Reason Quotes

When once a man is launched on such an adventure as this, he must bid farewell to hopes and fears, otherwise death or deliverance will both come too late to save his honor and his reason.

C.S. Lewis

The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike.

Delos Banning McKown

If you like what you do, and you’re lucky enough to be good at it, do it for that reason.

Phil Grimshaw

Rationalists are admirable beings, rationalism is a hideous monster when it claims for itself omnipotence. Attribution of omnipotence to reason is as bad a piece of idolatry as is worship of stock and stone believing it to be God. I plead not for the suppression of reason, but for a due recognition of that in us which sanctifies reason.

Mahatma Gandhi

I am older than you. Believe me, there is no other way to live on earth. Men are not open to truth or reason. They cannot be reached by a rational argument. The mind is powerless against them. Yet we have to deal with them. If we want to accomplish anything, we have to deceive them into letting us accomplish it. Or force them. They understand nothing else. We cannot expect their support for any endeavor of the intellect, for any goal of the spirit. They are nothing but vicious animals. They are greedy, self-indulgent, predatory dollar-chasers

Ayn Rand

Reason is a whore, surviving by simulation, versatility, and shamelessness.

E. M. Cioran

The heart has reasons that reason cannot know.

Blaise Pascal

Having learnt from experiment and argument that a stone falls downwards, a man indubitably believes this, and always expects the law he has learnt to be fulfilled.But learning just as certainly that his will is subject to laws, he does not and cannot believe it.However often experiment and reasoning may show a man that under the same conditions and with the same character he will do the same thing as before, yet when, under the same conditions and with the same character, he approaches for the thousandth time the action that always ends in the same way, he feels as certainly convinced as before the experiment that he can act as he pleases. Every man, savage or sage, however incontestably reason and experiment may prove to him that it is impossible to imagine two different courses of action in precisely the same conditions, feels that without this irrational conception (which constitutes the essence of freedom) he cannot imagine life. He feels that, however impossible it may be, it is so, for without this conceptions of freedom not only would he be unable to understand life, but he would be unable to live for a single moment.He could not live, because all man's efforts, all his impulses to life, are only efforts to increase freedom. Wealth and poverty, fame and obscurity, power and subordination, strength and weakness, health and disease, culture and ignorance, work and leisure, repletion and hunger, virtue and vice, are only greater or lesser degrees of freedom.A man having no freedom cannot be conceived of except as deprived of life.If the conception of freedom appears to reason a senseless contradiction, like the possibility of performing two actions at one and the same instant of time, or of an effect without a cause, that only proves that consciousness is not subject to reason.

Leo Tolstoy

Take away the cause, and the effect ceases.

Miguel de Cervantes

The way to see by faith, is to shut the eye of reason.

Benjamin Franklin

A good cause can become bad if we fight for it with means that are indiscriminately murderous. A bad cause can become good if enough people fight for it in a spirit of comradeship and self-sacrifice. In the end it is how you fight, as much as why you fight, that makes your cause good or bad.

Freeman Dyson

He that speaketh against his own reason speaks against his own conscience, and therefore it is certain that no man serves God with a good conscience who serves him against his reason.

Jeremy Taylor

Don't allow your mind to tell your heart what to do. The mind gives up easily

Paulo Coelho

Reason gains all people by compelling none.

Aaron Hill

Reason commands us far more imperiously than a master. When we disobey the latter we are punished, when we disobey the former we are fools.

Blaise Pascal

Faith consists in believing when it is beyond the power of reason to believe.

Voltaire

The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. He is the man who has lost everything except his reason.

G. K. Chesterton

A person possessed with an idea cannot be reasoned with.

James A. Froude

Reason is the historian, but passions are the actors.

Antoine Rivarol

Reason is a very light rider, and easily shook off.

Jonathan Swift