Quotes About Logic

Irrationality. I found the thought faintly pleasurable. Or rather, I felt at ease with it. What frightened me was the logic of the world; in it lay the foretaste of something incalculably powerful. Its mechanism was incomprehensible, and I could not possibly remain closeted in that windowless, bone-chilling room. Though outside lay the sea of irrationality, it was far more agreeable to swim in its waters until presently I drowned.

Irrationality. I found the thought faintly pleasurable. Or rather, I feel at ease with it. What frightened me was the logic of the world; in it lay the foretaste of something incalculably powerful. Its mechanism was incomprehensible, and I could not possibly remain closeted in that windowless, bone-chilling room. Though outside lay the sea of irrationality, it was far more agreeable to swim in its water until presently, I drowned.

Men speak words that sound quite grand, but all the while they spend their days concerned about predicting the thoughts of their adorable little wife. Whether it is prosperity, success, or victory—these ambitions come from the desire to please that single, beautiful wife. They add all kinds of logic to it and work hard at it, but all they want is to be praised.

There is always a contradiction between religion and common sense.

Man is a rational animal who always loses his temper when called upon to act according with the dictates of reason.

Man is a rational animal who always loses his temper when he is called upon to act in accordance with the dictates of reason.

Logic, when used correctly and by an intellect that is not corrupted by the lower passions, may lead to one to the Transcendent itself.

Rationalism is false not because it seeks to express reality in rational mode, so far as this possible, but because it seeks to embrace the whole of reality in the realm of reason, as if the reason coincides with the very principle of things.

That there is, besides a necessity of cause and effect — which I may call the logic of space — another necessity, an organic necessity in life, that of Destiny — the logic of time — is a fact of the deepest inward certainty

Is there a logic of history? Is there, beyond all the casual and incalculable elements of the separate events, something that we may call a metaphysical structure of historic humanity, something that is essentially independent of the outward forms — social, spiritual and political — which we see so clearly?

The danger of insanity is always present in those who try to penetrate the discipline of logic and pure knowledge.

Memory, then, is a necessary part of the logical faculty. … The proposition A = A must have a psychological relation to time, otherwise it would be At1 = At2.

If the philosophy of the Middle Ages is based on the logic of Aristotle, their science can be traced rather to the Greek thought of pre-Aristotelian times. For authority it relied very largely on a single dialogue of Plato, to which may be added Latin translations of a small part of Hippocrates, and of his post-Christian successor and interpreter, Galen.

And this, Magozzi thought, was the dreaded black place. The desperate place where people always went when anger and fear couldn't find any other answer, the place that obliterated logic and compassion and reason and all the other higher functions of the human mind that civilization had fostered.

just because a point is well made, doesn't mean it's right.

For Einstein, as for Gödel, philosophy without ontology was an illusion, and physics without philosophy reduced to engineering.

Godel continued drawing conclusions beyond the point where Einstein stopped.

Cats can work out mathematically the exact place to sit that will cause most inconvenience.

Two plus two always equals four. Balls dropped off roofs always fall. Your every thought always affects physical reality.

There is, plainly, no deep logic to the unfolding of time.

Let reason alone decide

One of the things I always tell the police and families is that while everything is possible, not all things are probable. You can't waste a lot of investigative effort on an extremely unlikely scenario; you have to stay with what makes sense.

The evidence should guide you to a theory; you should not be allowing the theory to guide the evidence upon which you focus.

Groupthink stifles the possibility of suspending one's assumptions. In fact, its whole purpose is to elevate and protect those assumptions from any assault by logic. Creative and synergistic communication is doomed within groups infected with the symptoms of groupthink. Any new or unusual notions quickly fall victim to the group's terminal sense of certainty.