Quotes About Reasoning

There is an astonishing imagination, even in the science of mathematics.

Common sense invents and constructs no less than its own field than science does in its domain. It is, however, in the nature of common sense not to be aware of this situation.

The computer was, to the best of my feelings about the subject, not thinking like a mathematician, and it was much more successful, because it was thinking not like a mathematician.

The basis of the discovery is imagination, careful reasoning and experimentation where the use of knowledge created by those who came before is an important component.

About weak points [of the Origin] I agree. The eye to this day gives me a cold shudder, but when I think of the fine known gradations, my reason tells me I ought to conquer the cold shudder.

Science is not about consensus, and consensus is not science.

The only hope [of science] ... is in genuine induction.

All science is intelligent inference; excessive literalism is delusion, not a humble bowing to evidence.

Belief is no substitute for arithmetic.

In terms of doing things I take a fairly scientific approach to why things happen and how they happen. I don't know if there's a god or not...

A man of logic is a man of sin.

Any ceremony performed in the absence of reasonable knowledge as to cause and effect is magic.

You can use logic to justify just about anything, that's its power and its flaw.

The language of experiment is more authoritative than any reasoning: facts can destroy our ratiocination—not vice versa.

Circular reasoning is infallible even if not exactly logical, and this is why so many of us so often resort to it—not so much to resolve baffling problems, but to be absolved of the obligation to worry about them.

Lincoln characterized Stephen Douglas's argument as a specious and fantastic arrangement of words, by which a man can prove a horse chestnut to be a chestnut horse.

His latest theory about his dealings with women isn't that he's lost his reason or that women are illogical (Deb, for instance, displays exemplary thought processes;) it's just that a certain vital part of the interface between them is strongly encrypted and requires some workaround.

The light obtained by setting straw men on fire is not what we mean by illumination.

demonstrates quite clearly Swift's maxim that you cannot reason someone out of a position they did not reason themselves into.

As Jonathan Swift said in 1721: 'Reasoning will never make a Man correct an ill Opinion, which by Reasoning he never acquired.

The tyrant will always find a pretext for his tyranny, and it is useless for the innocent to try by reasoning to get justice, when the oppressor intends to be unjust.

I believe that the vividness experienced in the reading of words is automatically modulated by the constant activation of the reasoning centers of the brain that are used in the process of cocreating the representation of reality the author has intended. By contrast, the visceral vividness portrayed on television has the capacity to trigger instinctual responses similar to those triggered by reality itself -- and without being modulated by logic, reason, and reflective thought.

We don't need to be constantly reasonable in order to have good relationships; all we need to have mastered is the occasional capacity to acknowledge with good grace that we may, in one or two areas, be somewhat insane.

established views have frequently emerged not through a process of faultless reasoning, but through centuries of intellectual muddle. There may be no good reason for things to be the way they are.