 
|
Reason lies between the bridle and the spur.
-Italian Proverb
|
|
|
|
Reason is the wise man's guide, example the fool's.
-Proverb
|
|
|
|
Reason itself is fallible, and this fallibility must find a place in our logic.
-Nicola Abbagnano
|
|
|
|
Why does man kill? He kills for food. And not only food: frequently there must be a beverage.
-Woody Allen
|
|
|
|
A man has free choice to the extent that he is rational.
-Thomas Aquinas
|
|
|
|
Most men seem to live according to sense rather than reason.
-Thomas Aquinas
|
|
|
|
O reason, reason, abstract phantom of the waking state, I had already expelled you from my dreams, now I have reached a point where those dreams are about to become fused with apparent realities: now there is only room here for myself.
-Louis Aragon
|
|
|
|
There are strange flowers of reason to match each error of the senses.
-Louis Aragon
|
|
|
|
No cause is left but the most ancient of all, the one, in fact, that from the beginning of our history has determined the very existence of politics, the cause of freedom versus tyranny.
-Hannah Arendt
|
|
|
|
Reasoning draws a conclusion, but does not make the conclusion certain, unless the mind discovers it by the path of experience.
-Roger Bacon
|
|
|
|
Never ascribe to an opponent motives meaner than your own.
-James Barrie
|
|
|
|
Everything that is beautiful and noble is the product of reason and calculation.
-Charles Baudelaire
|
|
|
|
That proves you are unusual, returned the Scarecrow; and I am convinced the only people worthy of consideration in this world are the unusual ones. For the common folks are like the leaves of a tree, and live and die unnoticed.
-Lyman Frank Baum
|
|
|
|
As if reasoning were any kind of writing or talking which tends to convince people that some doctrine or measure is true and right.
-Catharine Esther Beecher
|
|
|
|
The power of a movement lies in the fact that it can indeed change the habits of people. This change is not the result of force but of dedication, of moral persuasion.
-Steve Biko
|
|
|
|
Some excel in rhyme who reason foolishly.
-Nicholas Boileau
|
|
|
|
We can only reason from what is; we can reason on actualities, but not on possibilities.
-Henry Bolingbroke
|
|
|
|
To reason about love is to lose reason.
-Boufflers
|
|
|
|
Reason sits firm and holds the reins, and she will not let the feelings burst away and hurry her to wild chasms. The passions may rage furiously, like true heathens, as they are; and the desires may imagine all sorts of vain things: but judgment shall still have the last word in every argument, and the casting vote in every decision.
-Charlotte Bronte
|
|
|
|
Men are blind in their own cause.
-Heywood Broun
|
|
|
|
As reason is a rebel to faith, so passion is a rebel to reason.
-Sir Thomas Browne
|
|
|
|
Life, they urge, would be intolerable if men were to be guided in all they did by reason and reason only. Reason betrays men into the drawing of hard and fast lines, and to the defining by language -- language being like the sun, which rears and then scorches. Extremes are alone logical, but they are always absurd; the mean is illogical, but an illogical mean is better than the sheer absurdity of an extreme. There are no follies and no unreasonablenesses so great as those which can apparently be irrefragably defended by reason itself, and there is hardly an error into which men may not easily be led if they base their conduct upon reason only.
Reason might very possibly abolish the double currency; it might even attack the personality of Hope and Justice. Besides, people have such a strong natural bias towards it that they will seek it for themselves and act upon it quite as much as or more than is good for them: there is no need of encouraging reason. With unreason the case is different. She is the natural complement of reason, without whose existence reason itself were non- existent.
If, then, reason would be non-existent were there no such thing as unreason, surely it follows that the more unreason there is, the more reason there must be also? Hence the necessity for the development of unreason, even in the interests of reason herself. The Professors of Unreason deny that they undervalue reason: none can be more convinced than they are, that if the double currency cannot be rigorously deduced as a necessary consequence of human reason, the double currency should cease forthwith; but they say that it must be deduced from no narrow and exclusive view of reason which should deprive that admirable faculty of the one-half of its own existence. Unreason is a part of reason; it must therefore be allowed its full share in stating the initial conditions.
http://www.theabsolute.net/minefield/butler.html
-Samuel Butler
Erewhon (first published 1872)
|
|
|
|
If you follow reason far enough it always leads to conclusions that are contrary to reason.
-Samuel Butler
|
|
|
|
In war, events of importance are the result of trivial causes.
-Julius Caesar
|
|
|
|
A person usually has two reasons for doing something: a good reason and the real reason.
-Thomas Carlyle
|
|
Books about Reason
