Best 3829 quotes in «reason quotes» category

If you have to block your closest friend in Facebook for some unavoidable reason, don't feel bad, because he/she does not deserve your friendship.

If your hands don't find something they can do, they will find a reason to find that which they can't do

If you tell me before, it's a reason. If you tell me after, it's an excuse.

If you think it's bad now, my friend, wait till we reach a town!' He shook his head and brushed at his tattered, dirty shirtsleeve. 'Do try to remember we're visitors-and not welcome ones-if you should feel moved to reason with anyone.

If you want the waves to touch you softly, have a walk on the sea coasts; if you want the life to touch you softly, have a walk on the reason’s coasts, because reason is a shield that softens the strokes of life!

I guess I should say a little bit about my method - I really am a fence sitter. I *loathe* Science and am always keen to attack it in most situations, though not here, because I love Reason and I'm perfectly aware of the difference. I also know what a concept means like Rules of Evidence. I'm not sure that's a concept as widely circulated in these circles as it needs to be - in other words, how *do* you tell shit from shinola? That's very critical. I think reason can only take us a certain distance, and then we have to go with the divine imagination, but with all safety systems fully in operation, or the divine imagination will lead us into complete paranoia.

If you think the reason you exist or go to school is just to satisfy your selfish ambitions, then you are of all men most miserable

If you will not hear reason, she'll rap your knuckles.

I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time -- when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness... The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance

Ignorance must die for reason to live.

I have come to discover that the reason why they are so wealthy and prosperous is not because they were lying on the couch all day.

I have not tried to write the history of that language, but rather the archaeology of that silence.

I had been able to break the curse myself. I'd had to have reason enough, love enough to do it, to find the will and the strength.

I made the mistake of using my earned sick time at the W. M. Keck Observatory for essential surgery. When I returned to work the management team demanded my resignation numerous times, citing my essential surgery as a reason. The W. M. Keck Observatory taught me that using earned sick time in the USA may put your future employment at significant risk.

I know how men in exile feed on dreams of hope.

I'm an old-fashioned guy. I believe in the Enlightenment, and reason, and logic, and you know, facts.

I may not believe that 'all things happen for a reason.' But I do believe that reason may come from all things that happen.

I’m glad your self-righteousness has given you some exercise, but you forget: we are not such a tidy, reasonable, and humane race. Our thoughts don’t stand in grammatical rows, our hearts don’t draw equations, our consciences don’t have the benefit of historians whispering the answers to us.

Imitate Jesus and Socrates

I might, indeed, read history; but whenever I attempt to do so, I am to tell you the truth, driven from it by disgust—What is it, but a miserably mortifying detail of crimes and follies?—of the guilt of a few, and the sufferings of many, while almost every page offers an argument in favor of what I never will believe—that heaven created the human race only to destroy itself.

I'll write while I'm breathing.

I'm sure for that comming there was a reason, but what's going to happen with that reason and Gotham?

I'm just the reason they married. Mum says I was a surprise. Dad says I was an accident. Truth is ... I am their mistake.

In a story you had to find a reason, but real life gets on very well without even Freudian motivations.

In asking for a relic of Descartes, the chevalier de Terlon was standing at the crossroads of the ancient and modern. He was applying to a modern thinker - the inventor of analytic geometry, no less - a primitive tradition that extends back not only to the institutionalization of Christianity in the fourth century, when Christians first broke into the tombs of saints to gather relics, but farther still, beyond the horizon of recorded history. The request is all the stranger for the fact that the man whose remains were treated in this quasisaintlike way would go down in history as the progenitor of materialism, rationalism, and a whole tradition that looked on such veneration as nonsense.

In asking philosophical questions, we use a reason shaped by the body, a cognitive unconscious to which we have no direct access, and metaphorical thought of which we are largely unaware. The fact that abstract thought is mostly metaphorical means that answers to philosophical questions have always been, and always will be, mostly metaphorical. In itself, that is neither good nor bad. It is simply a fact about the capacities of the human mind. But it has major consequences for every aspect of philosophy. Metaphorical thought is the principal tool that makes philosophical insight possible and that constrains the forms that philosophy can take.

I never yet saw an instance of one of two disputants convincing the other by argument.

In fact, the truth cannot be communicated until it is perceived.

In his opinion, all the world’s misfortunes stemmed from the countless untruths, both deliberate and unintentional, which people told because of haste or carelessness.

I need time every day to think.

Independence is the recognition of the fact that yours is the responsibility of judgment and nothing can help you escape it—that no substitute can do your thinking—that the vilest form of self-abasement and self-destruction is the subordination of your mind to the mind of another, the acceptance of an authority over your brain, the acceptance of his assertions as facts, his say-so as truth, his edicts as middle-man between your consciousness and your existence.

In later ages the sages of India in recognition of human infirmity admitted that salvation may be won by the way of love and the way of works, but they never denied that the noblest way, though the hardest, is the way of knowledge, for its instrument is the most precious faculty of man, his reason.

