Quotes About Reason

St. Thomas is as practical and plain and reasonable in ethics as Aristotle, or Confucius, or your uncle.

the will can obey the passions instead of the reason, and this accounts for the fact that we often know what is good and what is evil—even what is good for us, what is truly best for us, for our own ultimate happiness—and yet choose evil over good, choose what we know is not in our own best interests. We can choose misery over joy if our will, led by our passions, commands our mind to focus on the short-range pleasures and ignore the long-run miseries.

it is possible to love one's friend for another reason than God, whereas God is the only reason for loving one's enemy.

we are fallen fools, most of our philosophy is not "the proper use of human reason" but the improper use of human reason.

T]o scorn the dictate of reason is to scorn the commandment of God (I-II,19,5).

From Socrates through Aquinas, reason meant primarily the understanding of the nature of reality, the knowledge of the essences of things.

Reason and truth themselves that are in question? Socrates never visited these terrifying heights and depths; they are distinctively modern and post-Christian. Socrates was a simple virgin; Christians are like married women (married to God), and modernists are like divorcees.

we have that the animal does not: reason and free will, or free choice.

Reason is His voice, His interior prophet, in our souls. We call that prophet conscience. (St. Thomas used two terms for it: "synderesis" was the awareness of its reality and truth and authority and rules, and "conscience" was the application of it. We use "conscience" for both.) Conscience is essentially the power of reason to know good and evil.

Heart" here refers especially to deep feeling or emotion. "Heart" means not only (1) intuitive reason ("the heart has its reasons") and (2) will

The real trouble with this world of ours is not that it is an unreasonable world, nor even that it is a reasonable one. The commonest kind of trouble is that it is nearly reasonable, but not quite. Life is not an illogicality; yet it is a trap for logicians. It looks just a little more mathematical and regular than it is; its exactitude is obvious, but its inexactitude is hidden; its wildness lies in wait.

We are by now well into the eighteenth century, when the Enlightenment identified the search for knowledge as the highest form of human activity. It was a time for scientists to wipe the metaphysical dust from their eyes.

The real trouble with this world of ours is not that it is an unreasonable world, nor even that it is a reasonable one. The commonest kind of trouble is that it is nearly reasonable, but not quite. Life is not an illogicality; yet it is a trap for logicians. It looks just a little more mathematical and regular than it is; its exactitude is obvious, but its inexactitude is hidden; its wildness lies in wait.3

One key reason for this is that the top-down, procedural planning approach is highly dependent on making predictions about the future based on past experience.

Reason is inherently expansionist. It seeks universal application.

The desire to replicate the—or a—viewer's view is realism's reason for being.

Without war the lower elements of mankind have increased all out of proportion. They threaten the educated few, those with scientific knowledge and training, the ones equipped to direct society. They have no regard for science or a scientific society, based on reason. And this Movement seeks to aid and abet them. Only when scientists are in full control can the—

If you intend to kill yourself you don't require a reason, in the usual sense of the term; just as, to contrary, when you intend to stay alive, no verbal, articulated, formal reason is necessary, one you can seize on if the issue comes up.

Had reason ever created a poem, or a symphony, or a painting? If rationality can't see things like the secret commonwealth, it's because rationality's vision is limited. The secret commonwealth is there. We can't see it with rationality any more than we can weigh something with a microscope: it's the wrong sort of instrument. We need to imagine as well as measure ...

But we shouldn't believe things because it makes us happy, she thought. We should believe things because they're true, and if that makes us unhappy that's very unfortunate, but it's not the fault of reason.

Capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.' You

Reason had brought her to this state. She had exalted reason over every other faculty. The result had been—was now—the deepest unhappiness she had ever felt.

Zuckerman, sucker though he was for seriousness, was still not going to be drawn into a discussion about agents and editors. If ever there was a reason for an American writer to seek asylum in Red China, it would be to put ten thousand miles between himself and those discussions.

That was how he got there, seeking asylum, hounded--the forlorn reason for a straight arrow so assertively uxorious, so intensely and spotlessly monogamous, hurling himself at such an extraordinary moment into a situation he would have thought he hated, the shameful fiasco of being untrue.