Quotes About Reason

If your opinion is sound, and you forego it for the love of God and follow that of another, you will win great merit. I have often heard that it is safer to accept advice than to give it. It may even come about that each of two opinions is good; but to refuse to come to an agreement with others when reason or occasion demand it, is a sign of pride and obstinacy.

You must rely on reason and science," she said, "and be guided by a likewise rational ethic of human concern. You must do your utmost as individuals to improve your understanding, ability and compassion.

Whatever the reason for it, dropping out is a symptom of a deeper problem in the system as a whole, not the problem itself. If you were running a business and every year you lost more than a third of your customers, you might start to wonder if the real problem was them or your business.

Woman without her man has no reason for living. With a colon and a comma, the writer would get a different reaction: Woman: without her, man has no reason for living.

The point of Zen is not to defy reason but to recognize the limitations of rationality.

We have been conditioned to treat rationality as sacred. But life itself is, in a very deep sense, absurd. It will not render itself to the tyranny of reason. Even the most wise cannot help but be flabbergasted by a three-year-old who keeps asking why. If you are not convinced, try asking yourself what is the reason for living. Life is basically a mystery that is not meant to be solved by our intellect. It cannot be "known" through the brain but through the heart.

Education is in no small measure preparing the way for the intellectual life and pointing to it. Those who cannot enter in at its gates are doomed, in Leonardo da Vinci's words, to "possess neither the profit nor the beauty of the world." For them life must be short, however many its years, and barren, however plentiful its acts. Their ears are deaf to the call of the indwelling Reason, and their eyes are blind to all the meaning and the values of human experience.

The things that mankind has tested and found right make for harmony and progress -- or peace; and the things it has found wrong hinder progress and make for discord. The right things lead to rational behavior -- such as the substitution of reason for force -- and so to freedom. The wrong things lead to brute force and slavery.

In a republican nation whose citizens are to be led by reason and persuasion and not by force," Jefferson wrote in an 1824 letter, "the art of reasoning becomes of first importance.

The revolutionary generation believed, to a man, that freedom and reason are the necessary preconditions of truth.

Common sense is the knack of seeing things as they are, and doing things as they ought to be done.

An explanation of cause is not a justification by reason.

Reason is the natural order of truth but imagination is the organ of meaning.

Faith... is the art of holding on to things your reason once accepted, despite your changing moods.

The more critical reason dominates, the more impoverished life becomes. When reason is overvalued, the individual suffers a loss. Relying more on facts and rationality than on imagination and theory detracts from the quality of a person's intellectual life.

If it be true that there can be no metaphysics transcending human reason, it is no less true that there can be no empirical knowledge that is not already caught and limited by the a priori structure of cognition.

The man who looks only outside and quails before the big battalions has no resource with which to combat the evidence of his senses and his reason.

22]"The fact is that archetypal images are so packed with meaning in themselves that people never think of asking what they really do mean...In reality, however, he has merely discovered that up till then he has never thought about his images at all. And when he starts thinking about them, he does so with the help of what he calls "reason"—which in point of fact is nothing more than the sum-total of all his prejudices and myopic viwes.

Reason becomes unreason when separated from the heart, and a psychic life void of universal ideas sickens from undernourishment. ~Carl Jung, The Symbolic Life, Page 311.

But people who are not above the general level of consciousness have not yet discovered that it is just as pre- sumptuous and fantastic to assume that matter produces mind, that apes give rise to human beings, that from the harmonious interplay of the drives of hunger, love, and power Kant's Critique of Pure Reason should have emerged, and that all this could not possibly be other than it is.

But it is the same with every single human being and his reasonably ordered world. His reason has done violence to natural forces which seek their revenge and only await the moment when the partition falls to overwhelm the conscious life with destruction.

This paraphrase not only sounds rationalistic but is meant to be so, for despite every effort the modern mind no longer understands our two-thousand-year-old theological language unless it "accords with reason." As a result, the danger that lack of understanding will be replaced by lip-service, affectation, and forced belief or else by resignation and indifference has long since come to pass.

As the mind explores the symbol, it is led to ideas that lie beyond the grasp of reason.

Faith is the art of holding on to things your reason has once accepted in spite of your changing moods