Quotes About Reason

Sometimes complex and difficult moral choices are decided less by reason and by right than by sentiment.

To understand the universe, our world, and all life in the world, you have to step out of time, which for living humanity is not an option, because we are a part of this painting, characters within it, able to perceive it only as a continuing series of events, episodes. However, because we are conscious creatures with the gift of reason, we can seek and learn and extrapolate from what we learn, and conceive the truth.

That was the splendid thing about life: Though it was cruel, it was also mysterious, filled with wonder and surprise; sometimes the surprises were so amazing that they qualified as miraculous, and by witnessing those miracles, a despondent person could discover a reason to live, a cynic could obtain unexpected relief from ennui, and a profoundly wounded boy could find the will to heal himself and medicine for melancholy.

A number of my fellow religious studies majors- muddled agnostics who didn't know which way was up, who were in the thrall of reason, that fools good for the bright- reminded me of the three toed sloth; and the three toed sloth, such a beautiful example of the miracle of life, reminded me of God.

When I was your age, I lived in bed, racked with polio. I asked myself every day, 'Where is God? Where is God? Where is God?' God never came. It wasn't God who saved me—it was medicine. Reason is my prophet and it tells me that as a watch stops, so we die. It's the end. If the watch doesn't work properly, it must be fixed here and now by us.

Be excessively reasonable and you risk throwing out the universe with the bathwater.

C'est ridicule. On ravale toutes ses larmes pendant des années et voilà qu'on pleure sans raison dans un salon d'essayage de Frank et Fils.

go upright among those who are down on their knees those with their backs turned those toppled in the dust you have survived not so that you might live you have little time you must give testimony be courageous when reason fails you be courageous in the final reckoning it is the only thing that counts and your helpless Anger - may it be like the sea whenever you hear the voice of the insulted and beaten

All gods who receive homage are cruel. All gods dispense suffering without reason. Otherwise they would not be worshipped.

How can a nation speak with one voice if they are not one? Don't forget, now. If you do, you encourage all the stupid but greedy and ambitious to sprout like toadstools and that's the end of right and reason in the state. Coddling and wheedling is not going to stop these destroyers. To a haughty belly, kindness is hard to swallow and harder to digest.

All gods dispense suffering without reason. Otherwise they would not be worshipped.

When your heart is first, you can be absent of heart but when you put spirit first, you have a reason for why you do heart.

Social media is basically the entire reason I have a career right now. Like everything, my readership for 'Nimona' came because I was active on Tumblr.

I don't know why I'm alive but I know there's a reason for it.

Ale rozum jest zawsze czym? mizernym wobec uczucia; jest ograniczony jak wszystko, co pozytywne; uczucie jest bez kresu. Rozumowa? tam, gdzie trzeba uczu?, to w?a?ciwo?? ma?ych dusz. Vandenesse

they said, as the soldiers and the dressers said, the perfunctory words, "Have patience! a little courage! What's the good of grieving? Suppose you kill yourself, what then? One gets accustomed to everything; be reasonable!

There are fools that love without calculation and wise men that calculate while they love.

Morning broke before the last song was finished. Lucien tried it over to a street-song of the day, to the consternation of Berenice and the priest, who thought that he was mad: — Lads, 'tis tedious waste of time To mingle song and reason; Folly calls for laughing rhyme, Sense is out of season.

if reason and poesy persist in wrangling with the tools, the brushes, we shall be brought to doubt, like Frenhofer, who is as much excited in brain as he is exalted in art. A sublime painter, indeed; but he had the misfortune to be born rich, and that enables him to stray into theory and conjecture. Do not imitate him. Work! work! painters should theorize with their brushes in their hands.

Reason is only a drug, and its effects cannot be permanent.

Reason I know, is only a drug, and, as such, its effects are never permanent. But, like the juice of the poppy, it often gives a temporary relief.

There had always been something rather brutal about (..._) common sense.

The world is a tragedy to those who feel, but a comedy to those who think.

Susan Haack make a similar point with her crossword-puzzle analogy. She develops the analogy and offers many other insights in a book I recommend to the reader with no reservations, Defending Science—Within Reason: Between Scientism and Cynicism (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2003