Quotes About Reason

If your view of the world is that people use reason for their important decisions, you are setting yourself up for a life of frustration and confusion. You'll find yourself continually debating people and never winning except in your own mind. Few things are as destructive and limiting as a worldview that assumes people are mostly rational.

Master Persuaders move your energy to the topics that help them, independent of facts and reason.

As a general rule, irrational people don't know they are irrational.

When candidate Trump answered questions about policies, it was clear he didn't have a detailed understanding of the more complicated issues. Most observers saw this as a fatal flaw that would keep him out of the White House. I didn't see it that way. I saw it as Trump recognizing that people don't use facts and reason to make decisions. A skilled persuader can blatantly ignore facts and policy details so long as the persuasion is skillful.

Word-thinking is a term I invented to describe a situation in which people are trying to win an argument by adjusting the definition of words. In these situations there is no appeal to reason. But that's okay, because facts and logic are not persuasive anyway. Word-thinking usually happens when people are bad at logic but don't realize it.

When a decision involves lots of facts, and we have access to all the facts, we are more likely to hallucinate that we used our powers of reason to reach a decision. But when we recognize that we don't have all the facts, we hallucinate that we used our gut feeling to bridge the gap. In both cases we acted irrationally, and we tried to rationalize it to ourselves after the fact. That's how the Persuasion Filter sees it.

Master Persuaders move your energy to the topics that help them, independent of facts and reason. I've

If you believe people use reason for the important decisions in life, you will go through life feeling confused and frustrated that others seem to have bad reasoning skills. The reality is that reason is just one of the drivers of our decisions, and often the smallest one. Recently

The main theme of this book is that humans are not rational. We bounce from one illusion to another, all the while thinking we are seeing something we call reality. The truth is that facts and reason don't have much influence on our decisions, except for trivial things, such as putting gas in your car when you are running low. On all the important stuff, we are emotional creatures who make decisions first and rationalize them after the fact.

If your view of the world is that people use reason for their important decisions, you are setting yourself up for a life of frustration and confusion. You'll find yourself continually debating people and never winning except in your own mind. Few things are as destructive and limiting as a worldview that assumes people are mostly rational. On

it helps to see the world as math and not magic.

If you believe people use reason for the important decision in life, you will go through life feeling confused and frustrated that others seem to have bad reasoning skills. The reality is that reason is just one of the drivers of our decisions, and often the smallest one. People who study hypnosis see others as moist machines that are simply responding to inputs with programmed outputs. No reasoning is involved beyond eliminating the most absurd options.

Word-thinking is a term I invented to describe a situation in which people are trying to win an argument by adjusting the definition of words. In these situations there is no appeal to reason.

You're wasting your time if you try to make someone see reason when reason is not influencing the decision.

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.

Some speak of the nobility of the law. Stern has not always found that to be true. Too much of the grubby bone shop, the odor of the abattoir, emanates from every criminal courtroom. It is at heart a very nasty business to accuse, to judge, to punish. But the law, at least, seeks to govern misfortune, to ensure that a society's wrath is not visited at random. In human affairs, reason will never fully triumph; but there is no better cause to champion. At

He'd have improved if you'd not given Him a mere glimmer of the light in heaven; He calls it Reason, and it has only increased His power to be beastlier than a beast.

Mefistófeles: "De sol e de mundos nada sei dizer, vejo apenas como os homens se atormentam. O pequeno Deus do mundo [o homem] continua na mesma e está tão admirável assim como no primeiro dia. Um pouco melhor ele viveria, não lhe tivesses dado o brilho da luz celeste; ele chama isto razão e lança mão dela somente para ser mais animalesco do que cada animal.

Wagner: Yet elocution makes the orator; I'm far behind, I feel it more and more. Faust: Seek thou an honest retribution! Be thou no motley, jingling fool! It needs but little elocution To speak good sense by reason's rule. It ye've a message to deliver, Need ye for words be hunting ever?

Be brave, and show them what you've got, [85] Have Fantasy with all her chorus, yes, Mind, Reason, Passion, Tears, the lot, But don't you leave out Foolishness.

Is he only happy before he has acquired his reason, or after he has lost it?

a man wholly under the influence of his passions has lost his ability to think rationally, and is regarded as intoxicated or insane.

Between the idea and the experience there seems to be a certain gulf fixed; we exert all our strength to cross it, in vain. In spite of this, we strive constantly to overcome this gap by means of reason, understanding, imagination, faith, feeling, madness, and, if nothing else will serve, with absurdity.

All that is great and skilful exists with the minority. There have been ministers who have had both king and people against them, and have carried out their great plans alone. It is not to be imagined that reason can ever be popular. Passions and feelings may become popular; but reason always remains the sole property of a few eminent individuals.