Reason Quotes - Page 14

That's a rhetorical question, and trying to answer rhetorical questions instead of being cowed by them is a good habit to cultivate.

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.

Anyone could see that this woman is living a nightmare. Except that she goes through her daily life wide awake, knowing that she could make a mistake at any moment.

I believe that an orderly universe, one indifferent to human preoccupations, in which everything has an expla nation even if we still have a long way to go before we find it, is a more beautiful, more wonderful place than a universe tricked out with capricious, ad hoc magic.

Before you, Bella, my life was like a moonless night. Very dark, but there were stars, points of light and reason. ...And then you shot across my sky like a meteor. Suddenly everything was on fire; there was brilliancy, there was beauty. When you were gone, when the meteor had fallen over the horizon, everything went black. Nothing had changed, but my eyes were blinded by the light. I couldn’t see the stars anymore. And there was no more reason, for anything.

Probably I'm boring, but I have a reason about it and I'm doing behind this, so take it, like it's a fake face.

I swear, gentlemen, that to be too conscious is an illness - a real thorough-going illness.

There are three sources of belief: reason, custom, inspiration.

The mark of the truly civilized is their (truly baffling to the likes of you and me) patience with what truly baffles.

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.

Live your life in such a way that if God should greet you with "How are you?", your answer will be "I am how you wanted me to be"! Live life without regrets!

Rationality belongs to the cool observer, but because of the stupidity of the average man, he follows not reason, but faith, and the naive faith requires necessary illusion and emotionally potent oversimplifications which are provided by the myth-maker to keep ordinary person on course.

The light obtained by setting straw men on fire is not what we mean by illumination.

The fact is you cannot be intelligent merely by choosing your opinions. The intelligent man is not the man who holds such-and-such views but the man who has sound reasons for what he believes and yet does not believe it dogmatically. And opinions held for sound reasons have less emotional unity than the opinions of dogmatists because reason is non-party, favouring now one side and now another. That is what people find so unpleasant about it.

We always need a sound reason to move on, and we always pretend to have it.

When sadness knows the reason of tears, heart prepares to carry the ache for years

The sensible man,' Crow had said (to Sherlock Holmes), 'don't look to confirm what he already knows -- he looks to deny it. Finding evidence that backs up your theories ain't useful, but finding evidence that your theories are wrong is priceless. Never try to prove yourself right -- always try to prove yourself wrong instead.

We all are beautiful, let's not pretend to be ugly.

Any man who neglects his conscience is a dangerous animal.

The truth is that if you do not join the way of godliness, then you do not have any reason to complain when the ungodly are busy planning and making the pathway of ungodliness.

Religious belief is without reason and without dignity, and its record is near-universally dreadful.

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.

The idea that reason and rationality is somehow separate from and antithetical to ones ' heart' is one of the most absurd theologies I have ever in my life heard." ~R. Alan Woods ("Just Keeping It Real", Copyright 2012)

Reality is that which exists; the unreal does not exist; the unreal is merely that negation of existence which is the content of a human consciousness when it attempts to abandon reason. Truth is the recognition of reality; reason, man’s only means of knowledge, is his only standard of truth.

The man who is master of his passions is Reason's slave.

With Truth, Reason, and Morality off the board, we then capture their last Rook —that prissy little virtue, Temperance— for she depends on those other three for her beauty and was thus left wholly undefended.

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

It is always more easy to discover and proclaim general principles than to apply them.

The top 10% of the people who are most creative, constructive and thoughtful, do not have much to do with churches. To them the canons of reason come first, making faith secondary and questionable.

Can reason lead us in directions that are good or decent or moral? After all, you pointed out that reason is just a means to an end, and the end depends on the reasoner's passions. Reason can lay out a road map to peace and harmony if the reasoner wants peace and harmony, but it can also lay out a road map to conflict and strife if the reasoner delights in conflict and strife. Can reason force the reasoner to want less cruelty and waste?

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.

For my part, I prefer the ontological argument, the cosmological argument and the rest of the old stock-in-trade, to the sentimental illogicality that has sprung from Rousseau.

Men who reject the responsibility of thought and reason can only exist as parasites on the thinking of others.

Where I cannot satisfy my reason I love to humour my fancy.

Every little or big problem has a reason,Every year there is a winter season,Every trouble goes away with time,After winter spring comes with rhyme.

