Best 923 quotes in «logic quotes» category

At the time I thought the winner in an argument was the person who put forward the most logical support for his position. Of course, this isn't true. Human history, from gardening disputes to genocide, is full of examples of people with the most decent, well-argued stance ending up with their face in the mud in front of a naked display of power.

Baby rats need rat milk, baby cats need cat milk, baby dogs need dog milk, baby humans need human milk, baby cows need cow milk, baby chimps need chimp milk.. Would anyone believe it if someone claimed adult giraffes need elephant milk? or adult horses need squirrel milk? or adult possums need goat milk? or adult humans need cow milk? oh, wait, no, that last one makes total sense.. NOT

Banyaknya proletar mesin dan tanah di Indonesia dan kekuatan yang tersembunyi memang sudah cukup kuat buat merebut kekuasaan dari imperialisme Belanda. Tetapi didikannya masih sangat tipis dan tidak cocok dengan keperluan dan kewajiban klasnya di hari depan. Mereka kekurangan filsafat. Mereka masih tebal diselimuti ilmu buat akhirat dan tahyul campur aduk.

Becoming a part of a movement doesn't help anybody think clearly.

Before we begin to investigate that, let us try to realize what we do know, so as to make the most of it, and to separate the essential from the accidental.

Before we discuss intuition in greater detail, let us first dispel the myths that intuition is some kind of a ‘fluke’ of nature. I would like you to understand that intuition is a skill that can be developed just as any other skills that you acquire. It comes from you, from no one else! Because we have not experienced that zone, that part, that dimension of our being, we have forgotten it. - HDH Bhagawan Sri Nithyananda Paramashivoham, in the book "Living Enlightenment".

Behind your reaction is a feeling that whatever is 'true' must be able to be expressed logically. Men, in particular, have a tendency to confuse correct logic with an accurate assessment of a situation. Be careful of any situation that you have to reason through logically, because if you have to work to reason it out, you're probably missing something.

Being and not being are not two different realities, but two different aspects of the same reality.

Being' cannot be derived from higher concepts by definition, nor can it be presented through lower ones. But does this imply being no longer offers a problem? Not at all. We can infer only that 'Being' cannot have the character of an entity. Thus we cannot apply to Being the concept of 'definition' as presented in traditional logic, [...] which, within certain limits, provides a justifiable way of characterizing 'entities'.

Being ninety nine percent sure opens for a possibility that you might be a hundred percent wrong.

Being ninty nine percent sure opens for a possibility that you might be a hundred percent wrong.

Beware of logic.

But the world doesn't run on logic, it runs on the seven deadly sins and the weather. - Alan Furst; Red Gold

But, after all, why not? And if so--why, if so, that would explain everything.

But if they are shown to be, and are the works not of men but of God, why are the unbelievers so irreligious as not to recognize the Master Who did them?

But...that doesn't make any sense...!' 'It does if you're a goat.

Beware of resting on logic.

But in the end, black can never be white, one plus one must always equal two, and Mara Lynn was a normal little girl.

By sabotaging logic, the common frame of reference, and the common language, we have removed a "safety valve" that allows cultural divides to be resolved.

Causes of individuals presuppose causes of the species, which are not univocal yet not wholly equivocal either, since they are expressing themselves in their effects. We could call them analogical. In language too all universal terms presuppose the non-univocal analogical use of the term *being*.

Captain Vimes believed in logic, in much the same way as a man in a desert believed in ice -- i.e., it was something he really needed, but this just wasn't the world for it.

Causality is a pointless superstition. These days it would take more than one book to persuade anyone of that.

Certain levels of human understanding cannot be attained, it is claimed, until the brain can work in more than one way.

Chana knows, I wondered sometimes how I raised that child without strangling her. By age six, [Jasnah] was pointing out my logical fallacies as I tried to get her to go to bed on time.

Contradictions do not perplex the logician. They arise because there are more rules to an open game than can be known.

Chaos is not the lack of order, it is merely the absence of order, that the observer is used to.

Comparison is the most abused intellectual tool of all. We compare men and women, man and God, good and bad, equal and unequal, forgetting that this sin only results in a punishment so severe that we can't even trace it back to its origins. All we're left with in the end is ambiguity, uncertainty, lethargy and and Kafka!

Confusion is not the absence of thinking it’s the absence of logic, All the options must be taken into account. If the logic does not fit into the thinking, just think again logically.

Consideration doth, as it were, open the door between the head and the heart: the understanding having received truths, lays them up in the memory now, consideration is the conveyer of theme from thence to the affections (571).

Complicated things are only a group of simple ones

Contrariwise,' continued Tweedledee, 'if it was so, it might be; and if it were so, it would be; but as it isn't, it ain't. That's logic.

¿Cuántas veces le he dicho que si eliminamos lo imposible, lo que queda, por improbable que parezca , tiene que ser la verdad? (cap. 6).

Cursed luck! —said he, biting his lip as he shut the door, —for man to be master of one of the finest chains of reasoning in nature, —and have a wife at the same time with such a head-piece, that he cannot hang up a single inference within side of it, to save his soul from destruction.

Data Science takes the guesswork/emotions out of answering business questions by applying logic and mathematics to find better solutions.

