Best 3829 quotes in «reason quotes» category

Never forget why you should win or achieve your goals and dreams. Once you feel you are losing purpose in the process, remind yourself why you saw the need to begin in the first place, let that drive you.

Never let money be the reason why you betray your close companion. You may not have the joy to spend it because you are supposed to enjoy that money with that companion you betrayed! Do not love money; love the reason for which money exist.

Never mistrust, unless given a reason.

Never reason the reason behind trying something reasonable. It’s the new things that bring excitement & becomes a reason for many people to fight the low phase.

Never try to find any reason to hate someone.

...new prejudices will serve as well as old ones to harness the great unthinking masses. For this enlightenment, however, nothing is required but freedom, and indeed the most harmless among all the things to which this term can properly be applied. It is the freedom to make public use of one's reason at every point. But I hear on all sides, 'Do not argue!' The Officer says: 'Do not argue but drill!' The tax collector: 'Do not argue but pay!' The cleric: 'Do not argue but believe!' Only one prince in the world says, 'Argue as much as you will, and about what you will, but obey!' Everywhere there is restriction on freedom.

Never! while heaven spares my reason,’ replied I, snatching away the hand he had presumed to seize and press between his own.

No castle can protect you, no castle but the Castle of Reason!

No idea is above scrutiny and no people are beneath dignity.

No matter how deeply it [a faith based on mere authority] entrenches itself behind authority, no matter how artfully it seeks to ward off all counter-hypotheses and alternative possibilities by assembling a system that covers every conceivable circumstance . . . , reason will still venture to subject it to critical scrutiny. And it will do so spontaneously [aus sich selbst], generating from within itself principles of possibility and plausibility irrespective of any such artificial historical structure predisposed to neglect reason and to claim primacy on historical grounds over the persuasiveness of rational truths.

No matter how vast your knowledge or how modest, it is your own mind that has to acquire it. It is only with your own knowledge that you can deal. It is only your own knowledge that you can claim to possess or ask others to consider. Your mind is your only judge of truth—and if others dissent from your verdict, reality is the court of final appeal. Nothing but a man’s mind can perform that complex, delicate, crucial process of identification which is thinking. Nothing can direct the process but his own judgment. Nothing can direct his judgment but his moral integrity.

Nonsense has taken up residence in the heart of public debate and also in the academy. This nonsense is part of the huge fund of unreason on which the plans and schemes of optimists draw for their vitality. Nonsense confiscates meaning. It thereby puts truth and falsehood, reason and unreason, light and darkness on an equal footing. It is a blow cast in defence of intellectual freedom, as the optimists construe it, namely the freedom to believe anything at all, provided you feel better for it.

No, not at all. I’m an atheist. You could say that I’m agnostic, but that’s just a certain kind of atheist (laughs). An atheist is someone who lacks a belief in a supernatural, and that’s me. I can’t say with absolute certainty that there is nothing beyond the material world, but there’s no reason for me to think there is. If I were a gambling man I would put all my money on there not being anything other than this universe.

No one can save anyone else from their own beliefs.

No one is an outside observer of nature, We're defined by our environment and our interaction with that environment -- by our ecology. And that ecology is necessarily relative, historical and empirical.

No reason can be a good reason to hurt someone.

Not every reason is reasonable.

Nothing can be truly infinite at a single point in time, as it would have taken an infinite amount of time to have arisen; something may however, have infinite potential

Nothing comes to our lives without a reason; accept it with love and kindness.

Nothing in any religious teachings goes beyond Humanism, unless you add the supernatural...Make believe is the only difference between being human and being religious.