This was true, she knew. Being involved with him gave her the privileged position of knowing him intimately. There were nights when he would wake up sweating, the nightmares returning out of the blue after a peaceful period sometimes weeks long. Growing up in the middle of a fierce civil war could indelibly mark a child. To Mykl, birthdays were always just another year under the belt, where the only reason to celebrate was that you weren’t dead yet. She took his hand, squeezed it tight and led him inside.

I survive by finding the sweet spot between reason and unreason, between the rational and irrational.

We continue to need exhortations to be sympathetic and just, even if we do not believe that there is a God who has a hand in wishing to make us so. We no longer have to be brought into line by the threat of hell or the promise of paradise; we merely have to be reminded that it is we ourselves -- that is, the most mature and reasonable parts of us (seldom present in the midst of our crises and obsessions) -- who want to lead the sort of life which we once imagined supernatural beings demanded of us. An adequate evolution of morality from superstition to reason should mean recognizing ourselves as the authors of our own moral commandments.

There are two paths that you must never leave in your life: The path of peace and the path of reason!

But Dostoevsky does allow himself to ask just this very question: whether our reason has any right to judge between the possible and the impossible.

To us, it is incomprehensible that millions of Christian men killed and tortured each other because Napoleon was ambitious or Alexander was firm, or because England's policy was astute or the Duke of Oldenburg was wronged. We cannot grasp what connection such circumstances have the with the actual fact of slaughter and violence: why because the Duke was wronged, thousands of men from the other side of Europe killed and ruined the people of Smolensk and Moscow and were killed by them.

I believe that we are henceforth incapable of returning to an order of moral life which would take the form of a simple submission to commandments or to an alien or supreme will, even if this will were represented as divine. We must accept as a positive good the critique of ethics and religion that has been undertaken by the school of suspicion. From it we have learned to understand that the commandment that gives death, not life, is a product and projection of our own weakness.

It is certainly true that reason is the most important and the highest rank among all things and, in comparison with other things of this life, the best and something divine. It is the inventor and mentor of all the arts, medicines, laws, and of whatever wisdom, power, virtue, and glory men possess in this life.

Here we are, trapped in the amber of the moment. There is no why.

There's no need to curse God if you're an ugly duckling. He chooses those strong enough to endure it so that they can guide others who've felt the same.

Talk sense to a fool and he calls you foolish.

Flames of outrage and reprisal had likewise made a comeback, his nearly forgotten, silent heritage no longer hidden by thirty years of compliance. Instead the fire grew, unmitigated by training, logic or reason.

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.

Indeed, Dr Haxhausen fought to preserve his freedom with very good reason, for he required a great deal of it—freedom, not reason—to pursue his plans for the future.

Don't allow your mind to tell your heart what to do. The mind gives up easily

There is no problem the mind of man can set that the mind of man cannot solve.

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

Jane! will you hear reason?' (he stooped and approached his lips to my ear) 'because, if you won't, I'll try violence.

The root of liberalism, in a word, is hatred of compulsion, for liberalism has the respect for the individual and his conscience and reason which the employment of coercion necessarily destroys. The liberal has faith in the individual – faith that he can be persuaded by rational means to beliefs compatible with social good.

For the most part, people strenuously resist any redefinition of morality, because it shakes them to the very core of their being to think that in pursuing virtue they may have been feeding vice, or in fighting vice they may have in fact been fighting virtue.

The expedition of my violent love outrun the pauser, reason.

But it’s a neurological fact that the scared self holds on while the reasoned one lets go. The adrenaline that let our ancestors escape the sabertooth tiger sears into the meat of our brains the extraordinary, the loud. The shrieking fight or the out-of-character insult endures forever, while the daily sweetness dissolves like sugar in water.

Do you know, I sometimes, catch myself wishing that I too were blind to the facts of life and only knew its fancies and illusions. They're wrong, all wrong, of course, and contrary to reason; but in the face of them my reason tells me, wrong and most wrong, that to dream and live illusions gives greater delight. And after all, delight is the wage for living. Without delight living is a worthless act. To labor at living and be unpaid is worse than to be dead. He who delights the most lives the most, and your dreams and unrealities are less disturbing to you and more gratifying than are my facts to me. I often doubt, I often doubt, the worthwhileness of reason. Dreams must be more substantial and satisfying. Emotional delight is more filling and lasting than intellectual delight by having the blues. Emotional delight is followed by no more than jaded senses which speedily recuperate. I envy you, I envy you

Morality established from Science is the key to understanding Coexistence.Science based on Morality is the reason we have prejudice for things we don't understand.

Humanity is a cage, and our puritanical sensibilities comprise the bars. We are confined by our own reason and intellect, and yet most of us don't even know it.