... Desire baffles knowledge and power.

De Bono argues that the West's tradition of settling disagreement by debate or argument is an example of overreliance on logic.

Definitions from Mulla Do-Piaza Intellectual: One who knows no craft.

Desperate, lonely, cut off from the human community which in many cases has ceased to exist, under the sentence of violent death, wracked by desires for intimacy they do not know how to fulfil, at the same time tormented by the presence of women, men turn to logic.

Disputes with men, pertinaciously obstinate in their principles, are, of all others, the most irksome; except, perhaps, those with persons, entirely disingenuous, who really do not believe the opinions they defend, but engage in the controversy, from affectation, from a spirit of opposition, or from a desire of showing wit and ingenuity, superior to the rest of mankind. The same blind adherence to their own arguments is to be expected in both; the same contempt of their antagonists; and the same passionate vehemence, in enforcing sophistry and falsehood. And as reasoning is not the source, whence either disputant derives his tenets; it is in vain to expect, that any logic, which speaks not to the affections, will ever engage him to embrace sounder principles.

Dissociation of the mind into logic-tight compartments is by no means confined to the population of the asylum. It is a common, and perhaps inevitable, occurrence in the psychology of every human being. Our political convictions are notoriously inaccessible to argument, and we preserve the traditional beliefs of our childhood in spite of the contradictory facts constantly presented by our experience.

Don’t let your heart get in the way of your head.

Does it look like I have stupid written across my forehead

Do not allow the adumbrations of Aristotelian logic to prevent you from seeing a vast spectrum of truths; the post-Boolean continuum of shades of grey where we spend most of our lives.

Don't make the effort to appeal to logic and reasoning all the time; very few people can relate to that. Appeal to emotions instead; everyone, at least, can relate to that.

Don't dull the voice of your heart just to please your brain As it swells into overthought and the desire to be right Switch on the light of your inner lamp. Listen to your heart so you can feel from your soul Don’t discount your heart to make your logic fit.

Ever since Plato most philosophers have considered it part of their business to produce ‘proofs’ of immortality and the existence of God. They have found fault with the proofs of their predecessors — Saint Thomas rejected Saint Anselm's proofs, and Kant rejected Descartes' — but they have supplied new ones of their own. In order to make their proofs seem valid, they have had to falsify logic, to make mathematics mystical, and to pretend that deepseated prejudices were heaven-sent intuitions.

Dreams are another slice of reality, not different from where we are now—they just tell about it in a different way. They also can open up your reality. They don’t have the constraints of conscious logic.

Dumb ideas come from people who have dumb brains

Each religion makes scores of purportedly factual assertions about everything from the creation of the universe to the afterlife. But on what grounds can believers presume to know that these assertions are true? The reasons they give are various, but the ultimate justification for most religious people’s beliefs is a simple one: we believe what we believe because our holy scriptures say so. But how, then, do we know that our holy scriptures are factually accurate? Because the scriptures themselves say so. Theologians specialize in weaving elaborate webs of verbiage to avoid saying anything quite so bluntly, but this gem of circular reasoning really is the epistemological bottom line on which all 'faith' is grounded. In the words of Pope John Paul II: 'By the authority of his absolute transcendence, God who makes himself known is also the source of the credibility of what he reveals.' It goes without saying that this begs the question of whether the texts at issue really were authored or inspired by God, and on what grounds one knows this. 'Faith' is not in fact a rejection of reason, but simply a lazy acceptance of bad reasons. 'Faith' is the pseudo-justification that some people trot out when they want to make claims without the necessary evidence. But of course we never apply these lax standards of evidence to the claims made in the other fellow’s holy scriptures: when it comes to religions other than one’s own, religious people are as rational as everyone else. Only our own religion, whatever it may be, seems to merit some special dispensation from the general standards of evidence. And here, it seems to me, is the crux of the conflict between religion and science. Not the religious rejection of specific scientific theories (be it heliocentrism in the 17th century or evolutionary biology today); over time most religions do find some way to make peace with well-established science. Rather, the scientific worldview and the religious worldview come into conflict over a far more fundamental question: namely, what constitutes evidence. Science relies on publicly reproducible sense experience (that is, experiments and observations) combined with rational reflection on those empirical observations. Religious people acknowledge the validity of that method, but then claim to be in the possession of additional methods for obtaining reliable knowledge of factual matters — methods that go beyond the mere assessment of empirical evidence — such as intuition, revelation, or the reliance on sacred texts. But the trouble is this: What good reason do we have to believe that such methods work, in the sense of steering us systematically (even if not invariably) towards true beliefs rather than towards false ones? At least in the domains where we have been able to test these methods — astronomy, geology and history, for instance — they have not proven terribly reliable. Why should we expect them to work any better when we apply them to problems that are even more difficult, such as the fundamental nature of the universe? Last but not least, these non-empirical methods suffer from an insuperable logical problem: What should we do when different people’s intuitions or revelations conflict? How can we know which of the many purportedly sacred texts — whose assertions frequently contradict one another — are in fact sacred?

Eller plaget den ham, denne erkjennelsen av at en handling, et nederlag eller et øyeblikk av glede aldri utspiller seg så presist som et regnestykke.