Quotes About Reason

Faith consists in believing when it is beyond the power of reason to believe. It is not enough that a thing be possible for it to be believed. – Voltaire

We must live by the light of our own self-satisfaction, through that secret vital busy inwardness which is even more remarkable than our reason.

It was extremely difficult to keep up any pace over the rocks since they were so unpredictable and devoid of reason. Their senselessness had never so much impressed me.

The loss of her reason did not seem to have made her unhappy

I cannot now remember the exact sequence of events in those prehistoric years. That we cannot remember such things, that our memory, which is our self, is tiny, limited and fallible, is also one of those important things about us, like our inwardness and our reason. Indeed it is the very essence of both.

You can only have the courage and strength to do what you think is right. It may turn out to be wrong, but you will at least have done it, and that is the important thing. We must act according to the best dictates of our reason, and then leave God to judge its ultimate value.

I have never, in all my life, not for one moment, been tempted toward religion of any kind. The fact is that I feel no spiritual void. I have my philosophy of life, which does not include any aspect of the supernatural and which I find totally satisfying. I am, in short, a rationalist and believe only that which reason tells me is so.

Old men tend to forget what thought was like in their youth; they forget the quickness of the mental jump, the daring of the youthful intuition, the agility of the fresh insight. They become accustomed to the more plodding varieties of reason, and because this is more than made up by the accumulation of experience, old men think themselves wiser than the young.

Humanists recognize that it is only when people feel free to think for themselves, using reason as their guide, that they are best capable of developing values that succeed in satisfying human needs and serving human interests.

I stand four-square for reason, and object to what seems to me to be irrationality, whatever the source. If you are on my side in this, I must warn you that the army of the night has the advantage of overwhelming numbers, and, by its very nature, is immune to reason, so that it is entirely unlikely that you and I can win out. We will always remain a tiny and probably hopeless minority, but let us never tire of presenting our view, and of fighting the good fight for the right.

How then to enforce peace? Not by reason, certainly, nor by education. If a man could not look at the fact of peace and the fact of war and choose the former in preference to the latter, what additional argument could persuade him? What could be more eloquent as a condemnation of war than war itself?

How then to enforce peace? Not by reason, certainly, nor by education. If a man could not look at the fact of peace and the fact of war and choose the former in preference to the latter, what additional argument could persuade him? What could be more eloquent as a condemnation of war than war itself? What tremendous feat of dialectic could carry with it a tenth the power of a single gutted ship with its ghastly cargo?

Logical but not reasonable. Wasn't that the definition of a robot?

I am a creature of dreams as well as of reason.

Who would bother hating, if it had to be reasoned out into sensibleness first?

público. No trató de razonar con ellos. Puede ser que cuanto mayor sea el grupo de gente, más fácilmente se les convence por la emoción que por la razón. Como las emociones son pocas y las razones muchas, el comportamiento de una masa de gente es más fácil de predecir que el comportamiento de una sola persona.

Nunca, en toda mi vida, ni siquiera por un momento, me he sentido tentado por ninguna religión de ningún tipo. El hecho es que no siento ningún vacío espiritual. Tengo mi filosofía de la vida, que no incluye ningún aspecto sobrenatural y que encuentro totalmente satisfactoria. En resumen, soy un racionalista y sólo creo lo que me dice la razón.

You can prove anything you want by coldly logical reason—if you pick the proper postulates.

Sin la interdependencia humana, desaparece el principal aliciente que ofrece la vida; se esfuman casi todos los valores intelectuales y falta una auténtica razón para vivir. La visualización no puede sustituir la presencia personal. Incluso los propios solarianos se dan cuenta de que la visualización no es más que un sentido a larga distancia.

If time is just a form of perception, or a category of reason, the past is as present as today: Cain continues to murder Abel.

I have seen these persons speak unthinkingly, not realizing that to speak is also to be. Word and gesture are man's thought. We should not speak without reason.

Love is a condition that tends to cloud men's reason, but it is not fatal. Usually all the patient needs is to have his love returned, and he will snap out of it and begin to sniff the air in search of new prey

de la pasión política, nadie escuchaba las voces razonables que llamaban al diálogo o la negociación.

It is time that scientists and other public intellectuals observed that the contest between faith and reason is zero-sum.