Quotes About Reason

my point being, what if my attacks are enterly unrelated attributable in fact to something entirely else, perhaps for instance just warning shocks brought on by my own crumbling biology, tiny flakes of unknown chemical origin already burning holes through the fabric of my mind, dismantling memories, undoing even the strongest powers of imagination and reason? how then do you fly from that path?

As it turned out, Ilsa Hermann not only gave Liesel Meminger a book that day. She also gave her a reason to spend time in the basement, her favorite place, first with Papa, then Max. She gave her a reason to write her own words, to see that words had also brought her to life. Don't punish yourself, she heard her say again, but there would be punishment and pain, and there would be happiness, too. That was writing.

A SMALL SUGGESTION*** Or maybe there was a woman on Grande Strasse who now kept her library window open for another reason - but that's just be being cynical, or hopeful. Or both.

When reason fails, the devil helps!

Raskolnikov once said: "When reason fails, the devil helps!

La razón tiene una dignidad especial que se alza por encima del juego de las fuerzas, y sólo en la medida en que se respeta la razón en una sociedad las minorías serán capaces de hacer escuchar sus justas, pero impopulares, demandas.

Religious belief is without reason and without dignity, and its record is near-universally dreadful.

For both of us, I think, it had to do with our weakened power to love. It is strange that enslavement should have that effect – not just the fantastic degradation, not just the fear and the boredom and all the rest, but also the layered injustice, the silent injustice. So all right. We're back where we started. To you, nothing – from you, everything. They took it from me, it seems, for no reason, other than that I value it so much.

The function of education, therefore, is to teach one to think intensively and to think critically. But education which stops with efficiency may prove the greatest menace to society. The most dangerous criminal may be the man gifted with reason, but with no morals.

As T. S. Eliot has said: "The last temptation is the greatest treason: To do the right deed for the wrong reason.

Later, claiming responsibility for the killing, the IRA said the man had been killed because he was supplying the Security Forces with fruit and vegetables.  McVeigh would not be the only person to die for such a tenuous reason – many businessmen would be murdered in cold blood for similar 'activities'. Throughout

Emotion,' she told him, 'is not a reliable guide for our words and actions.' 'There you are wrong,' he said. 'Deep, true emotion is our surest guide. We make our greatest mistake when we allow our heads to rules ours hearts.' 'Emotion is our human weakness.,' she said, 'reason our strength.' 'And love,' he said, 'is our destiny.

But love is an emotional thing, and whatever is emotional is opposed to that true cold reason which I place above all things. I should never marry myself, lest I bias my judgment.

Desultory readers are seldom remarkable for the exactness of their learning. No man burdens his mind with small matters unless he has some very good reason for doing so.

I assure you, my good Lestrade, that I have an excellent reason for everything that I do. You may possibly remember that you chaffed me a little, some hours ago, when the sun seemed on your side of the hedge, so you must not grudge me a little pomp and ceremony now. Might I ask you, Watson, to open that window, and then to put a match to the edge of the straw?

The love-affair of Enid Challenger and Edward Malone is not of the slightest interest to the reader, for the simple reason that it is not of the slightest interest to the writer.

Reason offers us many possibilities at once. Intuition infallibly chooses the best. Remember this and you cannot err; you will always make the right choice.

Laughter is a luxury reflex which could arise only in a creature whose reason has gained a degree of autonomy from the urges of emotion, and enables him to perceive his own emotions as redundant-to realize that he has been fooled.

In a hundred years we will be able to appeal to the criminal's reason and social instincts. To-day we have still to work on his physical constitution, and crash him, physically and mentally, if necessary

The humorist has solved his problem by joining two incompatible matrices together in a paradoxical synthesis. His audience, on the other hand, has its expectations shattered and its reason affronted by the impact of the second matrix on the first; instead of fusion there is collision; and in the mental disarray which ensues, emotion, deserted by reason, is flushed out in laughter.

Our greatest sufferings do not lie in the present, as intuitive representations or immediate feeling, but rather in reason, as abstract concepts, tormenting thoughts.

The true basis and propaedeutic for all knowledge of human nature is the persuasion that a man's actions are, essentially and as a whole, not directed by his reason and its designs; so that no one becomes this or that because he wants to, though he want to never so much, but that his conduct proceeds from his inborn and inalterable character, is narrowly and in particulars determined by motivation, and is thus necessarily the product of these two factors.

A man cannot serve two masters: so it is either reason or the scriptures. - On Religion

Far-sighted, rational deliberation usually comes out in favour of one decision, while immediate inclination comes out for the other. As long as we have to be passive, the balance seems tilted in favour of reason; but we can see in advance how strongly we will be pulled by the other side when the opportunity for acting arises.