Nunca será posible llegar solo mediante la razón pura a alguna verdad absoluta».5

Working out whether or not the claims you make in your premises are true, while important, is simply not enough to ensure that you draw true conclusions. People make this mistake all the time. They forget that you can begin with a set of entirely true beliefs but reason so poorly as to end up with entirely false conclusions. The problem is that starting with truth doesn't guarantee ending up with it.

The problem of induction is the problem of how an argument can be good reasoning as induction but be poor reasoning as a deduction.

Vanity can easily overtake wisdom. It usually overtakes common sense.

Once the tyranny of literalness is rejected, all relevant considerations for giving a rational content to the words become operative.

Religion without science is superstition. Science without religion is materialism.

There is a close relationship between faith and reason, for one cannot function without the other. Reason builds its arguments on first principles which cannot be proven, but are accepted by faith. For the truly wise, faith is the first principle, the starting point, on which reason is to build.

Unbelief cannot sustain itself; it is unable to make sense of the facts, many of which are the most obvious facts of the world; it assumes, rather than shows, that there is no God, that the world is not created by him, that his character is not obvious in creation, and so on. Then it proceeds to argue its case not by attempting to support those assumptions, but simply by assuming them and then arguing as if the assumptions themselves are, or must be, universal if one is to be "rational.

Common sense dictates that any voice you hear inside your head must be just you, thinking; so, if you know it's just you and you know you're basically an idiot, what possesses you to do what the stupid voice tells you?

In Israel we tend to be carried away by our emotions.

Italians think with their heads.

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