Quotes About Reasoning

It is useless to attempt to reason a man out of a thing he was never reasoned into.

It is not an unbroken succession of drinking-bouts and of merrymaking, not sexual love, not the enjoyment of the fish and other delicacies of a luxurious table, which produce a pleasant life; it is sober reasoning, searching out the grounds of every choice and avoidance, and banishing those beliefs through which the greatest disturbances take possession of the soul.

Non bisogna ragionare sulla natura per enunciati privi di riscontro oggettivo e formulazioni di principi teorici, ma in base a ciò che l'esperienza sensibile richiede.

Meglio essere saggi e sfortunati che sciocchi e molto fortunati. È preferibile che un'azione pianificata con giudizio fallisca piuttosto che qualcosa preparato senza ragionarci su venga premiato dalla sorte.

The Greeks invented logic but were not fooled by it.

Bonhoeffer openly thought things through and taught his students to do the same. They followed lines of reasoning to their logical conclusions and considered every angle to have a sense of absolute thoroughness, so that nothing depended on mere emotion.

respect for truth and for other human beings of different opinions formed the foundation of a civil society in which one might disagree graciously and might reason together civilly and productively.

You can speak of the ethical foundations of science, but you cannot speak of the scientific foundations of ethics.

Science without math is religion

A rational mind is sometimes the queerest mixture of rationality and irrationality on earth.

I have learned over the years that the higher the level of emotion, the lower the level of reasoning. For example, if your emotions are at the highest level of 10, your ability to reason is at a 0. If it's a 9 then your reasoning is a 1. I am not suggesting that emotions don't have their place, but taking actions based purely on emotions is dangerous and could cost you everything.

Philosophy springs from the love of being; it is man's loving endeavor to perceive the order of being and attune himself to it. Gnosis desires dominion over being; in order to seize control of being the gnostic constructs his system. The building of systems is a gnostic form of reasoning, not a philosophical one.

Thinking. A process by which I use my brain to make a rational decision.

We may reason on to our heart's content, the fog won't lift.

It's an iron rule of mine that I never argue correlation versus causation in the middle of the night, especially when I had an alternative option.

The timing alone argues against that hypothesis.

As Sherlock Holmes once observed: When you've excluded the inevitable, whatever remains, however unpalatable, must be lunch.

What makes human beings unique, says Aristotle, is our capacity to reason, and to use that reason to investigate the nature of the world and our purpose in it:

How could they reach such a conclusion? Their reasoning was simple and profound. They posited that virtually every object in creation is directed toward an end—a telos, in Greek. The value of an object lies in its capacity to achieve the purpose for which it was designed. Facts and values aren't separate things—values are embedded within facts. For example, a watch is virtuous if it tells time properly; a horse is virtuous if it properly pulls a cart.

Why can't you just convince me on the basis of the evidence that what you're proposing is the right solution for America?

Faith has its reasons and reason has its faiths.

Educate your children to self-control, to the habit of holding passion and prejudice and evil tendencies subject to an upright and reasoning will, and you have done much to abolish misery from their future and crimes from society.

How convenient does it prove to be a rational animal, that knows how to find or invent a plausible pretext for whatever it has an inclination to do!

retaining only the habit of expressing myself in terms of modest diffidence; never using, when I advanced anything that may possibly be disputed, the words certainly, undoubtedly, or any others that give the air of positiveness to an opinion; but rather say, I conceive or apprehend a thing to be so and so; it appears to me, or I should think it so or so, for such and such reasons; or I imagine it to be so; or it is so, if I am not mistaken.