Quotes About Reason

For nothing is of greater importance than that a powerful, long-established, and irrational custom should be once again confirmed by the act of some one who is recognized as rational. In this way the proceeding is thought to be sanctioned by reason itself! All honor to your opinions! but little unconventional actions are of still greater value.

Reason' is the cause of our falsification of the evidence of the senses. In so far as the senses show becoming, passing away, change, they do not lie.… But Heraclitus will always be right in this, that being is an empty fiction. The 'apparent' world is the only one: the 'real' world has only been lyingly added…

Reason in language- oh what an old deceptive female she is! I am afraid we are not rid of God because we still have faith in grammar.

The faith in the categories of reason is the cause of nihilism. We have measured the value of the world according to categories that refer to a purely fictitious world.

Thucydides and, maybe, Machiavelli's prince are most closely related to me by their unconditional will to fabricate nothing and to see reason in reality—not in "reason," and still less in "morality" . . .

I" you say and are proud of this word. But what is greater is that in which you do not want to believe – your body and its great reason. It does not say I, but does I. What

And what ye have called the world shall but be created by you: your reason, your likeness, your will, you love, shall it itself become! and verily, for your bliss...

The Church and morality say: 'A race, a people perishes through vice and luxury'. My restored reason says: when a people is perishing, degenerating physiologically, vice and luxury (that is to say the necessity for stronger and stronger and more and more frequent stimulants, such as every exhausted nature is acquainted with) follow therefrom.

It is true: we love life, not because we are used to living, but because we are used to loving. There is always some madness in love. But there is always also some reason in madness.

That is the greatest error ever committed, the most disastrous error on earth: believing that in the forms of reason, we had in our possession a criterion of reality, whereas we had them in order to gain mastery over reality, in order to misunderstand it in a shrewd way... — And behold, the world became false precisely because of the qualities which constitute its reality: change, becoming, multiplicity, opposition, strife, war.

In all truly productive men instinct is the strong, affirmative force and reason the dissuader and critic.

for a woman, love is its own reason. I love you because I love you.

Knowing belongs to man's intellect or reason; loving belongs to his will. The object of the intellect is truth; the object of the will is goodness or love.

For the Angelic Doctor, the reason of conceptual knowledge is just the contrary! It is not his distance from the animal that renders abstraction necessary; it is his distance from God. Abstraction is not a condition of a push from below; it is a result of a fall from above. Abstraction is necessary because our intellect is imperfect. This is the fundamental reason.

Celibacy is like poetry keeping the idea ever in mind like a dream; but marriage uses chisel and brush, concentrating more on marble and canvas. Celibacy jumps to a conclusion like an intuition; marriage, like reason, labors through ebb and flow, step by step.

Peace also implies order, the subordination of the body to the soul, of the senses to reason, and of the creature to the Creator.

Animals never have recourse to law courts, because they have no will to love; but man, having reason, feels the need of justifying his irrational behavior when he does wrong.

The truth that would answer this temptation was that faith in God must never contradict reason. The unreasonable venture never has the assurance of the Divine protection.

God writes His name on the soul of every man. Reason and conscience are the God within us in the natural order.

I had been able to break the curse myself. I'd had to have reason enough, love enough to do it, to find the will and the strength.

To me, a great ineptitude exists on the part of those who would have it that God made the universe more in proportion to the small capacity of their reason than to His immense, His infinite, power.

Where the senses fail us, reason must step in.

I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with senses, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use and by some other means to give us knowledge which we can attain by them.

The wise are instructed by reason, average minds by experience, the stupid by necessity and the brute by instinct.