Not to grow up properly is to retain our 'caterpillar' quality from childhood (where it is a virtue) into adulthood (where it becomes a vice). In childhood our credulity serves us well. It helps us to pack, with extraordinary rapidity, our skulls full of the wisdom of our parents and our ancestors. But if we don't grow out of it in the fullness of time, our caterpillar nature makes us a sitting target for astrologers, mediums, gurus, evangelists and quacks. The genius of the human child, mental caterpillar extraordinary, is for soaking up information and ideas, not for criticizing them. If critical faculties later grow it will be in spite of, not because of, the inclinations of childhood. The blotting paper of the child's brain is the unpromising seedbed, the base upon which later the sceptical attitude, like a struggling mustard plant, may possibly grow. We need to replace the automatic credulity of childhood with the constructive scepticism of adult science.

Now you found a reason and I decided go with it.

Nous sommes devenus lucides. Nous avons remplacé le dialogue par le communiqué.

No, you do not have to live as a man; it is an act of moral choice. But you cannot live as anything else—and the alternative is that state of living death which you now see within you and around you, the state of a thing unfit for existence, no longer human and less than animal, a thing that knows nothing but pain and drags itself through its span of years in the agony of unthinking self-destruction.

[Obituary of atheist philosopher Richard Robinson] An Atheist's Values is one of the best short accounts of liberalism (a term Robinson accepted) and humanism (a term he ignored) produced during the present century, all the more powerful for its lucidity and moderation, its wit and wisdom. It may now seem old-fashioned, but during those confused alarms of struggle and fight between the ignorant armies of left and right, thousands of readers must have taken inspiration from Richard Robinson's rational defence of rationalism. It is a pity that it is now out of print, when there is still so much nonsense and so little sense in the world.

Oh, Major, you do so love to annoy, don't you?" "It is the stuff of living, my lady.

Oh, wearisome conditions of humanity! Born under one law, to another bound, Vainly begot and yet forbidden vanity: Created sick, commanded to be sound. What meaneth Nature by these diverse laws— Passion and reason, self-division’s cause? -- from Mustapha

Once in jail or you just go in prison for a reason you don't have rights... So be wise, think twice and don't go there!

One is better off following one's whims, one's natural bent, than trying to reason things out.

One form of honesty has always been lacking among founders of religions and their kin:—they have never made their experiences a matter of the intellectual conscience. "What did I really experience? What then took place in me and around me? Was my understanding clear enough? Was my will directly opposed to all deception of the senses, and courageous in its defence against fantastic notions?"—None of them ever asked these questions, nor to this day do any of the good religious people ask them. They have rather a thirst for things which are contrary to reason, and they don't want to have too much difficulty in satisfying this thirst,—so they experience "miracles" and "regenerations," and hear the voices of angels! But we who are different, who are thirsty for reason, want to look as carefully into our experiences as in the case of a scientific experiment, hour by hour, day by day! We ourselves want to be our own experiments, and our own subjects of experiment.

One main reason why most dreamers cannot take their dreams off the ground is that they keep their ideas to themselves alone. The fact that you think you can make it alone is the first step to your failure!

One might have said that reason made him flee from reason.

One of the first unanswerable questions I asked was when I was eight years old. Some cousins of mine always said a prayer before eating: God is kind, God is good, And we thank him For our food. At that time we always heard the children in Europe were starving, therefore we should not waste any food. Two questions arose in my mind. First, what I knew about poetry was that it had to rhyme, and 'food' and 'good' didn't rhyme, so I always said 'Fud' with a silent sneer, and made it rhyme. Second: I once asked my aunt if god is good and we thank him for our Fud, why are the kids in Europe starving? I asked her if the kids in Europe were all bad. I remember her saying, 'Be thankful that you have food,' but, of course, she couldn't deal with the rest of it. I never accepted religion so I had nothing to reject as such. The history of 'Christiansanity' (my own coinage of which I am proud!) is so brutal of mind, emotions, freedom, progress, science, and all that I hold precious, that by any standards of justice its leaders in almost any given period would be incarcerated for life, or worse!

