Quotes About Reason

To people accustomed to reason about the forms in which their religious feeling has incorporated itself, it is difficult to enter into that simple, untaught state of mind in which the form and the feeling have never been severed by an act of reflection.

To advocate irrationality is to advocate that which is destructive to human life.

The Christian theologian will never find a contradiction between the propositions of faith and reason, because it is his job to interpret them out of existence.

Reason is not universal in the transcendent sense; that is, it is not part of the structure of the universe. It is universal, however, in that it is a capacity shared universally by all human beings. What allows it to be shared are the commonalities that exist in the way our minds are embodied.

Reason is not completely conscious, but mostly unconscious. Reason is not purely literal, but largely metaphorical and imaginative. Reason is not dispassionate, but emotionally engaged.

This is how reason really works: through framing, metaphors, emotion, narratives, and imagery.

It's fashionable among progressives to wonder why so many red state voters don't vote in their own economic interests. This is simply another symptom of 18th-century rationalism, which assumes that everyone is rational and rationality means seeking self-interest. [...] People are not 18th-century reason machines. Real reason works differently. Reason matters, and we have to understand how it really works.

While it is not impossible to have a Nurturant Parent rationalist morality (perhaps certain versions of utilitarianism are of this sort), Reason is not typically understood as a nurturer. Reason commands, lays down the law, gives orders, judges, reprimands, and so on. We almost never conceive of it as nurturing, feeling, caring, and so forth.

Could that have been what happened to the human race - a willing perversity that set at naught all human values which had been so hardly won and structured in the light of reason for a span of more than a million years?

God does not die on the day when we cease to believe in a personal deity, but we die on the day when our lives cease to be illumined by the steady radiance, renewed daily, of a wonder, the source of which is beyond all reason.

Wonder is that possession of the mind that enchants the emotions while never surrendering reason. It is a grasp on reality that does not need constant high points in order to be maintained, nor is it made vulnerable by the low points of life's struggle.

Reason would lead us to the conclusion that Jehovah would not create a wonderful earth like this, permit man to bring it to a high state of cultivation in many places, and then completely destroy it.

If we are wondering why only 19 percent of the American people feel that the Congress is in tune with their priorities, the cuts in Amtrak is one blatant reason why.

Orthodox Christianity, by playing upon the emotions of man, is able to accomplish wonders toward keeping him in order and relieving his mind. It can frighten or cajole him away from evil more effectively than could reason.

Do not despise the fish because they are absolutely unable to speak or to reason, but fear lest you may be even more unreasonable than they by resisting the command of the Creator. Listen to the fish, who through their actions all but utter this word: 'We set out on this long journey for the perpetuation of our species.'

The word 'belief' is a difficult thing for me. I don't believe. I must have a reason for a certain hypothesis. Either I know a thing, and then I know it - I don't need to believe it.

Faith can make no appeal to reason or the fitness of things; its appeal is to the Word of God, and whatever is therein revealed, faith accepts as true.

Words are the children of reason and, therefore, can't explain it. They really can't translate feeling because they're not part of it. That's why it bugs me when people try to analyze jazz as an intellectual theorem. It's not. It's feeling.

I would have loved the opportunity to have gone to drama school, but it just didn't work out for me; there are always several paths, and there's a reason why I've been down this path.

I'm really fortunate that I am in continuous work and I love what I do. And I think that there's a reason that it keeps happening. So while that keeps happening, I will be thrilled - and feel lucky - to keep doing it.

With science and reason throughout history, what people believed turned out to be false. So I like to keep an open mind to all perspectives and learn and become more fully realised as a person. I just feel we're never going to know what the full picture is.

Why is this thus? What is the reason for this thusness?

Thus the public use of reason and freedom is nothing but a dessert, a sumptuous dessert.

Ideas are 10 a penny. It's the execution that's the hard thing to do. House is standing up against a tide of sentiment and emotionalism over reason that threatens to engulf this world. When you think about it, a rationalist, a man of science and reason, is in a pretty lonely position.