Quotes About Reason

Habit is stronger than reason

The contemporary world has turned its back on the attempt and even on the desire to live reasonably.

faith in the intellect...is the only faith yet sanctioned by its fruits

We speak in (rich) monotones. Our poetry is haunted by the music it has left behind. Orpheus shrinks to a poet when he looks back, with the impatience of reason, on a music stronger than death.

The Nobel Prize is an honor unique in the world in having found its way into the hearts and minds of simple people everywhere. It casts a light of peace and reason upon us all and for that I am especially grateful.

Government is not reason, it is not eloquence. It is force, and like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master.

Let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion. Reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.

Government is not reason it is not eloquent it is force. Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master.

Government is not reason, it is not eloquence, it is force; like fire, a troublesome servant and a fearful master. Never for a moment should it be left to irresponsible action.

Government is not reason; it is not eloquence; it is force. Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master.

it is impossible to reason people out of affiliations they have not been reasoned into.

More often than not, nothingness is reluctantly and despairingly taken to be the only hypothesis possible when all the others have failed, since by definition it cannot be disproven and is beyond the scope of reason.

For those who have the habit of prayer, thought is too often a mere alibi, a sly way of deciding to do what one wants to do.  Reason will always obscure what we wish to keep in the shadows.

For those who have the habit of prayer, thought is too often a mere alibi, a sly way of deciding to do what one wants to do. Reason will always obscure what we wish to keep in the shadows. A worldling can think out the pros and cons and sum up his chances. No doubt. But what are our chances worth? We who have admitted once and for all into each moment of our puny lives the terrifying presence of God?...What is the use of working out chances? There are no chances against God.

One thing I don't think that we have enough of in wine writing is the use of cause and effect. Whatever wine tastes like, whatever you're going to do with it, it is as it is for a reason.

There's never a reason to trust someone. If there's a reason, then it's not trust.

Though this be madness, yet there is method in 't.

We should chiefly depend not upon that department of the soul which is most superficial and fallible (our reason), but upon that department that is deep and sure, which is instinct.

Every advance in social progress removes us more and more from the guidance of instinct, obliging us to depend upon reason for the assurance that our habits are really agreeable to the laws of health.

Impulse without reason is not enough, and reason without impulse is a poor makeshift.

Reason, ruling alone, is a force confining; and passion, unattended, is a flame that burns to its own destruction.

Modern man's besetting temptation is to sacrifice his direct perceptions and spontaneous feelings to his reasoned reflections; to prefer in all circumstances the verdict of his intellect to that of his immediate intuitions.

Well-bred instinct meets reason halfway.

A true history of human events would show that a far larger proportion of our acts are the results of sudden impulses and accident than of that reason of which we so much boast.