Quotes About Reasoning

Sometimes it is necessary to do the wrong things for the right reasons. The important thing is to be sure that our reasons are right and that we admit the wrong, that we do not lie to ourselves and convince ourselves that what we do is right.

We live in an epoch where rational reasoning associated with evidence isn't universally accepted and is, in fact, in jeopardy. That worries me a lot.

Worry and reasoning are two of Satan's most successful tools. He'll get us started with one negative thought and then sit back and watch us finish ourselves off.

Don't worry too much if you don't pass exams, so long as you feel you have understood the subject. It's amazing what you can get by the ability to reason things out by conventional methods, getting down to the basics of what is happening.

Science is a first-rate piece of furniture for a man's upper chamber, if he has common sense on the ground-floor. But if a man hasn't got plenty of good common sense, the more science he has, the worse for his patient.

That the sun will not rise tomorrow is no less intelligible a proposition, and implies no more contradiction, than the affirmation, that it will rise.

What we can do is provide the tools, through our educational system, for people to be able to tell sense from nonsense. These tools include the scientific method, skeptical questioning, empirical evidence, verifying sources, etc.

This means that no single logic is strong enough to support the total construction of human knowledge.

Looking for causes and reasons is a deeply ingrained human impulse. We are pattern-recognizing creatures, quick to see faces in craters on Mars or connections between the location of Venus in the sky and the state of our love life.

To understand why the Second Law works in our real world, it is not sufficient to simply apply statistical reasoning to the underlying laws of physics; we must also assume that the observable universe began in a state of very low entropy

Bayes teaches us (1) never to assign perfect certainty to any such belief; (2) always to be prepared to update our credences when new evidence comes along; and (3) how exactly such evidence alters the credences we assign. It's a road map for coming closer and closer to the truth.

Ray Bradbury said that thinking is the enemy of creativity because it's self-conscious. When you think you sit calmly and try to reason through something in a structured, logical way. Creativity dances to a different tune. Once you flip that switch, things get a bit chaotic. Ideas start buzzing. Images start popping into your head. Fragments of all kinds of data find their way into orbit.

Don't confuse creativity and imagination with "thinking" either. Ray Bradbury said that thinking is the enemy of creativity because it's self-conscious. When you think you sit calmly and try to reason through something in a structured, logical way. Creativity dances to a different tune.

Uneori îmi trece prin minte ca nimic nu i-a f?cut sa fuga, ca e doar un proces psihologic.

Intellect takes you to the door, but it doesn't take you into the house.

Since the time of Plato and Aristotle philosophers have had an interest in taking note of common fallacies in reasoning.

It is scientific only to say what is more likely and what less likely, and not to be proving all the time the possible and impossible.

The problem with putting two and two together is that sometimes you get four, and sometimes you get twenty-two.

If one were to bring ten of the wisest men in the world together and ask them what was the most stupid thing in existence, they would not be able to discover anything so stupid as astrology.

The genuine coherence of our ideas does not come from the reasoning that ties them together, but from the spiritual impulse that gives rise to them.

That was the reasoning behind learning to play bass, and then after that it was more like it was neat to play songs together - for me to play bass and for him to play guitar

This whole strange episode was like some sort of bizarre dream. He could scarcely believe what had just happened. There had been no thought behind it, no reasoning, no sense.

Common sense had already told her that she must not do so. But common sense sometimes seemed a dreary taskmaster.

The other way to train medics is to have them practice a skill so many times that it becomes automatic. So when the prefrontal cortex goes AWOL, when reasoning drops away, muscle memory, one hopes, will persist.