Reason Quotes

“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.”
― Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile, or On Education

“Where did I get it from? Was it by reason that I attained to the knowledge that I must love my neighbour and not throttle him? They told me so when I was a child, and I gladly believed it, because they told me what was already in my soul. But who discovered it? Not reason! Reason has discovered the struggle for existence and the law that I must throttle all those who hinder the satisfaction of my desires. That is the deduction reason makes. But the law of loving others could not be discovered by reason, because it is unreasonable.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

“Eating, drinking, dying - three primary manifestations of the universal and impersonal life. Animals live that impersonal and universal life without knowing its nature. Ordinary people know its nature but don't live it and, if they think seriously about it, refuse to accept it. An enlightened person knows it, lives it, and accepts it completely. He eats, he drinks, and in due course he dies - but he eats with a difference, drinks with a difference, dies with a difference.”
― Aldous Huxley, Island

“Благоразумието е бич за своя носител.”
― Blaga Dimitrova, Лавина

“... insanity is never reasonable.”
― E.A. Bucchianeri, Brushstrokes of a Gadfly

“[...] the less you know, the less you will be aware of your ignorance. The familiar metaphor is that the wider the circle of our knowledge, the greater its contact with the unknown, and the more oppressive our feeling of cognitive inadequacy. By contrast, a small mind finds a small world to match it, and the smaller the mind the more it feels it has the world sussed.”
― Raymond Tallis

“As many critics of religion have pointed out, the notion of a creator poses an immediate problem of an infinite regress. If God created the universe, what created God? To say that God, by definition, is uncreated simply begs the question. Any being capable of creating a complex world promises to be very complex himself. As the biologist Richard Dawkins has observed repeatedly, the only natural process we know of that could produce a being capable of designing things is evolution.”
― Sam Harris, Letter to a Christian Nation

“If the sleep of reason produces monsters, what does the sleep of unreason produce?”
― Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Three Trapped Tigers

“The expedition of my violent love outrun the pauser, reason.”
― William Shakespeare, Macbeth

“You ought not to love the individuals of your domestic circle less, but to love those who exist beyond it more. Once make the feelings of confidence and of affection universal, and the distinctions of property and power will vanish; nor are they to be abolished without substituting something equivalent in mischief to them, until all mankind shall acknowledge an entire community of rights.”
― Percy Bysshe Shelley, Necessity of Atheism and Other Essays

“Upon my word, Emma, to hear you abusing the reason you have, is almost enough to make me think so too. Better be without sense than misapply it as you do.”
― Jane Austen, Emma

“In contrast to logic, there is common sense, or still better, the Spirit of Reasonableness.”
― Lin Yutang, The Importance of Living

“The quality of life that you have is determined solely by the effort you put into giving your life value, purpose and a reason.”
― steven redhead, The Solution

“There is no method of reasoning more common, and yet none more blameable, than, in philosophical disputes, to endeavour the refutation of any hypothesis, by a pretence of its dangerous consequences to religion and morality. When any opinion leads to absurdities, it is certainly false; but it is not certain that an opinion is false, because it is of danger-ous consequence. Such topics, therefore, ought entirely to be forborne; as serving nothing to the discovery of truth, but only to make the person
of an antagonist odious.”
― David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding

“There are those who wish to read everything. Do not try to do this. Let it
> alone. The number of books is infinite, and you cannot follow
> infinity...For where there is no end, there can be no rest; where there is
> no rest, there can be no peace; and where there is no peace, God cannot
> dwell.”
― Hugh of St. Victor

“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”
― Gregory B. Sadler

“You know, Junpei, everything in the world has its reasons for doing what it does.”
― Haruki Murakami, Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman

“If people don't want you to question something, that probably means you should question it.”
― Michel Templet

“The reason that everyone has their own problem is everyone sees something in different side.”
― jessica patricia

“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.”
― Emma Cameron, Cinnamon Rain

“Presenting a rational argument to a person who has forsaken the use of reason is like asking a vegetarian to eat a cheeseburger.”
― Michel Templet

“Latter-day scepticism is fond of calling itself progressive; but scepticism is really reactionary. Scepticism goes back; it attempts to unsettle what has already been settled. Instead of trying to break up new fields with its plough, it simply tries to break up the plough.”
― G.K. Chesterton

“Within Hobbes’ depiction of the motives for conflict. . . there is a problematic in which the grave threat that human beings pose to other human beings is not constituted simply by the structures of human passions, interests, and desires, nor by the addition of a self-deceptive and egotistical desire for recognition and proof of one’s perhaps illusory power. In this moment, it is the very rationality of other humans, reason in the broad sense, understood as roughly equal to oneself in both capacity and structure, that poses such a threat”
― Gregory B. Sadler

“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.”
― Dinesh D'Souza, What's So Great About Christianity

“Retaining our capacity for reason
is common sense, but definite conclusions and beliefs keep us from seeing life as it really is at any given moment.”
― H.E. Davey Japanese Yoga: The Way of Dynamic Meditation

“People said it because other people said it. They did not know why it was being said and heard everywhere. They did not give or ask for reasons. 'Reason,' Dr. Pritchett had told them, 'is the most naive of all superstitions.'
'The source of public opinion?' said Claude Slagenhop in a public radio speech. 'There is no source of public opinion. It is spontaneously general. It is a reflex of the collective instinct of the collective mind.”
― Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

“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.”
― Harold Edmund Stearns, Liberalism in America: Its Origin, Its Temporary Collapse, Its Future

“Two wrongs' create an additional problem.
'A wrong' plus 'A right' creates a remorse.
'Two rights' create a solution.”
― Emmanuel Aghado

“God is The Reasonable One, therefore reason & faith are not antithetical"

~R. Alan Woods [2007]”
― R. Alan Woods

“That was his tactic. Make them want know something they never wanted to know. Lure them into the trap of knowledge.”
― Sahana Epari