Quotes About Reasoning

My mother took care never to tell me to do anything. She would only reason with me sweetly, like one intelligent, mature person with another.

Every language is a vast pattern-system, different from others, in which are culturally ordained the forms and categories by which the personality not only communicates, but also analyzes nature, notices or neglects types of relationship and phenomena, channels his reasoning, and builds the house of his consciousness.

In short, this or that behavior wasn't good because scripture said so. Scripture mandated this or that behavior because it was good, and if it was already good before scripture said so, then it was good for some reason inherent to itself, some reason that reason could discover.

Is it how we feel or how we think that is more important in determining whether we are morally good human beings?

Working out whether or not the claims you make in your premises are true, while important, is simply not enough to ensure that you draw true conclusions. People make this mistake all the time. They forget that you can begin with a set of entirely true beliefs but reason so poorly as to end up with entirely false conclusions. The problem is that starting with truth doesn't guarantee ending up with it.

The problem of induction is the problem of how an argument can be good reasoning as induction but be poor reasoning as a deduction.

Logic is the science of the justification of conclusions we have reached by natural reasoning. My point is that, for such natural reasoning to occur, consciousness is not necessary. The very reason we need logic at all is because most reasoning is not conscious at all.

Christian apologetics is the application of biblical truth to unbelief.

Remarkable how often there's a good reason that masks the real reason.

Italians think with their heads.

What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?

As a Jew, I believe that every argument has a counterargument.

Histories make men wise; poets, witty; the mathematics, subtile; natural philosophy, deep; moral, grave; logic and rhetoric, able to contend.

The men of experiment are like the ant, they only collect and use; the reasoners resemble spiders, who make cobwebs out of their own substance. But the bee takes the middle course: it gathers its material from the flowers of the garden and field, but transforms and digests it by a power of its own.

The human understanding when it has once adopted an opinion (either as being the received opinion or as being agreeable to itself) draws all things else to support and agree with it. And though there be a greater number and weight of instances to be found on the other side, yet these it either neglects and despises, or else by some distinction sets aside and rejects, in order that by this great and pernicious predetermination the authority of its former conclusions may remain inviolate.

For the things of this world cannot be made known without a knowledge of mathematics.

Reasoning draws a conclusion, but does not make the conclusion certain, unless the mind discovers it by the path of experience.

O intelecto não é uma luz que arde sem óleo, mas é alimentado pela vontade e pelas paixões.

But of one thing I am satisfied, that the reason for which a vacuum was introduced by Leucippus and Democritus (namely, that without it the same bodies could not embrace and fill sometimes larger and sometimes smaller spaces) is a false one. For matter is clearly capable of folding and unfolding itself in space, within certain limits, without the interposition of a vacuum; nor is there in air two thousand times as much of vacuity as there is in gold.

For at the heart of the uniform, reasoning is shaky and elusive: a mind in search of ideas should first stock up on appearances.

What, to use Noble Laureate Wigner's classic phrase, accounts for the 'unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics'?

What a terrible time this is to be a Christian. The churches have failed and betrayed us, and the ministry preaches hate and murder. If there is a sane and reasoning voice in the Christian church today it is sadly silent.

Muslim, Jew, Hindu or Christian, you are that because of where and when you were born. If you are an atheist, you are that because of a book or two you read, or who your parents were and the century in which you were born. Don't delude yourself: there are no good reasons for anything, just circumstances.

Good philosophy must exist, if for no other reason, because bad philosophy needs to be answered.