Quotes About Reason

Madurez: atisbo de entendimiento del mundo y de uno mismo, intuición del equilibrio de las cosas. Acercamiento entre la razón y el corazón. Conocimiento de los propios deseos y los propios miedos.

The emphasis on empathy accomplishes several significant goals in view of a posthuman theory of subjectivity. Firstly, it reappraises communication as an evolutionary tool. Secondly, it identifies in emotions, rather than in reason, the key to consciousness.

Even the wisest of mankind cannot live by reason alone; pure arrogant reason, denying the claims of prejudice (which commonly are also the claims of conscience), leads to a wasteland of withered hopes and crying loneliness, empty of God and man: the wilderness in which Satan tempted Christ was not more dreadful than the arid expanse of intellectual vanity deprived of tradition and intuition, where modern man is tempted by his own pride.

Spinoza writes, "A free man, that is to say, a man who lives according to the dictates of reason alone, is not led by fear of death, but directly desires the good, that is to say, desires to act, and to preserve his being in accordance with the principle of seeking his own profit. He thinks, therefore, of nothing less than death, and his wisdom is a meditation upon life.

A free man, that is to say, a man who lives according to the dictates of reason alone, is not led by fear of death, but directly desires the good, that is to say, desires to act, and to preserve his being in accordance with the principle of seeking his own profit. He thinks, therefore, of nothing less than death, and his wisdom is a meditation upon life.

Kui maailma valitses mõistus, kas siis ajalugu üldse olekski?

It is a positive starting point for philosophy when Aristotle says that philosophy begins with wonder, not as in our day with doubt. Moreover the world will learn that the thing is not to begin with the negative, and the reason why it has succeeded up to the present is that it has never really given itself over to the negative, and so has never seriously done what it said. Its doubt is mere child's play.

she does not suspect how much reason I have for deprecating all sympathy.

A person in sorrow or distress knows why he sorrows or is distressed. If you ask a melancholic what reason he has for his condition, what it is that weighs him down, he will replay, 'I don't know, what it is, I cannot explain it.' (pp499)

Guilt. Does anyone escape it? Is guilt the reason we make up stories?

When...did it become irrational to dislike religion, any religion, even to dislike it vehemently? When did reason get redescribed as unreason? When were the fairy stories of the superstitious placed above criticism, beyond satire? A religion was not a race. It was an idea, and ideas stood (or fell) because they were strong enough (or too weak) to withstand criticism, not because they were shielded from it. Strong ideas welcomed dissent.

to admit we do not understand a phenomenon is not to admit the presence of the miraculous but merely, reasonably, to accept the limitations of human knowledge. God was invented to explain what our ancestors couldn't comprehend: the radiant mystery of being. The existence of the incomprehensible, however, is not a proof of god.

In ancient times,' Quichotte said, in a last appeal to reason, 'when a woman was accused of witchcraft, the proofs were that she has a familiar, usually a cat, plus a broomstick and a third nipple for the Devil to suck on. But almost all homes had cats and brooms and in those days many people's bodies had warts. Thus the mere accusation, witch!, was all that was required. The proof was in every home and on every woman's body and therefore all women so accused were automatically guilty.

One's goal is the shedding of mental obstacles that prevent one from being flooded with the glorious universal, Love as Being. It is a goal, therefore, that requires of us the absolute and irreversible abandonment of reason, for love is without reason, above it and beyond it; it comes without a rational explanation and lives on when there is no reason for it to survive.

Reason may catnap for a time, but the irrational is more often comatose. In the end it will be the irrational that is forever caged in dreams, while reason gains the day.

In ancient times,' Quichotte said, in a last appeal to reason, 'when a woman was accused of witchcraft, the proofs were that she had a familiar, usually a cat, plus a broomstick and a third nipple for the Devil to suck on. But almost all homes had cats and brooms and in those days many people's bodies had warts. Thus the mere accusation, witch!, was all that was required. The proof was in every home and on every woman's body and therefore all women so accused were automatically guilty.

What I hoped for is indeed beyond hope,' he said. 'I was out of my mind, looking for this year's birds in last year's nests. And all around me America – and not only America, the whole human race! – yes, even our India! – was also losing its reason, its capacity for ethics, its goodness, its soul. And it may be, I can't say, that this deep failure brought down upon us the deeper failure of the cosmos

This thing: information got abolished sometime in the twentieth century, can't say just when; stands to reason, that's part of the information that got abolsh, abolished. Since then we've been living in a fairy-story.

The only angels we need invoke are those of our better nature: reason, honesty, and love. The only demons we must fear are those that lurk inside every human mind: ignorance, hatred, greed, and faith , which is surely the devil's masterpiece.

The faith of religion is belief on insufficient evidence.

Reason is nothing less than the guardian of love

Religious moderation is the product of secular knowledge and scriptural ignorance. [...] By failing to live by the letter of the texts [scripture], while tolerating the irrationality of those who do, religious moderates betray faith and reason equally.

How is it that, in this one area of our lives [religion], we have convinced ourselves that our beliefs about the world can float entirely free of reason and evidence?

There is no society in human history that ever suffered because its people became too reasonable.