Reason Quotes - Page 3

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.

If I go to heaven I want to take my reason with me.

Able writers let us into their minds and show us how they think and by that open our minds to ourselves

If I lie about truth which you will know somehow later, then you would call me a liar. But If you're willing to dig further about truth that force me do it, then you would understand my reason. But you wouldn't acknowledge it.

Hold childhood in reverence, and do not be in any hurry to judge it for good or ill. Leave exceptional cases to show themselves, let their qualities be tested and confirmed, before special methods are adopted. Give nature time to work before you take over her business, lest you interfere with her dealings. You assert that you know the value of time and are afraid to waste it. You fail to perceive that it is a greater waste of time to use it ill than to do nothing, and that a child ill taught is further from virtue than a child who has learnt nothing at all. You are afraid to see him spending his early years doing nothing. What! is it nothing to be happy, nothing to run and jump all day? He will never be so busy again all his life long. Plato, in his Republic, which is considered so stern, teaches the children only through festivals, games, songs, and amusements. It seems as if he had accomplished his purpose when he had taught them to be happy; and Seneca, speaking of the Roman lads in olden days, says, "They were always on their feet, they were never taught anything which kept them sitting." Were they any the worse for it in manhood? Do not be afraid, therefore, of this so-called idleness. What would you think of a man who refused to sleep lest he should waste part of his life? You would say, "He is mad; he is not enjoying his life, he is robbing himself of part of it; to avoid sleep he is hastening his death." Remember that these two cases are alike, and that childhood is the sleep of reason.The apparent ease with which children learn is their ruin. You fail to see that this very facility proves that they are not learning. Their shining, polished brain reflects, as in a mirror, the things you show them, but nothing sinks in. The child remembers the words and the ideas are reflected back; his hearers understand them, but to him they are meaningless.Although memory and reason are wholly different faculties, the one does not really develop apart from the other. Before the age of reason the child receives images, not ideas; and there is this difference between them: images are merely the pictures of external objects, while ideas are notions about those objects determined by their relations.

Purpose drives the process by which we become what we are capable of being.

Doubt is the archenemy of love. He is the scoundrel who accused her to reason

Know then thyself, presume not God to scan,The proper study of mankind is Man.Placed on this isthmus of a middle state,A being darkly wise and rudely great:With too much knowledge for the Sceptic side,With too much weakness for the Stoic's pride,He hangs between, in doubt to act or rest;In doubt to deem himself a God or Beast;In doubt his mind or body to prefer;Born but to die, and reas'ning but to err;Alike in ignorance, his reason such,Whether he thinks too little or too much;Chaos of thought and passion, all confused;Still by himself abused or disabused;Created half to rise, and half to fall;Great lord of all things, yet a prey to all;Sole judge of truth, in endless error hurl'd;The glory, jest, and riddle of the world!Go, wondrous creature! mount where science guides,Go, measure earth, weigh air, and state the tides;Instruct the planets in what orbs to run,Correct old time, and regulate the sun;Go, soar with Plato to th’ empyreal sphere,To the first good, first perfect, and first fair;Or tread the mazy round his followers trod,And quitting sense call imitating God;As Eastern priests in giddy circles run,And turn their heads to imitate the sun.Go, teach Eternal Wisdom how to rule—Then drop into thyself, and be a fool!

Like two side to a coin, there are two sides to life: your reason and emotional facets.

It might have been the real reason I went out there at all, to hear all the nice things guys had to say when they got you alone, when they earned their shot in a booth with you.

I’ve often wondered how the term “'New Atheism”' gained such currency. It is a misnomer. There is nothing new about nonbelief. All of us, without exception, are born knowing nothing of God or gods, and acquire notions of religion solely through interaction with others – or, most often, indoctrination by others, an indoctrination usually commencing well before we can reason. Our primal state is, thus, one of nonbelief. The New Atheists (most prominently Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and the late Christopher Hitchens) have, in essence, done nothing more than try to bring us back to our senses, to return us to a pure and innate mental clarity.

To irrational principles, one cannot be loyal. Ideas that are not derived from reality cannot be consistently practiced in reality.--as quoted by Leonard Peikoff in "Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand

There is a reason that all things are as they are, and did you see with my eyes and know with my knowledge, you would perhaps better understand.

There is no position outside of reason where you can stand and lecture about reason and pass judgment on reason.

