reason quotes

Abraham Joshua Heschel: 

When I was young, I used to admire intelligent people; as I grow older, I admire kind people.

Abraham Lincoln: 

When I'm getting ready to reason with a man, I spend one-third of my time thinking about myself and what I am going to say -- and two-thirds thinking about him and what he is going to say.

Albert Einstein: 

The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift.

Albert Einstein: 

The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift.

Albert Einstein: 

Great spirits have always found violent opposition from mediocrities. The latter cannot understand it when a man does not thoughtlessly submit to hereditary prejudices but honestly and courageously uses his intelligence.

Alexander Hamilton: 

Men give me credit for some genius. All the genius I have lies in this; when I have a subject in hand, I study it profoundly. Day and night it is before me. My mind becomes pervaded with it. Then the effort that I have made is what people are pleased to call the fruit of genius. It is the fruit of labor and thought.

Alexis Carrel: 

All great men are gifted with intuition. They know without reasoning or analysis, what they need to know.

Anais Nin: 

When we blindly adopt a religion, a political system, a literary dogma, we become automatons. We cease to grow.

Anton Chekhov: 

Man has been endowed with reason, with the power to create, so that he can add to what he's been given. But up to now he hasn't been a creator, only a destroyer. Forests keep disappearing, rivers dry up, wild life's become extinct, the climate's ruined and the land grows poorer and uglier every day. [Uncle Vanya, 1897]

Blaise Pascal: 

We know the truth, not only by the reason, but also by the heart. 

Blaise Pascal: 

The heart has its reasons which reason knows not of.

Blaise Pascal: 

We know the truth, not only by the reason, but by the heart.

Buddha: 

Believe nothing just because a so-called wise person said it. Believe nothing just because a belief is generally held. Believe nothing just because it is said in ancient books. Believe nothing just because it is said to be of divine origin. Believe nothing just because someone else believes it. Believe only what you yourself test and judge to be true. [paraphrased]

Charlotte Perkins Gilman: 

But reason has no power against feeling, and feeling older than history is no light matter.

Christian Nevell Bovee: 

Example has more followers than reason.

Daniel Dennett: 

There's nothing I like less than bad arguments for a view that I hold dear.

David Borenstein: 

Feelings are not supposed to be logical. Dangerous is the man who has rationalized his emotions.

Dorothy Thompson: 

There is nothing to fear except the persistent refusal to find out the truth, the persistent refusal to analyze the causes of happenings.

Edith Hamilton: 

The fundamental fact about the Greek was that he had to use his mind. The ancient priests had said, "Thus far and no farther. We set the limits of thought." The Greek said, "All things are to be examined and called into question. There are no limits set on thought."

Edward Abbey: 

There is science, logic, reason; there is thought verified by experience. And then there is California.

Edward Bulwer-Lytton: 

A good heart is better than all the heads in the world.

Elbert Hubbard: 

Religions are many and diverse, but reason and goodness are one. 
The Roycroft Dictionary and Book of Epigrams, 1923


Elizabeth Gaskell: 

I'll not listen to reason . . . . Reason always means what someone else has got to say.

Erich Fromm: 

Human history begins with man's act of disobedience which is at the very same time the beginning of his freedom and development of his reason.

Farrah Fawcett: 

God made man stronger but not necessarily more intelligent. He gave women intuition and femininity. And, used properly, that combination easily jumbles the brain of any man I've ever met.

Francis Bacon: 

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. Not unlike this is the true business of philosophy (science); for it neither relies solely or chiefly on the powers of the mind, nor does it take the matter which it gathers from natural history and mechanical experiments and lay up in the memory whole, as it finds it, but lays it up in the understanding altered and disgested. Therefore, from a closer and purer league between these two faculties, the experimental and the rational (such as has never been made), much may be hoped.

Galileo Galilei: 

I do not feel obligated to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reasons, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.

Harriet Martineau: 

Readers are plentiful, thinkers are rare.

Holbrook Jackson: 

Intuition is reason in a hurry.

Irwin Edman: 

It is a myth, not a mandate, a fable not a logic, and symbol rather than a reason by which men are moved.

John Kord Lagemann: 

Intuition isn't the enemy, but the ally, of reason.

Joseph Cook: 

Conscience is our magnetic compass; reason our chart.

Louis-Ferdinand Céline: 

To hell with reality! I want to die in music, not in reason or in prose. People don't deserve the restraint we show by not going into delirium in front of them. To hell with them!

Margery Allingham: 

He did not arrive at this conclusion by the decent process of quiet, logical deduction, nor yet by the blinding flash of glorious intuition, but by the shoddy, untidy process halfway between the two by which one usually gets to know things.

Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach: 

Fear not those who argue but those who dodge.

Michael Burke: 

Good instincts usually tell you what to do long before your head has figured it out.

Molleen Matsumura: 

Reason guides our attempt to understand the world about us. Both reason and compassion guide our efforts to apply that knowledge ethically, to understand other people, and have ethical relationships with other people. 
2/95


Noam Chomsky: 

Three quarters of the American population literally believe in religious miracles. The numbers who believe in the devil, in resurrection, in God doing this and that -- it's astonishing. These numbers aren't duplicated anywhere else in the industrial world. You'd have to maybe go to mosques in Iran or do a poll among old ladies in Sicily to get numbers like this. Yet this is the American population.

Oliver Goldsmith: 

Logicians have but ill defined
As rational the human mind.
Logic, they say, belongs to man,
But let them prove it if they can.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.: 

Insanity is often the logic of an accurate mind overtasked.

Ralph Waldo Emerson: 

Shallow men believe in luck. Strong men believe in cause and effect.

Ralph Waldo Emerson: 

Religion is to do right. It is to love, it is to serve, it is to think, it is to be humble.

Ralph Waldo Emerson: 

Be as beneficent as the sun or the sea, but if your rights as a rational being are trenched on, die on the first inch of your territory.

Rene Descartes: 

The two operations of our understanding, intuition and deduction, on which alone we have said we must rely in the acquisition of knowledge.

Richard Courant: 

Mathematics as an expression of the human mind reflects the active will, the contemplative reason, and the desire for aesthetic perfection. Its basic elements are logic and intuition, analysis and construction, generality and individuality.

Robert Heller: 

Never ignore a gut feeling, but never believe that it's enough.

Rudolf Arnheim: 

All perceiving is also thinking, all reasoning is also intuition, all observation is also invention.

Stanley Baldwin: 

I would rather trust a woman's instinct than a man's reason.

Thomas Jefferson: 

Reason and free inquiry are the only effectual agents against error.

Thomas Jefferson: 

Error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it.

Thomas Jefferson: 

Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason, than that of blind-folded fear.

Thomas Paine: 

Time makes more converts than reason.

Thomas Paine: 

The most formidable weapon against errors of every kind is reason.

Will Durant: 

The trouble with most people is that they think with their hopes or fears or wishes rather than with their minds.

William Drummond: 

He who will not reason is a bigot; he who cannot is a fool; and he who dares not is a slave.