Quotes About Reasoning

You see, it is a very dangerous thing to listen. If one listens one may be convinced; and a man who allows himself to be convinced by an argument is a thoroughly unreasonable person.

It is only intellectually lost who ever argue.

Logic is the kingdom of the unexpected. To think logically is to be perpetually astonished.

Now look here, old friend, I said. I know your bally heart is broken and all that, and at some future time I shall be delighted to hear all about it, but - I didn't come to talk about that. No? Good egg! The past, said young Bingo, is dead. Let us say no more about it. Right-o! I have been wounded to the very depths of my soul, but don't speak about it. I won't. Ignore it. Forget it. Absolutely! I hadn't seen him so dashed reasonable for days.

A swami may conceivably follow only the path of dry reasoning, of cold renunciation; but a yogi engages himself in a definite, step-by-step procedure by which the body and mind are disciplined and the soul gradually liberated. Taking nothing for granted on emotional grounds or by faith, a yogi practices a thoroughly tested series of exercises that were first mapped out by the ancient rishis. In every age of India, yoga has produced men who became truly free, true Yogi-Christs.

Dotado de una mentalidad eminentemente lógica y matemática, su conducta se basaba principalmente en el razonamiento. Mi madre, por su parte, era una reina de corazones y nos educó exclusivamente por medio del amor. Después de su fallecimiento, la ternura interior de mi padre comenzó a exteriorizarse más y entonces noté a menudo que su mirada parecía transformarse en la mirada de mi madre.

Consider morality. In some places people say that the gods laid down the rules people live by. In other places the gods or ancestors simply watch people and sanction their misdemeanours. In both cases people make a connection between moral understandings (intuitions, feelings and reasoning about what is ethical and what is not) and supernatural agents (gods, ancestors, spirits).

Over the years he began displaying that rarest of intellectual gifts—the ability and willingness to change his mind and do it in an orderly, well-reasoned way.

There were many times when logic was of no comfort.

Today we are apt to downplay or disregard the importance of good thinking to strong faith; and some, disastrously, even regard thinking as opposed to faith. They do not realize that in so doing they are not honoring God, but simply yielding to the deeply anti-intellectualist currents of Western egalitarianism, rooted, in turn, in the romantic idealization of impulse and blind feeling found in David Hume, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and their nineteenth- and twentieth-century followers.

Bluntly, to serve God well we must think straight; and crooked thinking, unintentional or not, always favors evil. And when the crooked thinking gets elevated into group orthodoxy, whether religious or secular, there is always, quite literally, "hell to pay." That is, hell will take its portion, as it has repeatedly done in the horrors of world history.

When multiple explanations exist, the simplest is usually correct.

For centuries, most of the devout had looked past vast amounts of scientific data and rational logic in defense of their faith.

the sum of the crowd's IQ was far below that of its most modest single member. Mobs have passions, not brains.

I now understand the need for faith – pure, blind, fly-in-the-face-of-reason faith – as a small life preserver in the wild and endless sea of a universe ruled by unfeeling laws and totally indifferent to the small, reasoning beings that inhabit it. Day

Occam's Razor: All other things being equal, the simplest solution is usually the correct one. —William of Occam, fourteenth century Darwin's Blade: All other things being equal, the simplest solution is usually stupidity. —Darwin Minor, twenty-first century

The emotional mind takes its beliefs to be absolutely true, and so discounts any evidence to the contrary. That is why it is so hard to reason with someone who is emotionally upset: no matter the soundness of your argument from a logical point of view, it carries no weight if it is out of keeping with the emotional conviction of the moment.

complexity—to reason—plummeted.

Según Damasio, para tomar una buena decisión tenemos que aplicar sentimientos a los pensamientos

Intelligence is not only the ability to reason; it is also the ability to find relevant material in memory and to deploy attention when needed.

The body moves naturally, automatically, unconsciously, without any personal intervention or awareness. But if we begin to use our faculty of reasoning, our actions become slow and hesitant.

The head follows the feet. We act first and find reasons later.

In the absence of evidence, superstition. It's a Middle Ages thing. That's my theory anyway.

The two operations of our understanding, intuition and deduction, on which alone we have said we must rely in the acquisition of knowledge.