It is also worth noting that one can obtain a Ph.D. in any branch of science for no other purpose than to make cynical use of scientific language in an effort to rationalize the glaring inadequacies of tbe Bible. A handful of Christians appear to have done this; some have even obtained their degrees from reputable universities. No doubt, others will follow in their footsteps. While such people are technically "scientists," they are not behaving like scientists. They simply are not engaged in an honest inquiry into the nature of the universe. And their proclamations about God and the failures of Darwinism do not in the least signify that there is a legitimate scientific controversy about evolution.

Never mistrust, unless given a reason.

The finger of the atheists' own divinity, Reason, wrote on the wall the appalling judgments that there is no God; that the universe is only matter in spontaneous motion; and, most grievous word of all, that what men call their souls die with the death of the body, as music dies when the strings are broken.

Never do something for just one reason.

The greatest gift you can leave to humanity is the beautiful trace you left behind yourself that invites people to reason, science and peace!

Limitations can be reasonably expanded. We are constantly challenging our limitations. But a hobbled mind is not going anywhere.

Worse than any severe mental illness, is the illness of bigotry.

...I am, in short, a rationalist and believe only that which reason tells me is so. Mind you, this isn’t easy. We are so surrounded by tales of the supernatural, by the thunders of the powers to be who attempt with all their might to convince us of the existence of the supernatural, that the strongest among us may feel himself swaying.Something like that happened to me recently. In January 1990, I was lying in a hospital bed one afternoon and my dear wife, Janet, was not with me, but had gone home for a few hours to take care of some necessary chores. I was sleeping, and a finger jabbed at me. I woke, of course, and looked blearily to see who had awakened me and for what purpose.My room, however, had a lock, and the lock was firmly closed and there was a chain across the door too. Sunlight filled the room and it was clearly empty. So were the closet and the bathroom. Rationalist though I am, there was no way in which I could refrain from thinking that some supernatural influence had interfered to tell me that something had happened to Janet (naturally, my ultimate fear). I hesitated for a moment, trying to fight it off, and for anyone but Janet I would have. So I phoned her at home. She answered immediately and said she was perfectly well.Relieved, I hung up the phone and settled down to consider the problem of who or what had poked me. Was it simply a dream, a sensory hallucination? Perhaps, but it had seemed absolutely real. I considered.When I sleep alone, I often wrap myself up in my own arms. I also know that when I am sleeping lightly, my muscles twitch. I assumed my sleeping position and imagined my muscles twitching. It was clear that my own finger had poked into my shoulder and that was it.Now suppose that at the precise moment I had poked myself, Janet, through some utterly meaningless coincidence, had tripped and skinned her knee. And suppose I had called and she had groaned and said, "I just hurt myself".Would I have been able to resist the thought of supernatural interference? I hope so. However, I can't be sure. It's the world we live in. It would corrupt the strongest, and I don't imagine I'm in the strongest.

Conversion and zealotry, just like revelation and apostasy, are flip sides of the same coin, the currency of a political culture having more in common with religion than rational discourse.

Through Sade and Goya, the Western world received the possibility of transcending its reason in violence....

...Spinoza’s Conjecture:“Belief comes quickly and naturally, skepticism is slow and unnatural, and most people have a low tolerance for ambiguity.The scientific principle that a claim is untrue unless proven otherwise runs counter to our natural tendency to accept as true that which we can comprehend quickly. Thus it is that we should reward skepticism and disbelief, and champion those willing to change their mind in the teeth of new evidence. Instead, most social institutions-most notably those in religion, politics, and economics-reward belief in the doctrines of the faith or party or ideology, punish those who challenge the authority of the leaders, and discourage uncertainty and especially skepticism.

I may not know why, but I do know why not and this is where I stand.

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 do not believe in God. It seems to me that theists of all kinds have very largely failed to make their concept of a deity intelligible; and to the extent that they have made it intelligible, they have given us no reason to think that anything answers to it.

The real difference is this: the Christian says that he has knowledge; the Agnostic admits that he has none; and yet the Christian accuses the Agnostic of arrogance, and asks him how he has the impudence to admit the limitations of his mind. To the Agnostic every fact is a torch, and by this light, and this light only, he walks.The Agnostic knows that the testimony of man is not sufficient to establish what is known as the miraculous. We would not believe to-day the testimony of millions to the effect that the dead had been raised. The church itself would be the first to attack such testimony. If we cannot believe those whom we know, why should we believe witnesses who have been dead thousands of years, and about whom we know nothing?The Agnostic takes the ground that human experience is the basis of morality. Consequently, it is of no importance who wrote the gospels, or who vouched or vouches for the genuineness of the miracles. In his scheme of life these things are utterly unimportant. He is satisfied that “the miraculous” is the impossible. He knows that the witnesses were wholly incapable of examining the questions involved, that credulity had possession of their minds, that 'the miraculous' was expected, that it was their daily food.

