Quotes About Reason

How great, I said to myself then, repeating the words of Vincent Belovacensis, the humblest beauty of this world, and how pleasing to the eye of reason the consideration of not only the modes and numbers and orders of things, so decorously established for the whole universe, but also the cycle of times that constantly unravel through successions and lapses, marked by the death of what has been born.

Listening to Monck's story, Lanny realized that this had been an oil war. Lack of oil was the reason the mad Führer had had to drop his program of bombing Britain out of the war and to fall back upon a defensive program.

Adolf Hitler taught that the masses did not think with their brains but with their blood; that is to say, they did not reason but were driven by instincts.

I've realized now that hope almost never goes together with reason. It's something quite irrational and instinctive.

The choice was whether to be sad and foolish or sad and reasonable.

Thucydides's ancient warning that "it is a habit of mankind to entrust to careless hope what they long for, and to use sovereign reason to thrust aside what they do not desire."16

Because things are not agreeable, said Jean Valjean, that is no reason for being unjust towards God.

Often the losing of a battle leads to the winning of progress. Less glory but greater liberty: the drum is silent and the voices of reason can be heard.

Often a battle is lost and progress is conquered. There is less glory and more liberty. The drum holds its peace; reason takes the word. It is a game in which he who loses wins.

Intellectual and moral growth is no less indispensable than material improvement. To know is a sacrament, to think is the prime necessity, truth is nourishment as well as grain. A reason which fasts from science and wisdom grows thin.

Ordinarily it ends in that ocean: revolution. Sometimes, however, coming from those lofty mountains which dominate the moral horizon, justice, wisdom, reason, right, formed of the pure snow of the ideal, after a long fall from rock to rock, after having reflected the sky in its transparency and increased by a hundred affluents in the majestic mien of triumph, insurrection is suddenly lost in some quagmire, as the Rhine is in a swamp.

The moment comes when protest is not enough; reason must give way to action, and force ensure what thought has conceived.

Bewigged tragedy has a reason for its existence.

Because things are unpleasant, said Jean Valjean, that is no reason for being unjust toward God.

Serious men, grave persons and reasonable people; favorite locutions of our sad world where egotism takes its word of command from pedantry

You don't reason with men like Hitler.

You don't reason with men like Hitler.

J.R.R. Tolkien, had it right in the lecture he gave just after he published The Hobbit. "Fantasy," he said in 1939, talking about fantastical prose fiction, "is a natural human activity. It certainly does not destroy or even insult Reason; and it does not either blunt the appetite for, nor obscure the perception of, scientific verity. On the contrary. The keener and the clearer is the reason, the better fantasy will it make.

I don't believe in empirical science. I only believe in a priori truth.

The world isn't purposeful. It isn't ruled by reason. The world wants to play. Fashion queens have always aroused more interest than future generations and their fate.

The public health authorities never mention the main reason many Americans have for smoking heavily, which is that smoking is a fairly sure, fairly honorable form of suicide.

I am eternally grateful.. for my knack of finding in great books, some of them very funny books, reason enough to feel honored to be alive, no matter what else might be going on.

More recently, the intellectual historian Gertrude Himmelfarb has maintained that justice, reason, and the love of humanity "are, in fact, predominantly, perhaps even uniquely, Western values."19

Common sense is wisdom with its sleeves rolled up.