Quotes About Reason

Opinion is called the queen of the world; it is so, for when reason opposes it, it is condemned to death. It must rise twenty times from its ashes to gradually drive away the usurper.

The birth of science was the death of superstition.

A bearer of news of death appears to himself as very important. His feeling - even against all reason - makes him a messenger from the realm of the dead.

Whether outright government-sanctioned persecution was inevitable, nobody could say for sure, but the fear of persecution was such that not even a practical man grounded in his everyday tasks, a person who tried his best to contain the uncertainty and the anxiety and the anger and operate according to the dictates of reason, could hope to preserve his equilibrium any longer.

I'm talking to a virtually inhumanly disciplined, rational person who has lost all sense of proportion and entered into a desperate story of unreasonable wishes. Yet that is what it is to be in life, isn't it? What it is to forge a life. You know your reason can reassert itself at any time - and if it does, there goes life and the instability that is life.

I find a simple answer in the Bible's overarching theme that God is love. That quality, more than anything else, makes clear the reason behind all creation. Love cannot really exist without an object to receive it.

He would henceforth worship and defend the very reason for Joy, the Almighty Maker of Joy.

À toutes mes haines acidulées, vous avez donné le narcotique raisonnable.

It's not at all uncommon to find a person's desires compelling him to go against his reason, and to see him cursing himself and venting his passion on the source of the compulsion within him. It's as if there were two warring factions, with passion fighting on the side of reason. But I'm sure you won't claim that you had ever, in yourself or in anyone else, met a case of passion siding with his desires against the rational mind, when the rational mind prohibits resistance.

True opinions are a fine thing and do all sorts of good so long as they stay in their place; but they will not stay long. They run away from a man's mind, so they are not worth much until you tether them by working out the reason. Once they are tied down, they become knowledge, and are stable.

A poet, you see, is a light thing, and winged and holy, and cannot compose before he gets inspiration and loses control of his senses and his reason has deserted him.

Wars and revolutions and battles, you see, are due simply and solely to the body and its desires. All wars are undertaken for the acquisition of wealth; and the reason why we have to acquire wealth is the body, because we are slaves in its service.

Eros guides us to Logos.

Cuando se suscita en el alma alguna rebelión, la cólera toma siempre las armas en favor de la razón.

Y si al que está en esas condiciones se le acerca alguien y le dice tranquilamente la verdad, esto es, que no hay en él razón alguna, que está privado de ella y que la razón es algo que no se puede adquirir sin entregarse completamente a la tarea de conseguirla, ¿crees que es fá­cil que haga caso quien está sometido a tantas malas in­fluencias?

The human soul is composed of reason, will & desire

In men the nature of the genital organs is disobedient and self-willed, like a creature that is deaf to reason, and it attempts to dominate all because of its frenzied lusts.

Los hombres todos están persuadidos de que la virtud puede ser adquirida. Porque nadie castiga a un hombre malo sólo por ha sido malo, a no ser que se trate de alguna bestia feroz que castigue para saciar su crueldad. Pero el que castiga con razón, castiga, no por las faltas pasadas, porque ya no es posible que lo que ya ha sucedido deje de suceder, sino por las faltas que puedan sobrevenir, para que el culpable no reincida y sirva de ejemplo a los demás su castigo.

No man has wit enough to reason with a fool, Zin.

Hope against reason: an opiate she'd long abandoned.

Unreason is an essential medicine as long as you do not overdose.

The source of magic in this world is more mysterious than all the explanations that sorcerers and wizards have given for it, and it is more prevalent than can be understood by those who live according to the constricted form of reason so prevalent in our time.

The why of the mind's existence and the how of its profound capacity to reason - especially its penchant for moral reasoning - will by their very nature remain as mysterious as whatever lies outside of time.

When the constellation of Cassiopeia is in this hemisphere and I am able to identify it, I feel less alone. This isn't a reasoned response to a configuration of stars, but the heart cannot flourish on logic alone. Unreason is an essential medicine as long as you do not overdose.