Reason Quotes

A faith without some doubts is like a human body without any antibodies in it. People who blithely go through life too busy or indifferent to ask hard questions about why they believe as they do will find themselves defenseless against either the experience of tragedy or the probing questions of a smart skeptic. A person's faith can collapse almost overnight if she has failed over the years to listen patiently to her own doubts, which should only be discarded after long reflection. Believers should acknowledge and wrestle with doubts — not only their own but their friends' and neighbors'. It is no longer sufficient to hold beliefs just because you inherited them. Only if you struggle long and hard with objections to your faith will you be able to provide the grounds for your beliefs to skeptics, including yourself, that are plausible rather than ridiculous or offensive. And, just as important for our current situation, such a process will lead you, even after you come to a position of strong faith, to respect and understand those who doubt.

~ Timothy J. Keller

The reason for our limitation is only inside us.

~ Sunday Adelaja

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.

~ Bertrand Russell

But it works that way if it works.

~ Jeffery Deaver

Are you going to give me a reason to stay?

~ Elle Cosimano

We survive, in the confusionof a life reborn beyond reason.

~ Pier Paolo Pasolini

There is a delicate ridge one must ride between fear and reason on a motorcycle—lean too far in either direction and there will be consequences.

~ Lily Brooks-Dalton

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

~ Justin K. Mcfarlane Beau

fear doesn't listen to reason it takes it own counsel

~ Richard Paul Evans

War has no longer the justification that it makes for the survival of the fittest, it involves the survival of the less fit. The idea that the struggle between nations is a part of the evolutionary law of man's advance involves a profound misreading of the biological analogy.The warlike nations do not inherit the earth, they represent the decaying human element....

~ Norman Angell

The Creator did not speak man into existence as He did all else which He made, but He began with previously made material. So in the restoration process He did not speak the restoration into reality by fiat. Rather He began the process through a series of connected acts and events. And certainly no act of the Eternal Creator would ever be without purpose or reason.

~ Dr. J. Otis Yoder

At this point it may be objected: well, then, if even the crabbed sceptics admit that the statements of religion cannot be confuted by reason, why should not I believe in them, since they have so much on their side:­ tradition, the concurrence of mankind, and all the consolation they yield? Yes, why not? Just as no one can be forced into belief, so no one can be forced into unbelief. But do not deceive yourself into thinking that with such arguments you are following the path of correct reasoning. If ever there was a case of facile argument, this is one. Ignorance is ignorance; no right to believe anything is derived from it.

~ Sigmund Freud

Faith and reason are indeed complementary faculties that we use to think about the truth. When any winged creature (or mechanism) tries to fly on just one wing, it falls to the ground. In a similar way, when we human beings try to wing it with just one faculty, we crash.

~ Scott Hahn

Cognitive science has something of enormous importance to contribute to human freedom: the ability to learn what our unconscious conceptual systems are like and how our cognitive unconscious functions. If we do not realize that most of our thought is unconscious and that we think metaphorically, we will indeed be slaves to the cognitive unconscious. Paradoxically, the assumption that we have a radically autonomous rationality as traditionally conceived actually limits our rational autonomy. It condemns us to cognitive slavery - to an unaware and uncritical dependence on our unconscious metaphors. To maximize what conceptual freedom we can have, we must be able to see through and move beyond philosophies that deny the existence of an embodied cognitive unconscious that governs most of our mental lives.

~ George Lakoff

What I can and cannot imagine is a psychological fact about me. It is not a deep metaphysical fact about the nature of the universe.

~ Patricia S. Churchland

Keep in mind, we are past the age of enlightenment. This is past reason. We are pretty deep into modern history and the decline of religion. This is when nature itself has been stripped bare of its cozy personality and we all feel homeless in our natures as well.The Limits Of The World

~ Diane Williams

It opens the mind toward an understanding of humannature and destiny. It increases wisdom. It is the veryessence of that much misinterpreted concept, a liberaleducation. It is the foremost approach to humanism,the lore of the specifically human concerns that distinguishman from other living beings. . . . Personal cultureis more than mere familiarity with the presentstate of science, technology, and civic affairs. It ismore than acquaintance with books and paintings andthe experience of travel and of visits to museums. It isthe assimilation of the ideas that roused mankind fromthe inert routine of a merely animal existence to a lifeof reasoning and speculating. It is the individual’seffort to humanize himself by partaking in the traditionof all the best that earlier generations havebequeathed.

~ Ludwig Von Mises

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.

~ George Lakoff

Our reasons are not prophets When oft our fancies are.

~ William Shakespeare

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.

~ Thiruman Archunan

...[P]hilosophical theories are structured by conceptual metaphors that constrain which inferences can be drawn within that philosophical theory. The (typically unconscious) conceptual metaphors that are constitutive of a philosophical theory have the causal effect of constraining how you can reason within that philosophical framework.

~ George Lakoff

The deliberate habituation of patriotism has a bearing upon the problem of peace. Knowledge of other peoples will not bring harmony and mutual goodwill unless it is sympathetic knowledge, and, if it is to be sympathetic, our mental prepossessions must be shaped so as to open our minds to a just appreciation of unwelcome facts and ways at variance with our own.

~ Clarence Reidenbach

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.

~ Debasish Mridha

This is not a new idea; this is the idea of the age of reason. This is the philosophy that guided the men that made the democracy that we live under. The idea that no one really knew how to run a government led to the idea that we should arrange a system by which new ideas could be developed, tried out, and tossed out if necessary, with more new ideas brought in—a trial and error system.

~ Richard Feynman

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?

~ Steven Pinker

Art works to satisfy the instinct and the science works to satisfy the reason.

~ Thiruman Archunan

We love and reason because God Loves and reasons and holds our hand while we do it.

~ C.s. Lewis

[T]he vast majority of human beings are not interested in reason or satisfied with what it teaches.

~ Aldous Huxley

Reason is overrated. Many pundits have argued that a good heart and steadfast moral clarity are superior to triangulations of overeducated policy wonks, like the best and brightest and that dragged us into the quagmire of Vietnam. And wasn't it reason that gave us the means to despoil the planet and threaten our species with weapons of mass destruction? In this way of thinking, it's character and conscience, not cold-hearted calculation, that will save us. Besides, a human being is not a brain on a stick. My fellow psychologists have shown that we're led by our bodies and our emotions and use our puny powers of reason merely to rationalize our gut feelings after the fact

~ Steven Pinker

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

~ Junaid Raza

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

~ Lame Deer

This was the bonus to liberal Christianity: I could use my reason and believe at the same time.

~ Nadia Bolz-Weber

Emotion lay at the very heart of the process of perception, intertwined with intellectual functions, yet adding to perception a quality that reason lacked.

~ John Corrigan

Maybe it's not finding a reason, it's trusting that there is one.

~ Anonomyous.

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.

~ Benjamin Cain

When we need reasons to do something, we pretend to have it.

~ Junaid Raza

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.

~ Claire Robertson

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

~ Samuel R. Delany

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

~ Anne Brontë

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

~ Jack London