Reason Quotes

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There are women who have an indefinable charm in their faces which makes them beautiful to their intimates, but a cold stranger who tried to reason the matter out and find this beauty would fail.

Sound and sufficient reason falls, after all, to the share of but few men, and those few men exert their influence in silence.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

We have less reason to be surprised or offended when we find others differ from us in opinion, because we very often differ from ourselves.

He who wholly renounces himself, and relies not on mere human reason, will make good progress in the Scriptures; but the world comprehends them not, from ignorance of that mortification which is the gift of God's word.

There are many faculties in man, each of which takes its turn of activity, and that faculty which is paramount in any period and exerts itself through the strongest nation, determines the civility of that age: and each age thinks its own the perfection of reason.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

That in the soul which is called mind (by mind I mean that whereby the soul thinks and judges) is, before it thinks, not actually any real thing. For this reason it cannot reasonably be regarded as blended with the body

Reason is like an officer when the King appears;
The officer then loses his power and hides himself.
Reason is the shadow cast by God; God is the sun.

The reason of idleness and of crime is the deferring of our hopes.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Being, in whose name Heidegger's philosophy increasingly concentrates itself, is for him—as a pure self-presentation to passive consciousness—just as immediate, just as independent of the mediations of the subject as the facts and the sensory data are for the positivists. In both philosophical movements thinking becomes a necessary evil and is broadly discredited. Thinking loses its element of independence. The autonomy of reason vanishes: the part of reason that exceeds the subordinate reflection upon and adjustment to pre-given data. With it, however, goes the conception of freedom and, potentially, the self-determination of human society.

Theodor W. Adorno

The duty of criticism is neither to depreciate nor dignify by partial representations, but to hold out the light of reason, whatever it may discover; and to promulgate the determinations of truth, whatever she shall dictate

The ego represents what we call reason and sanity, in contrast to the id which contains the passions.

My love is as a fever, longing still
For that which longer nurseth the disease,
Feeding on that which doth preserve the ill,
Th' uncertain sickly appetite to please.
My reason, the physician to my love,
Angry that his prescriptions are not kept,
Hath left me, and I desperate now approve
Desire is death, which physic did except.

William Shakespeare

That which is apprehended by intelligence and reason is always in the same state; but that which is conceived by opinion with the help of sensation and without reason, is always in a process of becoming and perishing and never really is.

I cannot help it; reason has nothing to do with it; I love her against reason-but who would as soon love me for my own sake, as she would love the beggar at the corner.

Charles Dickens

The system of Descartes... seemed to give a plausible reason for all those phenomena; and this reason seemed more just, as it is simple and intelligible to all capacities. But in philosophy, a student ought to doubt of the things he fancies he understands too easily, as much as of those he does not understand.

Do not banish reason for inequality; but let your reason serve to make the truth appear where it seems hid, and hide the false seems true.

William Shakespeare

You want to have proven to you that the soul is imperishable and immortal, and you think that the philosopher who is confident in death has but a vain and foolish confidence, if he thinks that he will fare better than one who has led another sort of life, in the world below, unless he can prove this; and you say that the strength and divinity of the soul, and of her existence prior to our becoming men, does not necessarily imply her immortality.... For any man, who is not devoid of natural feeling, has reason to fear, if he has no knowledge or proof of the soul's immortality. That is what I suppose you to say, Cebes, which I designedly repeat, in order that nothing may escape us...

It may be taken for granted that, rash as the Americans are, when they are prudent there is good reason for it.

They wrote in the old days that it is sweet and fitting to die for ones country. But in modern war there is nothing sweet nor fitting in your dying. You will die like a dog for no good reason.

Ernest Hemingway

Of many, imagined blessings it may be doubted whether he that wants or possesses them had more reason to be satisfied with his lot.

When a reasonable Soul forsaketh his divine nature, and becometh beast-like, it dieth. For though the substance of the Soul be incorruptible: yet, lacking the use of Reason, it is reputed dead; for it loseth the Intellective Life.

As long as I have a want, I have a reason for living. Satisfaction is death.

George Bernard Shaw

For some reason which I have failed to understand, many people like the system [scientific totalitarianism] when it is Russian but disliked the very same system when it was German. I am compelled to think that this is due to the power of labels; these people like whatever is labelled 'Left' without examining whether the label has any justification.

Bertrand Russell

Reason has so many forms that we do not know which to choose-Experiment has no fewer.

Michel de Montaigne

FOOL: "The reason why the seven stars are no more than seven is a pretty reason."
LEAR: "Because they are not eight?"
FOOL: "Yes, indeed. Thou wouldst make a good fool."

William Shakespeare