Quotes About Reasoning

doubts trigger disbelief only when you can't explain them away.

As Wilson puts it, what happens is that we come up with a plausible-sounding reason for why we might like or dislike something, and then we adjust our true preferences to be in line with that plausible-sounding reason.

And why? Because

An intelligent woman is a goldmine! She has the ability to learn, reason and understand things better and faster than her contemporaries. She is competent, alert and can reason out stuffs easily.

Patience and persistence are the keys... The keys to unlock doors of success... With these two virtues, you grow in reasoning and experience.

An anomaly has his own ambitions. You can try reasoning with him, but that's like using money to bribe a beast.

Intuition is neither a feeling, an inspiration nor a disorderly sympathy but a fully developed method.

The moving power of mathematical invention is not reasoning but imagination.

Because that was the problem with society. It cared too much about who you fell in love with but never about why. The why matters.

How can I argue with someone who makes no sense?

The only way to find out whether you're depressed is to listen to and watch yourself, to feel your feelings and then think about them. If you feel bad without reason most of the time, you're depressed. If you feel bad most of the time with reason, you're also depressed, though changing the reasons may be a better way forward than leaving circumstance alone and attacking the depression. If the depression is disabling to you, then it's major.

Prozac doesn't do it unless we help it along. Listen to the people who love you. Believe that they are worth living for even when you don't believe it. Seek out the memories depression takes away and project them into the future. Be brave; be strong; take your pills. Exercise because it's good for you even if every step weighs a thousand pounds. Eat when food itself disgusts you. Reason with yourself when you have lost your reason.

a person bound to the facts can never hope to best the rabble-rouser in the arena.

All week I kept the awful secret of my adoption to myself. I didn't even tell Stacey what I'd discovered, and Stacey is my best friend in the world. I wanted to talk to Stacey, but I couldn't. Not yet. There must, I thought, be some terrible reason for keeping my adoption a secret, but what could the terrible reason be?

We have this kind of shibboleth which says: what wasn't reasoned into existence can't be reasoned out. The truth I think is rather much closer to this: that people are making desperate efforts, rather heroic efforts, to be reasonable, to have a coherent worldview, and when those efforts become too costly or too embarrassing… dogma loses.

religious beliefs are simply beyond the scope of rational discourse.

Merely being offended, or worried, isn't a counter-argument. It isn't a deep reason not to think about something or discover whether or not something is true or useful.

There is a price to be paid for changing my worldview, and that price is good evidence and good arguments. That's the coin of the realm. If you come to me with good evidence and good arguments, I am going to be swayed to the degree that you deliver the goods.

Choices, efforts, intentions, and reasoning influence our behavior—but they are themselves part of a chain of causes that precede conscious awareness and over which we exert no ultimate control.

The point, of course, is that science increasingly allows us to identify aspects of our minds that cause us to deviate from norms of factual and moral reasoning—norms which, when made explicit, are generally acknowledged to be valid by all parties.

We have names for people who have many beliefs for which there is no rational justification. When their beliefs are extremely common we call them "religious"; otherwise, they are likely to be called "mad," "psychotic," or "delusional

Logic is like the sword--those who appeal to it shall perish by it.

Life is the art of drawing sufficient conclusions from insufficient premises.

Sir, I have found you an argument; but I am not obliged to find you an understanding.