Quotes About Reason

A bad manner spoils everything, even reason and justice a good one supplies everything, gilds a No, sweetens a truth, and adds a touch of beauty to old age itself.

Canst thou comprehend, my poor beloved Tried-one, that unless the torpor and the veils of sleep had wrapped thee, such sights would rend and bear away thy mind as the whirlwinds rend and carry into space the feeble sails, depriving thee forever of thy reason? Dost thou understand that the Soul itself, raised to its utmost power can scarcely endure in dreams the burning communications of the Spirit?

In bringing God face to face with the Great Whole, we see that only two states are possible between them,—either God and Matter are contemporaneous, or God existed alone before Matter. Were Reason—the light that has guided the human race from the dawn of its existence—accumulated in one brain, even that mighty brain could not invent a third mode of being without suppressing both Matter and God.

Reason always cuts a poor figure beside sentiment; the one being essentially restricted, like everything that is positive, while the other is infinite.

I was a firm believer in the idea that coincidences always came along at the right time. I felt there was some kind of reason for the way things happened as they did, like bubbles from my subconscious mind rising to the surface.

Reason shapes the future, but superstition infects the present.

That's what I'm opposed to. A dumb war. A rash war. A war based not on reason but on passion, not on principle but on politics.

My philosophy, in essence, is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute.

Metaphysics—objective reality; Epistemology—reason; Ethics—self-interest; Politics—capitalism.

Reason can only work with the experience available to it. Wisdom atrophies if it is not walked on a regular basis.

the thing you contend for to be reason," Burke had said, "show it to be common sense, show it to be the means of attaining some useful end, and then I am content to allow it what dignity you please.

If we suppose for a moment that space exists, and that God placed the world in it, why did He place it in the spot it occupies instead of any other spot, all space being alike, and no one point being preferable to any other point? God acted without having a reason, for if space is, His choice of a place was arbitrary; but God cannot act irrationally. Therefore space is not.

To consider reason to be hostile to revelation is to regard God as divided against Himself, labouring to destroy His own work. Reason is a gift of God and faith is a gift of God. Each has its own sphere.

God, then, did not find in Himself any reason for creating. If the reason for creation were to be found in the nature of the Absolute, there would be no creation. The existence of the world is therefore irrational, for what can be more irrational than the idea of something added to perfection? Nevertheless the world exists. Reality is not rational, it is superior to reason.

If reason has never been able to found a religion which will bear criticism, it is because of this, that it begins with an undemonstrable hypothesis and ends in an hypothesis. Consequently, all attempts to prove the existence of God are convincing only to those already convinced.

Reason is dependent on faith, and faith is helpless without reason. A belief of some sort underlies every system of thought. If we bore as deep as we can through systems, the deepest thing we reach is an undemonstrable thesis, which is accepted and believed in as a verity. It is the primary substance which is unaffected by the most corrosive acid so long as it remains uncombined.

The liberty of the creature is at once alienable and inalienable; alienable because it depends on the will of the creature, and inalienable because it is absolutely willed by the Creator. It is alienable in fact, but inalienable by right. Natural right is the will of God, as it expresses itself in the essence of our reason, which is His workmanship. And as God alone is absolute, no pretended positive has any authority to contravene a natural right proceeding from Him.

Supreme happiness to reason, that is the Ideal of the intellect, is the attainment of certainty upon every subject and about all things.

Our convictions are the facts assured to us on the testimony of our own nature, our own senses, or our own reason.

The idea of the supernatural is not a rational verity. It belongs to the sentiment which is the faculty of perceiving the infinite, whereas the reason is, by its nature, finite. God is perceived by the heart, not concluded by the mind.

God's existence escapes demonstration; it is idle to ask reason to prove what is beyond its scope, for reason is the faculty of dealing with the finite.

Reason starts from itself to return to itself.

Reason is a faculty for extracting truth out of materials provided by the sentiment.

The God of reason cannot be the object of religion.