Quotes
Quotes about Reason
The personal life of every individual is based on secrecy, and perhaps it is partly for that reason that civilised man is so nervously anxious that personal privacy should be respected.
Waiting is a trap. There will always be reasons to wait...The truth is, there are only two things in life, reasons and results, and reasons simply don't count.
I have found some of the best reasons I ever had for remaining at the bottom simply by looking at the men at the top.
The reasonable man adapts himself to the world, but the unreasonable man tries to adapt the world to him--therefore, all progress depends upon the unreasonable man.
A prince never lacks legitimate reasons to break his promise.
For it would have been better that man should have been born dumb, nay, void of all reason, rather than that he should employ the gifts of Providence to the destruction of his neighbor. [Lat., Mutos enim nasci, et egere omni ratione satius fuisset, quam providentiae munera in mutuam perniciem convertere.]
Action based on reason, action therefore which is only to be understood by reason, knows only one end, the greatest pleasure of the acting individual.
Reason and action are congeneric and homogenous, two aspects of the same phenomenon.
The continuous disasters of man's history are mainly due to his excessive capacity and urge to become identified with a tribe, nation, church or cause, and to espouse its credo uncritically and enthusiastically, even if its tenets are contrary to reason, devoid of self-interest and detrimental to the claims of self-preservation.We are thus driven to the unfashionable conclusion that the trouble with our species is not an excess of aggression, but an excess capacity for fanatical devotion.
It may indeed prove to be far the most difficult and not the least important task for human reason rationally to comprehend its own limitations. It is essential for the growth of reason that as individuals we should bow to forces and obey principles which we cannot hope fully to understand, yet on which the advance and even the preservation of civilization depend.
Human reason can neither predict nor deliberately shape its own future. Its advances consist in finding out where it has been wrong.
Reason's biological function is to preserve and promote life and to postpone its extinction as long as possible. Thinking and acting are not contrary to nature; they are, rather, the foremost features of man's nature. The most appropriate description of man as differentiated from nonhuman beings is: a being purposively struggling against the forces adverse to his life.
Our knowledge and our ability to handle our problems progress through the open conflict of ideas, through the tests of phenomenological adequacy, inner consistency, and practical-moral consequences. Reason may err, but it can be moral. If we must err, let it be on the side of our creativity, our freedom, our betterment.
Nothing has an uglier look to us than reason, when it is not on our side.
Reason is the main resource of man in his struggle for survival.
Who speaks reason to his fellow man bestows it upon them.
Because they know not the forces of nature, and in order that they may have comrades in their ignorance, they suffer not that others should search out anything, and would have us believe like rustics and ask no reason...But we ask in all things a reason must be sought.
He who will not reason, is a bigot; he who cannot is a fool; and he who dares not is a slave.
Most people would find it bizarre to speak of tolerating blonds. For whatever reason, hair color has not been a basis of tribal identity or group politics in our culture; the concept of tolerance is never invoked in this context because there is too obviously nothing to tolerate. In a rational culture, the same would be true of race, ethnicity, and the like.
In matters of intellect, follow your reason as far as it will take you, without regard for any other consideration.
Everything that we think God has in his mind necessarily proceeds from our own mind; it is what we imagine to be in God's mind, and it is really difficult for human intelligence to guess at a divine intelligence. What we usually end up with by this sort of reasoning is to make God the color-sergeant of our army and to make Him as chauvinistic as ourselves.
There are two modes of acquiring knowledge, namely by reasoning and experience. Reasoning draws a conclusion and makes us grant the conclusion, but does not make the conclusion certain, nor does it remove doubt so that the mind may rest on the intuition of truth, unless the mind discovers it by the path of experience.
Whatsoever is contrary to nature is contrary to reason, and whatsoever is contrary to reason is absurd.
Habits... the only reason they persist is that they are offering some satisfaction. You allow them to persist by not seeking any other, better form of satisfying the same needs. Every habit, good or bad, is acquired and learned in the same wayâby finding that it is a means of satisfaction.
...we are entitled to make almost any reasonable assumption, but should resist making conclusions until evidence requires that we do so.
