Quotes About Reason

Immigration is a legitimate concern, but it's not a good reason to leave the E.U.

All human language draws its nature and value from the fact that it both comes from the Word of God and is chosen by God to manifest himself. But this relationship is secret and incomprehensible, beyond the bounds of reason and analysis.

Mais celui qui parle le langage de la raison est celui qui aime le moins. Gauvain savait déjà cette vérité-là (52).

Derjenige, der die Sprache der Vernunft spricht, ist derjenige, der am wenigsten liebt.

As for the anonymous admonition about moderation and forbearance, how could the time for moderation be past? That would mean that reason is of no use to us. .

There are two great gifts, or faculties, by which men attain to truth: faith and reason.

We believe, it seems, where we ought to reason. We reason where we ought to believe. We believe too blindly and not blindly enough. We reason too closely and not closely enough.

Disputes are not to be decided by the weight of authority, but by the force of reason.

Make a point never so clear, it is great odds that a man whose habits and the bent of whose mind lie a contrary way, shall be unable to comprehend it. So weak a thing is reason in competition with inclination.

In time action becomes habit, and habit can wear reason away, leaving no traces.

Without God, our reason is an accident of the cosmos, as ultimately inconsequential as the spinning of the planet or the pulling of the tides. Reason becomes unimportant, and hence untenable. Without God we have only belief, and yet we are left with nothing to believe in.

The best reason for putting anything down on paper is that one may then change it.

Irrationality is the opposite of rationality: it means unreasonable, unfounded, ill-conceived. Irrationality is reason, practiced badly. A trance brought about by ecstatic dancing or drumming is certainly not rational, but it isn't irrational either. It's non-rational—it belongs to another category of experience entirely. Indeed, much of its value lies quite precisely in the fact that it takes us on a holiday away from reason—

Ils n'ont aucune raison de faire du business avec nous. Tu fais des affaires avec tes souris de laboratoires ou tes grenouilles d'élevages?

Go ahead; embark on your journey now—walk the path of Goodness, Life, Law, and Reason.

Io credo alla dolce violenza che la ragione usa agli uomini. A lungo andare, non le sanno resistere. […] Il pensare è uno dei massimi piaceri concessi al genere umano.

Then I will tell you something. I do not believe in it. Forty years among men has consistently taught me that they are not amenable to common sense. Show them the red tail of a comet, fill them with black terror, and they will all come running out of their houses and break their legs. But tell them one sensible proposition and support it with seven reasons, and they will simply laugh in your face

Girl Tractorist: As the poet Mayakovsky said: "The home of the Soviet people shall be the home of Reason"!

La verità riesce ad imporsi solo nella misura in cui noi la imponiamo; la vittoria della ragione non può essere che la vittoria di coloro che ragionano.

No one supposes, when he sees a forester pruning a copse to help the trees to grow, or a gardener hunting for snails, tending young plants under glass frames, or exposing them to the health-giving heat of a conservatory, that these things are done from a feeling of affection for the vegetable kingdom. And yet care for it he does, much more so than cold reason would suppose. This affection, however, is not the motivating reason for his pains; it is rather their necessary accompaniment.

Reason is a harmonising, controlling force rather than a creative one.

Real life is, to most men, a long second-best, a perpetual compromise between the ideal and the possible but the world of pure reason knows no compromise, no practical limitations, no barrier to the creative activity.

Emotion as well as reason belongs to the very stuff of history.

Every argument that can be brought against a stereotyped creed for adults, tells with tenfold force against a stereotyped catechism for children. If it is evil to try and mould the thought of those whose maturity ought to be able to protect them against pressure from without, it is certainly far more evil to mould the thought of those whose still unset reason is ductile in the trainer's hand.