Quotes About Reason

I found that when people are nursing a grievance it's a waste of time trying to explain the ubiquitous nature of coincidence in the universe. People always want things to happen for a reason.

Click here' is not a call to action, because I will only take action with a reason, and clicking is no reason. Remove the 'Click here' from any link, and it will be clearer and more direct. (The only time I ever use 'Click here' is when it is not at all obvious that the target is clickable, which should never really happen.)

I was puzzled, but shortly thereafter learned the reason.

had been a principal reason behind Citi's pursuit of Wachovia.

Facts don't care about your feelings.

We receive our notions of Divine meaning from a three-millennia-old lineage stretching back to the ancient Jews; we receive our notions of reason from a twenty-five-hundred-year-old lineage stretching back to the ancient Greeks. In rejecting those lineages—in seeking to graft ourselves to rootless philosophical movements of the moment, cutting ourselves off from our own roots—we have damned ourselves to an existential wandering.

What does this mean for human beings? What makes a man virtuous is his capacity to engage in the activities that make him a man, not an animal—man has a telos, too. What is our telos? Our end, according to both Plato and Aristotle, is to reason, judge, and deliberate.

What makes human beings unique, says Aristotle, is our capacity to reason, and to use that reason to investigate the nature of the world and our purpose in it:

To Aristotle, "good" wasn't a subjective term, something for each of us to define for ourselves; "good" was a statement of objective fact. Something was "good" if it fulfilled its purpose. A good watch tells time; a good dog defends its master. What does a good human being do? Acts in accordance with right reason.

The Passions of men," Hobbes writes, "are commonly more potent than their Reason." Reason cannot bring happiness, nor can it be used as the goal of a philosophical life. There is no happiness. There is only striving and security and passion. Reason cannot save us from the war of all against all; only the Leviathan, the power of the state, can.21

Faith provided individual moral purpose; faith provided collective moral purpose. But while individual capacity was bolstered by the doctrinal belief in free will and the value of work, reason had been made secondary to faith; while collective capacity was bolstered by the presence of a strong social fabric, the all-encompassing power of the Catholic Church and the rule of monarchs meant that individual choice was heavily circumscribed.

Aquinas posited, then human beings can examine the natural world as a pathway to understanding Him. God made nature; to discover nature is to investigate the works of God. In fact, God wanted man to do this—God wanted man to seek Him everywhere. And God granted human beings the power of free will and reason to do so

Voltaire, Kant, Bentham—all assumed that reason could construct morality from scratch. But their moralities did not coincide. Practically speaking, their morality lifted elements, even if unconsciously, from the Judeo-Christian tradition and Greek telos they suggested they had exploded.

It was left to Hume, once again, to completely circumscribe reason. "Reason is, and ought only to be, the slave of the passions," Hume famously wrote, taking to its logical extreme the thought of his predecessors. "[Reason] cannot be the source of moral good or evil, which are found to have that influence."24

These three elements—America's philosophy of reason, equality, liberty, and limited government; America's culture of individual rights and social duties; and America's shared history—define our country.

The ancient Greeks gave us three foundational principles: first, that we could discover our purpose in life from looking at the nature of the world; second, that in order to learn about the nature of the world, we had to study the world around us by utilizing our reason; and finally, that reason could help us construct the best collective systems for cultivating that reason. In short, the Greeks gave us natural law, science, the basis of secularly constructed government.

law, rooted in reason and enshrined by religion; individual natural rights, balanced by corresponding duties; a limited government of checks and balances designed to protect those rights in accordance with natural law; and inculcation of virtue, to be pursued by individuals and communities, again in accordance with the dictates of natural law.

Whereas modern systems of morality focus far more on whether given actions are good or evil, ancient ethical systems worried less about rules for action, and more about making men and women virtuous people—people capable of fulfilling their telos as human beings, and utilizing reason and character to carry out complex moral equations.

The notion of all men having equal freedom and independence sprang originally from the Biblical notion of man being made in God's image, admixed with the Greek tradition of individual reason, and passed down generation after generation, transmuted over time into the understanding that not only are human beings made in God's image with will and reason, but with the liberty to exercise that will and reason in accordance with the pursuit of virtue.

The Athenian system of thought establishes certain fundamental notions crucial to happiness: the notion of telos, discoverable by us; the importance of reason-led investigation, leading to the birth of science; the recognition that social ties bind us to one another.

Both Bacon and Descartes, while discarding the teleology of the ancients, maintained faith in the Bible and in God. But they also laid the groundwork for the rise of Deism—and in time, for the fall of religion itself. By cutting final causes from science, by separating God from the natural world, the modern scientific project would eventually remove religion and purpose from the domain of reason—a project that both Bacon and Descartes would have abhorred.

There's a reason for everything, you said, and though it's a mystery to me now, I know it won't always be so.

Truth is the answer, love is the reason.

Anger is never without a reason but seldom a good one.