One of the difficulties in raising public concern over the very severe threats of global warming is that 40 percent of the US population does not see why it is a problem, since Christ is returning in a few decades. About the same percentage believe that the world was created a few thousand years ago. If science conflicts with the Bible, so much the worse for science. It would be hard to find an analogue in other societies.

One of the most obvious signs of intelligence is not knowledge alone but imagination combined with reason.

One of the recent arguments from design, that based on the so-called fine-tuning life of some fundamental physical constants, founders on the following objections: an extremely small prior probability merited by the God of theism in light – if that is the right word – of the Problem of Evil; the fact that it is not unreasonable to place a substantial probability on the hypothesis that a future theory will fix those values; and the sheer incoherence of computations of the ‘chances’ of fine-tuning were there no fine-tuner.

One is tempted to define man as a rational animal who always loses his temper when he is called upon to act in accordance with the dictates of reason.

Our belief is not a belief. Our principles are not a faith. We do not rely solely upon science and reason, because these are necessary rather than sufficient factors, but we distrust anything that contradicts science or outrages reason. We may differ on many things, but what we respect is free inquiry, open-mindedness, and the pursuit of ideas for their own sake ... We are not immune to the lure of wonder and mystery and awe: we have music and art and literature, and find that the serious ethical dilemmas are better handled by Shakespeare and Tolstoy and Schiller and Dostoyevsky and George Eliot than in the mythical morality tales of the holy books. Literature, not scripture, sustains the mind and -- since there is no other metaphor -- also the soul.

Only human beings have come to a point where they no longer know why they exist.

Our deepest (and fastest) yearnings can be tempered by reason and experience; our more prudent judgments softened by desire and need.

[On Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz] The answer is unknowable, but it may not be unreasonable to see him, at least in theological terms, as essentially a deist. He is a determinist: there are no miracles (the events so called being merely instances of infrequently occurring natural laws); Christ has no real role in the system; we live forever, and hence we carry on after our deaths, but then everything — every individual substance — carries on forever.

(On the seeming futility of metaphysics) Why then has nature afflicted our reason with the restless striving for such a path, as if it were one of reason's most important occupations? Still more, how little cause have we to place trust in our reason if in one of the most important parts of our desire for knowledge it does not merely forsake us but even entices us with delusions and in the end betrays us! Or if the path has merely eluded us so far, what indications may we use that might lead us to hope that in renewed attempts we will be luckier than those who have gone before us?

Our common humanity can bridge any prior expanse of disagreement between us.

Our greater beastliness lies not in a penchant for brute force,but in our greater corruption, nihilism, and decadence; in our servitude to the overwhelming systems we create; in the sociopathic rationalism we adopt to master natural forces and to compete with the machines we build;and in the scientistic idolatry that co-opts the religious impulse. Of course the ancients resorted more to brute force: they lacked the infrastructure to punish their enemies and victims in a safer, more sophisticated fashion, with advanced legal regimes and mass-produced, maximum security prisons; with engineered propaganda for social conditioning; and with economic, cyber, and drone warfare. We channel our aggression with more sophisticated instruments, but the use of those instruments doesn’t ennoble us.

Passion has helped us; but can do so no more. It will in future be our enemy. Reason, cold, calculating, unimpassioned reason, must furnish all the materials for our future support and defence.

Our reasons are not prophets When oft our fancies are.

Ours was the age of enlightenment, he said, when the battle cry was, ‘We must know, we shall know!’, and reason would depose superstition and we be liberated by it.

Passion belongs to nothing and reason belong to many things that’s why reason it is better than passion.

People inspire people. That’s the more reason why mentor-ship is a critical tool for dreams accomplishment.

People falling in love for one reason may fall out of love due to another reason. However, if faith or trust is the basis of love, it does not break easily. Often people use all their reasoning to understand each other and even live together for years to satisfy themselves that they are in love. However, marriages based on such logical love, the love based on reason, do not last long. Quite to the contrary, marriages where the partners do not even know each other, survive for life—being based on mutual trust and faith.