Quotes About Logic

The professor believed in thought. He was always telling his students that you could get to the unknown by using the known. If you just put the facts that you knew together in the proper way, you might get some truly amazing results.

when a person's commitment to evidence and logic grows dangerously thin or simply snaps under the burden of fear, wishful thinking, tribalism, or ecstasy, we recognize that he's being "religious.

If the evidence says you're wrong, you don't have the right theory. You change the theory, not the evidence.

No choice is ever made on the basis of logic; the logic is fabricated around the impulse, the initial desire which is innate and incontrovertible.

Where logic seems apparent: in bullfrogs or Black-Eyed Susans bird migrations patterns on the skin of newt or carp we go too far imagining a god of purposes.

For no art and no religion is possible until we make allowances, until we manage to keep quiet the enfant terrible of logic that plays havoc with the other faculties.

A sane accusation can be refuted. An insane accusation, one that makes no sense on any level, cannot be refuted, cannot even be addressed, because it is insolent nonsense. There is no sober way to defend oneself from the accusation of being a one-eyed one-horned flying purple people eater.

Reasoning by analogy is like filling balloons with liquid helium. It won't fly.

If Vulcans had a church, they'd be Catholics.

One of the great things about mental math is that the calculations can generally be done from either direction, and a certain symmetry generally is present.

I think we've established that her son is crazy, and crazy cancels out clever every time.

the soundness of an argument depends on its content and logical structure rather than on who offers it.

If a 'religion' is defined to be a system of ideas that contains unprovable statements, then Gödel taught us that mathematics is not only a religion, it is the only religion that can prove itself to be one.

Science is predicated upon the belief that the Universe is algorithmically compressible and the modern search for a Theory of Everything is the ultimate expression of that belief, a belief that there is an abbreviated representation of the logic behind the Universe's properties that can be written down in finite form by human beings.

If you're not thinking about numbers, you're probably not thinking.

Bernhard Riemann was a very pure case of the intuitive mathematician. This needs some explaining. The mathematical personality has two large components, the logical and the intuitive. Both are present in any good mathematician, but often one or the other is strongly dominant.

Man is not logical and his intellectual history is a record of mental reserves and compromises. He hangs on to what he can in his old beliefs even when he is compelled to surrender their logical basis.

We can have facts without thinking but we cannot have thinking without facts.

Whole object of intellectual education is formation of logical disposition

I am a mathematician, sir. I never permit myself to think.

Real life isn't required to be logical, but fiction has to make sense.

The life of sense begins by assuming that we can only fitfully live the life of reason.

It's not that I literally believe in magic or spirits. In my logical life I absolutely don't believe in any kind of mumbo jumbo. But I do have this belief in the greater magic of the universe.

Neither life nor happiness can be achieved by the pursuit of irrational whims.