In order to decide, judge; in order to judge, reason; in order to reason, decide (what to reason about).

In philosophy, metaphorical pluralism is the norm. Our most important abstract philosophical concepts, including time, causation, morality, and the mind, are all conceptualized by multiple metaphors, sometimes as many as two dozen. What each philosophical theory typically does is to choose one of those metaphors as "right," as the true literal meaning of the concept. One reason there is so much argumentation across philosophical theories is that different philosophers have chosen different metaphors as the "right" one, ignoring or taking as misleading all other commonplace metaphorical structurings of the concept. Philosophers have done this because they assume that a concept must have one and only one logic. But the cognitive reality is that our concepts have multiple metaphorical structurings.

In my experience, the biggest reason people struggle to get where they want to be is guilt. Guilt that they have let someone down, and also guilt that they are about to leave someone they love ...behind.

In Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone he goes so far as to claim that conscientious moral judgement cannot err. The voice of conscience, which is our internal moral judge, can serve as a ‘guiding thread’ (Leitfaden) in matters of doubt.

In so far as religion is gone, reason is going. For they are both of the same primary and authoritative kind. They are both methods of proof which cannot themselves be proved.

In my school, no consideration is given to anything unreasonable; the heart of the matter is to use the power of the knowledge of martial arts to gain victory any way you can.

In short, this or that behavior wasn't good because scripture said so. Scripture mandated this or that behavior because it was good, and if it was already good before scripture said so, then it was good for some reason inherent to itself, some reason that reason could discover.

Interestingly enough, every time I corner a fanatic with scientific facts which they cannot argue or disprove, they either dismiss me as 'anti-God' and a 'secular humanist' or they start spouting reams of misapplied and irrelevant 'scripture' at me, like good little sheeple and like that will in any way, shape or form prove anything... Which just proves to me that common sense and actual reason doesn't come into it. Only hatred.

Intellect is the virtue of ignoring one’s emotions’ attempt to contaminate one’s opinions.

Instinct ensures animals to have society. Reason ensures society to have animals

In the average, want overcomes reason. In the magnificent, reason is the want.

in the modern era, many thinkers began to mistrust faith, viewing it as 'blind' and an enemy of reason. Their watchword was 'reason alone.' One of the difficulties of this stance is that reason cannot test its own reliability, any more than soapstone can test its own hardness. Any argument, accomplished by reasoning, that what reasoning accomplishes can be trusted, would be circular, because it would take for granted the very thing that it was trying to prove. Suppose I am at the window of a burning building. Although I can hear the firemen calling to me from far below, I cannot see them because of all the smoke. They are telling me to jump. Though I may have every reason to believe that they will catch me in their net, I may not trust them enough to overcome my fear, and so, hesitating, I burn to death. Obviously, my reasons are not the same as trust; faith surpasses reason. Even so they are reasons for trust; though faith surpasses reason, it is not irrational.

In the physical constitution of an organized being, that is, a being adapted suitably to the purposes of life, we assume it as a fundamental principle that no organ for any purpose will be found but what is also the fittest and best adapted for that purpose. Now in a being which has reason and a will, if the proper object of nature were its conservation, its welfare, in a word, its happiness, then nature would have hit upon a very bad arrangement in selecting the reason of the creature to carry out this purpose. For all the actions which the creature has to perform with a view to this purpose, and the whole rule of its conduct, would be far more surely prescribed to it by instinct, and that end would have been attained thereby much more certainly that it ever can be by reason. Should reason have been communicated to this favored creature over and above, it must only have served it to contemplate the happy constitution of its nature, to admire it, to congratulate itself thereon, and to feel thankful for it to the beneficent cause, but not that it should subject its desires to that weak and delusive guidance, and meddle bunglingly with the purpose of nature. In a word, nature would have taken care that reason should not break forth into practical exercise, nor have the presumption, with its weak insight, to think out for itself the plan of happiness and the means of attaining it. Nature would not only have taken on herself the choice of the ends but also of the means, and with wise foresight would have entrusted both to instinct.

In the court of reason man is always a claimant and God is always a respondent. The original intention of the reason for creation of God is to make Him as a respondent as and when the need arises. Hence when a man is in trouble his reason tries to save him by acting as an arbitrator; the reason sitting as sole judge asks the man for his claims and makes the God to respond.

In the presence of death reason and philosophy are silent

In your country and mine we should have the privilege of making fun of this kind of morality, but it would be unkind to do it here.Many of these people have the reasoning faculty, but no one uses it in religious matters.

In this respect ‘Ἡγεμονιχόν would be a fitting title for the will; yet again this title seems to apply to the intellect, in so far as that is the guide and leader, like the footman who walks in front of the stranger. In truth, however, the most striking figure for the relation of the two is that of the strong blind man carrying the sighted lame man on his shoulders.

In this way, reason represented by your knowledge, and experience represented by instinct -will start to conflict. Eventually, one will lose, and confusion sets in.