Quotes About Reason

But as sociologist Tressie McMillan Cottom observed, "Whiteness defends itself. Against change, against progress, against hope, against black dignity, against black lives, against reason, against truth, against facts, against native claims, and against its own laws and customs.

You have to have faith that there is a reason you go through certain things. I can't say I'm glad to go through pain, but in a way one must, in order to gain courage and really feel joy.

I think that in terms of emotion, that our culture allows men to be angry. The animal rights movement gives men a legitimate reason to be angry. I don't think our culture should give men any more reason--that the animal rights movement should not be the place to give men more reasons to be angry. That is not what we need in the world.

This child did not need to "change his behaviors." We needed to understand his behaviors and what they suggested as the probable underlying reason for the behaviors. We needed to remember that behaviors are a message, a symptom—not a diagnosis.

A stereotype might bend or even shatter under the weight of disconfirming information, but the hallmark of prejudice is that it is impervious to reason, experience, and counterexample.

was Aristotle who said it: "All human actions have one or more of seven causes," and then he named them: chance, nature, compulsion, habit, reason, passion, and desire.

You might imagine that a person would resort to self-mutilation only under extremes of duress, but once I'd crossed that line the first time, taken that fateful step off the precipice, then almost any reason was a good enough reason, almost any provocation was provocation enough. Cutting was my all-purpose solution.

Forgiveness is a mystical act, not a reasonable one.

Love overcame reason...I had rather beg my bread with him than to be the greatest queen christened.

Let me know what I am able and trust that behind all events no matter how painful there is a reason from which truth can come.

Science is the refusal to believe on the basis of hope.

Enjoy the present, bid defiance to the future, laugh at all those reasonable beings who exercise their reason to avoid the misfortunes which they fear, destroying at the same time the pleasure that they might enjoy.

We love without heeding reason, and cease to love in the same manner.

Hope is nothing but a deceitful flatterer accepted by reason only because it is often in need of palliatives.

Centuries later, John Rawls wrote of the same possibility: "The benefits from discussion lie in the fact that even representative legislators are limited in knowledge and the ability to reason. No one of them knows everything the others know, or can make all the same inferences that they can draw in concert. Discussion is a way of combining information and enlarging the range of arguments.

Man, being reasonable, must get drunk; the best of life is but intoxication.

There is more to life, and less to the traditional explanations of it, than meets the eye unaided by reason.

The heart of metaphor is inference. Conceptual metaphor allows inferences in sensory-motor domains (e.g., domains of space and objects) to be used to draw inferences about other domains (e.g., domains of subjective judgment, with concepts like intimacy, emotions, justice, and so on). Because we reason in terms of metaphor, the metaphors we use determine a great deal about how we live our lives.

I live to hail that season by gifted one foretold, when men shall live by reason, and not alone by gold.

Faith preceded understanding, and so faith informed and shaped understanding. Working from this principle, Kuyper insisted that reason, natural science, and methodological naturalism were not ideologically neutral. Even the most technical of natural sciences, he observed, operated within the framework of the faith, or higher commitments, of the practitioner.

Newton was not the first of the age of reason," wrote Keynes. "He was the last of the magicians, the last of the Babylonians and Sumerians, the last great mind which looked out on the visible and intellectual world with the same eyes as those who began to build our intellectual inheritance rather less than 10,000 years ago.

Perhaps that is the secret. It is not what we do, so much as why we do it.

It's not what we do, so much as why we do it.

Vanity is the quicksand of reason.