Quotes About Reason

The World's Fair audience tended to think of the machine as unqualifiedly good, strong, stupid and obedient. They thought of it as a giant slave, an untiring steel Negro, controlled by Reason in a world of infinite resources.

The doctrine that future happiness depends upon belief is monstrous. It is the infamy of infamies. The notion that faith in Christ is to be rewarded by an eternity of bliss, while a dependence upon reason, observation and experience merits everlasting pain, is too absurd for refutation, and can be relieved only by that unhappy mixture of insanity and ignorance, called 'faith.

He was a worshiper of liberty, a friend of the oppressed. A thousand times I have heard him quote these words: "For Justice all place a temple, and all season, summer." He believed that happiness is the only good, reason the only torch, justice the only worship, humanity the only religion, and love the only priest.

if there's no need to climb, then there's no reason to learn how to climb.

The world of affairs, as I have experienced it, is a very ambiguous one. The problem of preparing people to serve and be served by this society is, as Chesterton says, that the world is nearly reasonable but not quite. It is not illogical, yet it is a trap for logicians.

All my life I have had this inclination to yield only to gentleness and reason—and to resist all pressure.

This is the terror I mean; this is the terror that strangles reason with the clawing hands of panic. I saw it twice, I felt it pluck at me twice. But it was rare. It claimed few victims. Courage was a commonplace.

There are three sources of belief: reason, custom, inspiration. The Christian religion, which alone has reason, does not acknowledge as her true children those who believe without inspiration. It is not that she excludes reason and custom. On the contrary, the mind must be open to proofs, must be confirmed by custom, and offer itself in humbleness to inspirations, which alone can produce a true and saving effect

A motorcycle functions entirely in accordance with the laws of reason, and a study of the art of motorcycle maintenance is really a miniature study of the art of rationality itself.

But Einstein knew that its central thesis was wrong. Why? Because he knew in his very bones that there could be no reason, nor any special purpose, for a Divinity. Mankind had made it all up out of whole cloth because, at bottom, everyone was afraid of the dark, afraid of ultimate extinction, afraid to face the fact that individual lives meant nothing in the grand scheme of a vast and utterly indifferent cosmos.

That God does not play dice with the universe. The cosmos cannot simply be a game, designed at random and made without reason. But perhaps He is playing some other game. A game we don't know yet, with rules we can't understand.

Reason has always existed, but not always in a reasonable form." ? Karl Marx

I like to tease Rowan that he can go ahead and try to reason his way to a new world, but my generation intends to dance our way there.

the irrational will have its say, perhaps because 'irrational' is the wrong word for it.

Myself: But wasn't the decision a right one? Am I not here? What more could Feeling have achieved than was brought about by Reason?

I saw no reason why hell should not have, so to speak, visible branch establishments throughout the earth, and I have visited quite a few of them since.

In some curious way the battle at Verdun had become a paradigm for the entire war. Verdun now exerted its own dynamic and needed no reason to continue. By the middle of 1916 it was, or should have been, clear to all that there was no reason in it; reason had ceased to play any part in this struggle.

Now and again, the history of war throws up a battle that transcends reason. The soldiers fight because they cannot stop fighting, because too much has been committed to give up now. Too much blood has been shed, so much courage and will has been committed, that to admit defeat would be unthinkable.

No existe el caos en el universo. Todo tiene su razón de ser, todo lo que te haya pasado o haya de pasarte. Recuerda lo que dije, John: cada experiencia conlleva una lección que aprender. Así que no insistas en lo secundario. Disfruta de la vida.

Encouraged by the Scholastics and embodied in the great medieval universities founded by the church, faith in the power of reason infused Western culture, stimulating the pursuit of science and the evolution of democratic theory and practice.

the truly fundamental basis for the rise of the West was an extraordinary faith in reason and progress that was firmly rooted in Christian theology, in the belief that God is the rational creator of a rational universe.

And therefore, according as any one is more anxious in demanding a reason, by so much will he be the firmer in preserving his faith.9

That's how I gained a lifelong fondness for repeating certain phrases beyond the point of all reason.

For more on the core concerns and how to manage them in negotiation, see Roger Fisher and Daniel Shapiro, Beyond Reason: Using Emotions As You Negotiate (Penguin, 2006).