There's a logical reason for everything in the universe even if we cannot comprehend, understand, or express that reason.

Surviving is one thing," he said quietly, his voice suddenly calmer, "but you've got to have a reason to do it. There's no point in living if you don't have anything worth living for.

Reason can in general do more than blind force.

The heart has its reasons which reason knows not.

I do understand what love is, and that is one of the reasons I can never again be a Christian. Love is not self denial. Love is not blood and suffering. Love is not murdering your son to appease your own vanity. Love is not hatred or wrath, consigning billions of people to eternal torture because they have offended your ego or disobeyed your rules. Love is not obedience, conformity, or submission. It is a counterfeit love that is contingent upon authority, punishment, or reward. True love is respect and admiration, compassion and kindness, freely given by a healthy, unafraid human being.

But we have reason to think that the annihilation of work is no less a physical impossibility than its creation, that is, than perpetual motion.

We should be agnostic about those things for which there is no evidence. We should not hold beliefs merely because they gratify our desires for afterlife, immortality, heaven, hell, etc.

He always maintained that we fear something because we recognize it as fearsome through rational inferences, and that only the reason had any power; the heart had none. While I ate well and drank well, he kept demonstrating to me the advantages of reason... In striving after the positive, the poor man had argued away all life's splendour, all the sunbeams, all the faith and all the flowers, leaving nothing but the cold, positive grave.

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.

[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.

It's irresponsible to think things are just going to work out because you believe things happen for a reason. I refuse to accept these things. I refuse to give in to that absurdity. You saw what happened in Lucille and you lived with Col all those years. You know the suffering they went through. Even this place. There are so many empty houses yet so many homeless. Society is breaking. The kingdoms are failing them.

Reading doesn't mean accepting everything you read, it means reasoning everything you read.

Logic rests on the axiom that existence exists. Logic is the art of non-contradictory identification.

The very fact of having fixed conclusions to strive for in orthodox belief does not render the Christian philosopher dogmatic but rather intellectually fruitful, willing to take and follow reason further than the putatively undogmatic unbelieving philosopher

This world, for aught he knows, is very faulty and imperfect, compared to a superior standard; and was only the first rude essay of some infant deity, who afterwards abandoned it, ashamed of his lame performance: it is the work only of some dependent, inferior deity; and is the object of derision to his superiors: it is the production of old age and dotage in some superannuateddeity; and ever since his death, has run on at adventures, from the first impulse and active force which it received from him.

She could just pack up and leave, but she does not visualize what's beyond ahead.

What unhappy beings men are! They constantly waver between false hopes and silly fears, and instead of relying on reason they create monsters to frighten themselves with, and phantoms which lead them astray.

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.

The empiricist assumes without any evidence or proof that his experiences somehow give him a magical access to reality. So completely does he identify experience and reality that he cannot liberate himself from thinking of the two as one and the same. In equating experience and reality, he is making a huge and unwarranted leap. But this breakdown of reason is not easy for him or us to recognize because our human minds have a built-in disposition toward illusion – the illusion that reality must be exactly the way we experience it. The irony is that many of the people who proceed in this irrational way think of themselves as following strictly along the pathways of reason.

The way to be invisible - is to truly be imaginary. But since you cannot imagine yourself, you have to clone your imagination into being an image of yourself. Imagine that.

Do not think that we say that these things are only to be received by faith, but also that they are to be asserted by reason. For indeed it is not safe to commit these things to bare faith without reason, since assuredly truth cannot be without reason.

God put you on earth with a divine assignment- something prepared in advance for you to do. I've found that the things that make us sad, the things that make us righteously angry, or the things we care about that others don't are often a key that unlocks our reason for living. It's our burden.

There are two futures, the future of desire and the future of fate, and man's reason has never learned to separate them.

We must conduct research and then accept the results. If they don't stand up to experimentation, Buddha's own words must be rejected.

The reason why I smile even in the midst of the storm is because I know that Jesus Christ will carry me through.

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.

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

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

emotion untempered by reason is social suicide

Nihil est sine ratione.[There is nothing without a reason.]

Everything feels like the end of the world, and you can't reason with someone who can't see tomorrow.