Quotes About Reason

Belief is of four kinds. The first kind is a belief accepted because it is believed by all. The second is a belief accepted because it is believed by someone in whom the believer trusts. The third belief is the belief that reason helps one to believe. The fourth belief is conviction, of which one is as sure as if one were an eyewitness

Faith in the power of reason is the central pillar of the modern worldview.

Premoderns placed their trust in authority. Moderns lost their confidence in authority and placed it in human reason instead. Postmoderns kept the modern distrust of authority but lost their trust in reason and have found nothing to replace it. This is the crux of all postmodern thought.

Postmodernism involves the loss of any hope that some larger-than-human force—be it God or History or Progress or Science or Reason—is going to come to the aid of humanity and make everything all right in the end. Postmoderns believe that we make our own bed, historically speaking, and we have to lie in it; and that's all there is to say. Except, maybe, that we're not such good bed-makers.

Call him wise whose actions, words, and steps, are all a clear because to a clear why.

We are all hunting for rational reasons for believing in the absurd.

Science is the poetry of the intellect and poetry the science of the heart's affections.

The heaviest impact of the work of art is in the guts. Art does not reason. It manhandles you and changes you...

The word strategy only came into general use at the start of the nineteenth century. Its origins predated Napoleon and reflected the Enlightenment's growing confidence in empirical science and the application of reason.

Sometimes fear does the work of reason.

Religion is always an irrational enterprise, no matter how ennobling it may be to the human spirit.

Sometimes we have to do a thing in order to find out the reason for it. Sometimes our actions are questions, not answers.

Once you have learned to do your dreaming wide awake, to balance your sanity not on the razor's edge of reason but on the double support, the fine balance, of reason and dream; once you have learned that, you cannot unlearn it any more than you can unlearn to think.

We are called upon to obey and follow our Lord the Christ, but it is not because of any fear of Him or of the consequences if we did not follow; it is the love of Christ which constraineth us, as we are told in the Epistle for the first Sunday of Lend. It is because of our love and gratitude to Him that we must follow Him, that we must strain every nerve to make ourselves like Him. That is our reason--not fear but love.

You must appreciate that love is the last reason for which a man marries.

To continue in atheism, I would need to believe that nothing produces everything, non-life produces life, randomness produces fine-tuning, chaos produces information, unconsciousness produces consciousness, and non-reason produces reason. I simply didn't have that much faith.

Our Reason walks with weary, bruiséd feet. But Intuition soars with wings complete. The conscious mind is not so much the man As that subconscious force that knows Life's plan.

There is nothing without reason.

Now, as there is an infinity of possible universes in the Ideas of God, and as only one of them can exist, there must be a sufficient reason for God's choice, which determines him toward one rather than another. And this reason can be found only in the fitness, or the degrees of perfection, that these worlds contain, since each possible thing has the right to claim existence in proportion to the perfection it involves.

It is God who is the ultimate reason of things, and the Knowledge of God is no less the beginning of science than his essence and will are the beginning of things.

There are two famous labyrinths where our reason very often goes astray. One concerns the great question of the free and the necessary, above all in the production and the origin of Evil. The other consists in the discussion of continuity, and of the indivisibles which appear to be the elements thereof, and where the consideration of the infinite must enter in.

Although the whole of this life were said to be nothing but a dream and the physical world nothing but a phantasm, I should call this dream or phantasm real enough, if, using reason well, we were never deceived by it.

For, above all, I hold a notion of possibility and necessity according to which there are some things that are possible, but yet not necessary, and which do not really exist. From this it follows that a reason that always forces a free mind to choose one thing over another (whether that reason derives from the perfection of a thing, as it does in God, or from our imperfection) does not eliminate our freedom.

Being convinced that reason operates automatically within him he orders his life and his government upon emotion and superstition.