Reason Quotes

“If everyone who had a gun just shot themselves, there wouldn't be a problem.”
― George Harrison

“I felt for the tormented whirlwinds
Damned for their carnal sins
Committed when they let their passions rule their reason.”
― Dante Alighieri

“And here is the point, about myself and my co-thinkers. 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, openmindedness, and the pursuit of ideas for their own sake.”
― Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything

“Man has been accustomed, ever since he was a boy, to having a dozen incompatible philosophies dancing about together inside his head. He doesn't think of doctrines as primarily "true" or "false," but as "academic" or "practical," "outworn" or "contemporary," "conventional" or "ruthless." Jargon, not argument, is your best ally in keeping him from the Church. Don't waste time trying to make him think that materialism is true! Make him think it is strong or stark or courageous—that it is the philosophy of the future. That's the sort of thing he cares about.”
― C.S. Lewis

“Why has government been instituted at all? Because the passions of man will not conform to the dictates of reason and justice without constraint.”
― Alexander Hamilton

“Be happy for no reason, like a child. If you are happy for a reason, you’re in trouble, because that reason can be taken from you.”
― Deepak Chopra

“Le coeur a ses raisons que le raison ne connaît point.”
― Blaise Pascal, Pensées

“The doctrine that future happiness depends upon belief is monstrous. It is the infamy of infamies. The notion that faith in Christ is to be rewarded by an eternity of bliss, while a dependence upon reason, observation and experience merits everlasting pain, is too absurd for refutation, and can be relieved only by that unhappy mixture of insanity and ignorance, called 'faith.”
― Robert Ingersoll, On the Gods and Other Essays

“Whenever we want to combat our enemies, first and foremost we must start by understanding them rather than exaggerating their motives.”
― Criss Jami, Killosophy

“So this is where all the vapid talk about the 'soul' of the universe is actually headed. Once the hard-won principles of reason and science have been discredited, the world will not pass into the hands of credulous herbivores who keep crystals by their sides and swoon over the poems of Khalil Gibran. The 'vacuum' will be invaded instead by determined fundamentalists of every stripe who already know the truth by means of revelation and who actually seek real and serious power in the here and now. One thinks of the painstaking, cloud-dispelling labor of British scientists from Isaac Newton to Joseph Priestley to Charles Darwin to Ernest Rutherford to Alan Turing and Francis Crick, much of it built upon the shoulders of Galileo and Copernicus, only to see it casually slandered by a moral and intellectual weakling from the usurping House of Hanover. An awful embarrassment awaits the British if they do not declare for a republic based on verifiable laws and principles, both political and scientific.”
― Christopher Hitchens

“We should challenge the relativism that tells us there is no right or wrong, when every instinct of our mind knows it is not so, and is a mere excuse to allow us to indulge in what we believe we can get away with. A world without values quickly becomes a world without value.”
― Jonathan Sacks

“The advantages of natural folly in a beautiful girl have been already set forth by the capital pen of a sister author; and to her treatment of the subject I will only add, in justice to men, that though to the larger and more trifling part of the sex, imbecility in females is a great enhancement of their personal charms, there is a portion of them too reasonable and too well informed themselves to desire anything more in woman than ignorance.”
― Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey

“It is not, what a lawyer tells me I may do; but what humanity, reason, and justice, tell me I ought to do.”
― Edmund Burke, Speech on Conciliation with America

“To kill an error is as good a service as, and sometimes even better than, the establishing of a new truth or fact.”
― Charles Darwin, More Letters of Charles Darwin, Vol 2

“Reason excludes faith," Alessandro responded, watching the blood-red mite as it made a dash for the rim. "It's deliberately limited. It won't function with the materials of religion. You can come close to proving the existence of God by reason, but you can't do it absolutely. That's because you can't do anything absolutely by reason. That's because reason depends on postulates. Postulates defy proof and yet they are essential to reason. God is a postulate. I don't think God is interested in the verification of His existence, and, therefore, neither am I. Anyway, I have professional reasons to believe. Nature and art pivot faithfully around God. Even dogs know that.”
― Mark Helprin

“Resources are hired to give results, not reasons.”
― Amit Kalantri, Wealth of Words

“If he [Thomas Edison] had a needle to find in a haystack, he would not stop to reason where it was most likely to be, but would proceed at once with the feverish diligence of a bee, to examine straw after straw until he found the object of his search. … Just a little theory and calculation would have saved him ninety percent of his labor.”
― Nikola Tesla

“Every impulse of feeling should be guided by reason; and, in my opinion, exertion should always be in proportion to what is required.”
― Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

“Reason must know the heart's reasons and every other reason”
― Leonora Carrington

“Reason I know, is only a drug, and, as such, its effects are never permanent. But, like the juice of the poppy, it often gives a temporary relief.”
― Hope Mirrlees, Lud-in-the-Mist

“Colonialism. The enforced spread of the rule of reason. But who is going to spread it among the colonizers?”
― Anthony Burgess

“When even the brightest mind in our world has been trained up from childhood in a superstition of any kind, it will never be possible for that mind, in its maturity, to examine sincerely, dispassionately, and conscientiously any evidence or any circumstance which shall seem to cast a doubt upon the validity of that superstition. I doubt if I could do it myself.”
― Mark Twain, The Autobiography of Mark Twain

“We are all human, and our senses are quicker to prompt us than our reason. Every man gives off a scent, and that scent tells you how to act before your head does.”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The First Circle

“As a poet and as a mathematician, he would reason well; as a mere mathematician, he could not have reasoned at all.”
― Edgar Allan Poe, The Purloined Letter

“Without the voice of reason, every faith is its own curse."

(History Will Teach Us Nothing)”
― Sting, Nothing Like the Sun

“There iz no alternativ. Every possible reezon that could ever be offered for altering the spelling of wurds, stil exists in full force; and if a gradual reform should not be made in our language, it wil proov that we are less under the influence of reezon than our ancestors.

[This quote illustrates the reformed spelling advocated by Webster.]”
― Noah Webster

“I write
Not
For the sake of glory
Not
For the sake of fame
Not
For the sake of success
But for the sake of my soul”
― Beth Nimmo , Rachel's Tears: The Spiritual Journey of Columbine Martyr Rachel Scott

“The misunderstanding of passion and reason, as if the latter were an independent entity and not rather a system of relations between various passions and desires; and as if every passion did not possess its quantum of reason”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power

“Giving does not only preceed receiving; it is the reason for it. It is in giving that we receive.”
― Israelmore Ayivor

“And it's his illusions about what
constitutes the real world which are inhibiting him...His reality, his reason, his society ... These are what must be destroyed”
― Luke Rhineheart