Quotes About Reason

The reason, however, why the philosopher may be likened to the poet is this: both are concerned with the marvellous.

Most men seem to live according to sense rather than reason.

Thus avarice, leagued with power, disturbed, violated, and wasted every thing, without moderation or restraint; disregarding alike reason and religion, and rushing headlong, as it were, to its own destruction. For whenever any arose among the nobility, who preferred true glory to unjust power, the state was immediately in a tumult, and civil discord spread with as much disturbance as attends a convulsion of the earth.

In fact, "atheism" is a term that should not even exist. No one ever needs to identify himself as a "non-astrologer" or a "non-alchemist." We do not have words for people who doubt that Elvis is still alive or that aliens have traversed the galaxy only to molest ranchers and their cattle. Atheism is nothing more than the noises reasonable people make in the presence of unjustified religious beliefs.

A pet peeve of mine is when fans start griping about a fighter who lost making excuses. Of course he's making excuses. This is his profession, he's going to get back in there, and for his sanity and mental strength he needs to have a reason he can point to for his loss. If he didn't make excuses, if he didn't have a reason to think he can win next time, how could he ever fight again?

While men tend to think in abstractions—rules, principles, information, definitions—women tend to see the world in terms of relationships. Where men tend to define, distinguish, and divide, women often seek to bring unity and healing. Head and heart, reason and emotion, masculine and femininity—these are all complementary aspects of humanity. A tragedy of history is that, so often, the male voice has drowned out the female voice altogether.

Mankind are governed more by their feelings than by reason.

All the things you would do gladly, oh without enthusiasm, but gladly, all the things there seems no reason for your not doing, and that you do not do! Can it be we are not free? It might be worth looking into.

To live is like to love — all reason is against it, and all healthy instinct for it.

To live is like love, all reason is against it, and all healthy instinct for it.

Among those who came to visit me were some who had received a liberal education at the Colleges of Unreason, and taken the highest degrees in hypothetics, which are their principal study.

The duty of criticism is neither to depreciate nor dignify by partial representations, but to hold out the light of reason, whatever it may discover; and to promulgate the determinations of truth, whatever she shall dictate

The accidental prescriptions of authority, when time has procured them veneration, are often confounded with the laws of nature, and those rules are supposed coeval with reason, of which the first rise cannot be discovered

Evil is uncertain in the same degree as good, and for the reason that we ought not to hope too securely, we ought not to fear with too much dejection

I will probably be caught again, because that's what happens to criminals in this universe. And maybe I will escape once more." He shrugged. "Maybe I will not be caught again, though." He looked at her, surprised not at her but at something in himself. "I was no I before, but now there is a reason to stay free. I will not be caught again. There is a reason." "What is it, Butcher?" "Because I am," he said softly, "and you are.

To live within the tethers of desire is—again and again—to be shocked at how far they have come loose from reason

I hope, as he assures me, he was not guilty of Indecency; but have Reason to bless God, who, by disabling me in my Faculties, enabled me to preserve my Innocence; and when all my Strength would have signified nothing, magnified himself in my Weakness.

Every man is born an Aristotelian or a Platonist. I do not think it possible that anyone born an Aristotelian can become a Platonist; and I am sure that no born Platonist can ever change into an Aristotelian…. The one considers reason a quality, or attribute; the other considers it a power.

The imagination… that reconciling and mediatory power, which incorporating the reason in images of the sense and organizing (as it were) the flux of the senses by the permanence and self-circling energies of the reason, gives birth to a system of symbols, harmonious in themselves, and consubstantial with the truths of which they are the conductors.

The Good consists in the congruity of a thing with the laws of the reason and the nature of the will, and in its fitness to determine the latter to actualize the former: and it is always discursive. The Beautiful arises from the perceived harmony of an object, whether sight or sound, with the inborn and constitutive rules of the judgment and imagination: and it is always intuitive.

Talent, lying in the understanding, is often inherited; genius, being the action of reason or imagination, rarely or never.

I was standing in that place they call "bittersweet." That place that, if you could find it on a map, would be the mountain that sits between happy and sad. And I thought about how when you stand on that mountain, you can almost feel God's hand on your head and you just know, deep down inside, that even if you dno't understand everything that happened to cause those mixed feelings, you still know there was a good reason for them happening.

You can't judge a person by what they're doing, till you know why they're doing it.

We're in that place called "bittersweet." That place, I reasoned when I was a girl, that if you could find it on a map, would be the mountain that sits between happy and sad. The place where you can almost feel God's hand on your head and just know, deep down inside, that there was a good reason for every single thing that happened.