Logic Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

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

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

Lewis White Beck

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

Logic is the key to an all-inclusive spiritual well-being.

Marlene Dietrich

Cooking like everything else in France is logic and fashion.

You can be totally rational with a machine. But if you work with people, sometimes logic often has to take a backseat to understanding.

Almost all thinking people agree that you should not have probability 1 (or 0) for any event, other than one demonstrable by logic, like 2 x 2 = 4.

Mankind could not admit an anarchical,— a dual or multiple — universe. The world was there, staring them in the face, with all its chaotic conditions, and society insisted on its Unity in self-defence. Society still insists on treating it as Unity though no longer affecting logic. Society insists on its free will, although free will has never been explained to the satisfaction of any but those who much wish to be satisfied, and although the words in any common sense implied not unity but duality in creation. The Church had nothing to do with inventing this riddle,— the oldest that fretted mankind.

It had been different during his first year of graduate school, when he temporarily forsook physics to explore instead the realm of the senses. Applying logic to the late-blooming quandries of maturity, he had parsed the elements of encounter, banter, negotiation, and consummation, separating and solving the variables one by one until the problem—if not generally solved—did appear to have tractable special solutions.

Ideas should be neutral. But man animates them with his passions and folly. Impure and turned into beliefs, they take on the appearance of reality. The passage from logic is consummated. Thus are born ideologies, doctrines, and bloody farce.

I feel that we are living a very fragmented life; the whole world — you too. So I perceive the world in fragments. It is somewhat like being on a very fast train and getting glimpses of things in strange scales as you pass by. A person can be very, very tiny. And a billboard can make a person very large. You see the corner of a house or you see a bird fly by, and it's all fragmented. Somehow, in painting I try to make some logic out of the world that has been given to me in chaos. I have a very pretentious idea that I want to make life, I want to make sense out of it. The fact that I am doomed to failure — that doesn't deter me in the least.

Logic teaches us that on such and such a road we are sure of not meeting an obstacle; it does not tell us which is the road that leads to the desired end. For this, it is necessary to see the end from afar, and the faculty which teaches us to see is intuition. Without it, the geometrician would be like a writer well up in grammar but destitute of ideas.

Henri Poincaré

Logic is one thing, the human animal another. You can quite easily propose a logical solution to something and at the same time hope in your heart of hearts it won't work out.

Luigi Pirandello

What had been released into the desert vacuum and starry oases of the galaxy was the inexorable logic of reproduction and natural selection. What followed was parasitism, predation, symbiosis, interdependency—chaos, complexity, life.

Robert Charles Wilson

Discovery in mathematics is not a matter of logic. It is rather the result of mysterious powers which no one understands, and in which unconscious recognition of beauty must play an important part. Out of an infinity of designs, a mathematician chooses one pattern for beauty's sake and pulls it down to earth.

And what is 'art'? — a firestorm rushing through Time, arising from no visible source and conforming to no principles of logic or causality.

Joyce Carol Oates