Best 923 quotes in «logic quotes» category

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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*.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

... Desire baffles knowledge and power.

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

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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?

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

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.

Do you think I'm stupid? Only a fool would use a fast-acting poison on a target with a taster. The taster goes down before the king gets it into his system." Lila blinked at him, as if surprised by this display of logic.

Drinking myself blind seemed like the next logical step.

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.

Even a book that is made up of only untruths can greatly improve us intellectually.

Everybody, professors and students and Proctors the same, knew that if the sign said 'do not walk on the grass', one hopped. Anybody who didn't had failed to understand what Oxford was.

Everything must be taken into account. If the fact will not fit the theory---let the theory go.

Every faith has logic even though people after developing faith forget the logic behind the faith. There is a strong logic behind the creation of religion—the greatest symbol of human faith—that has provided a common code of conduct and belief, and brought millions or even billions of people together. Religion has benefited man even materialistically, as it reduced the conflict between individuals and ushered in a long era of peace and prosperity.

Everyone have a game, everyone is playing in his own game and his own game he is the king the others are the other figures from the chess.

Excessive praise arises from the same bigotry matrix as excessive criticism.

Excluding certain ideas and thoughts, calling them hate speech, is an important piece in the progressive movement’s puzzle. If you can’t win an argument logically, demonize your opponent, make him out to be a bad person and all of a sudden the ideas he stands for become bad as well.

Faith is the mortar that fills the cracks in the evidence and the gaps in the logic, and thus it is faith that keeps the whole terrible edifice of religious certainty still looming dangerously over our world.

Facts don't care about your feelings.

Experience cannot beat logic, and interpretations of observational evidence which are not in line with the laws of logical reasoning are no refutation of these but the sign of a muddled mind (or would one accept someone’s observational report that he had seen a bird that was red and non-red all over at the same time as a refutation of the law of contradiction rather than the pronouncement of an idiot?).

Exposition is a mode of thought, a method of learning, and a means of expression. Almost all of the characteristics we associate with mature discourse were amplified by typography, which has the strongest possible bias toward exposition: a sophisticated ability to think conceptually, deductively and sequentially; a high valuation of reason and order; an abhorrence of contradiction; a large capacity for detachment and objectivity; and a tolerance for delayed response.