Quotes About Reason

Foremost is reason. Reason is nonnegotiable. As soon as you show up to discuss the question of what we should live for (or any other question), as long as you insist that your answers, whatever they are, are reasonable or justified or true and that therefore other people ought to believe them too, then you have committed yourself to reason, and to holding your beliefs accountable to objective standards.

The Enlightenment has worked—perhaps the greatest story seldom told. And because this triumph is so unsung, the underlying ideals of reason, science, and humanism are unappreciated as well. Far from being an insipid consensus, these ideals are treated by today's intellectuals with indifference, skepticism, and sometimes contempt. When properly appreciated, I will suggest, the ideals of the Enlightenment are in fact stirring, inspiring, noble—a reason to live.

The indispensability of reason does not imply that individual people are always rational or are unswayed by passion and illusion. It only means that people are capable of reason, and that a community of people who choose to perfect this faculty and to exercise it openly and fairly can collectively reason their way to sounder conclusions in the long run.

Benjamin Franklin observed, "So convenient a thing is it to be a rational creature, since it enables us to find or make a reason for everything one has a mind to.

If there's anything the Enlightenment thinkers had in common, it was an insistence that we energetically apply the standard of reason to understanding our world, and not fall back on generators of delusion like faith, dogma, revelation, authority, charisma, mysticism, divination, visions, gut feelings, or the hermeneutic parsing of sacred texts.

Finally, an intensifying application of knowledge and rationality to human affairs - the escalator of reason - can force people to recognize the futility of cycles of violence, to ramp down the privileging of their own interests over others', and to re-frame violence as a problem to be solved rather than a contest to be won.

If you extol reason, then what matters is the integrity of the thoughts, not the personalities of the thinkers.

The Enlightenment principle that we can apply reason and sympathy to enhance human flourishing may seem obvious, trite, old-fashioned. I wrote this book because I have come to realize that it is not. More than ever, the ideals of reason, science, humanism, and progress need a wholehearted defense

The history of human folly, and our own susceptibility to illusions and fallacies, tells us that men and women are fallible. One therefore ought to seek good reasons for believing something. Faith, revelation, tradition, dogma, authority, the ecstatic glow of subjective certainty - all are recipes for error, and should be dismissed as sources of knowledge.

Though we cannot logically prove anything about the physical world, we are entitled to have confidence in certain beliefs about it. The application of reason and observation to discover tentative generalizations about the world is what we call science.

A humanistic morality rests on the universal bedrock of reason and human interests: it's an inescapable feature of the human condition that we're all better off if we help each other and refrain from hurting each other.

you can perpetuate life in turn. You have been endowed with a sense of sympathy—the ability to like, love, respect, help, and show kindness—and you can enjoy the gift of mutual benevolence with friends, family, and colleagues. And because reason tells you that none of this is particular to you, you have the responsibility to provide to others what you expect for yourself. You can foster the welfare of other sentient beings by enhancing

Since any defense of reason, science, and humanism would count for nothing if, two hundred and fifty years after the Enlightenment, we're no better off than our ancestors in the Dark Ages, an appraisal of human progress is where the case must begin.

I will present a different understanding of the world, grounded in fact and inspired by the ideals of the Enlightenment: reason, science, humanism, and progress.

Lakoff is right to insist that conceptual metaphors are not just literary garnishes but aides to reason – they are 'metaphors we live by.' And metaphors can power sophisticated inferences, not just obvious ones…

El sometimiento de todas nuestras creencias a los juicios de la razón y las evidencias es una destreza antinatural, como la alfabetización y el cálculo, y ha de ser inculcada y cultivada.

What is a valid reason for someone to love someone else? Since apparently I'm doing it wrong.

Every life, every love, every action and feeling and thought has its reason and significance: its beginning, and the part it plays in the end. Sometimes, we do see.

Each day my reason tells me so; But reason doesn't rule in love, you know.

God's love for us is not the reason for which we should love him. God's love for us is the reason for us to love ourselves.

The danger of a closed mind is that it can also leave good things like love, compassion and reason on its outside.

A woman in love can't be reasonable - or she probably wouldn't be in love.

Now there is a final reason I think that Jesus says, 'Love your enemies.' It is this: that love has within it a redemptive power. And there is a power there that eventually transforms individuals.

Love knows no time, or distance, and it certainly knows no reason.