Logic Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

The most refined abstractions of logic conduct to a view of life, which, though startling to the apprehension, is, in fact, that which the habitual sense of its repeated combinations has extinguished in us. It strips, as it were, the painted curtain from this scene of things. I confess that I am one of those who are unable to refuse my assent to the conclusions of those philosophers who assert that nothing exists but as it is perceived.

Percy Bysshe Shelley

Certainly, truth should be strenuous and bold; but the strongest things are not always the noisiest, as any one may see who compares scolding with logic.

Edwin Hubbell Chapin

My day passes between logic, whistling, going for walks, and being depressed. I wish to God that I were more intelligent and everything would finally become clear to me - or else that I needn't live much longer.

Ludwig Wittgenstein

General scepticism is the live mental attitude of refusing to conclude. It is a permanent torpor of the will, renewing itself in detail towards each successive thesis that offers, and you can no more kill it off by logic than you can kill off obstinacy or practical joking.

Life teaches us that human thought almost never walks hand in hand with logic, and it is usually counterproductive to raise the point.

Jeff Lindsay (writer)

When you squeeze an orange, you'll always get orange juice to come out. What comes out is what's inside. The same logic applies to you: when someone squeezes you, puts pressure on you, or says something unflattering or critical, and out of you comes anger, hatred, bitterness, tension, depression, or anxiety, that is what's inside. If love and joy are what you want to give and receive, change your life by changing what's inside

The space of night is infinite, The blackness and emptiness Crossed only by thin bright fences Of logic.

Kenneth Rexroth

Most scientific problems are far better understood by studying their history than their logic.

Let us hope that in the interludes of rhetoric the logic of facts may find a moment to make itself heard. It will teach men... to hold of Nature that her ways are not as our ways, nor her thoughts as our thoughts.

George Rolleston

The vision of extraordinary achievement is,by definition, a few steps beyond consensus and conventional logic

That which passes under the name earth-science is not all science in the strict sense of the term. Not a little consists of generalizations from incomplete data, of inferences hung on chains of uncertain logic, of interpretations not beyond question, of hypotheses not fully verified, and of speculation none too substantial.

Thomas Chrowder Chamberlin

I think it would be desirable that this form of word [mathematics] should be reserved for the applications of the science, and that we should use mathematic in the singular to denote the science itself, in the same way as we speak of logic, rhetoric, or (own sister to algebra) music.

James Joseph Sylvester

My sense of reality and logic is different from most people's.

The deep paradox uncovered by AI research: the only way to deal efficiently with very complex problems is to move away from pure logic.... Most of the time, reaching the right decision requires little reasoning.... Expert systems are, thus, not about reasoning: they are about knowing.... Reasoning takes time, so we try to do it as seldom as possible. Instead we store the results of our reasoning for later reference.

I think logicians hate my work, they detest it! And I'm like pornography, I'm sort of an unmentionable subject in the world of logic, because my results are so disgusting!

Gregory Chaitin

Nothing is so dangerous as to shut oneself within a circle from which, with rigid logic, everything is banished that does not fit in with the results of a narrow experience!

Federigo Enriques

He who recognizes no higher logic than that of the shilling may become a very rich man, and yet remain all the while an exceedingly poor creature; for riches are no proof whatever of moral worth, and their glitter often serves only to draw attention to the worthlessness of their possessor, as the glow-worm's light reveals the grub.

In the logic of science there is a principle as important as that of parsimony: it is that of sufficient reason.

Lewis White Beck

For a superficial observer, scientific truth is beyond the possibility of doubt; the logic of science is infallible, and if the scientists are sometimes mistaken, this is only from their mistaking its rules.

Henri Poincaré

Metaphysics may be, after all, only the art of being sure of something that is not so and logic only the art of going wrong with confidence.

Joseph Wood Krutch

What frightened me was the logic of the world; in it lay the foretaste of something incalculably powerful. Its mechanism was incomprehensible, and I could not possibly remain closeted in that windowless, bone-chilling room. Though outside lay the sea of irrationality, it was far more agreeable to swim in its waters until presently I drowned.

Logic is to grammar what the sense of words is to their sound.

Somebody who should have been born
is gone.

Yes, woman, such logic will lead
to loss without death. Or say what you meant,
you coward... this baby that I bleed.

The logic of all branches of science points to the existence of some system of evolution of the universe, its complete nature hidden in the vastnesses of time and space, but nevertheless developed in accordance with Nature's laws.

Logic, like language, is partly a free construction and partly a means of symbolizing and harnessing in expression the existing diversities of things; and whilst some languages, given a man's constitution and habits, may seem more beautiful and convenient to him than others, it is a foolish heat in a patriot to insist that only his native language is intelligible or right.

George Santayana