Browse through our collection of quotes tagged with Reason.
The gods plant reason in mankind, of all good gifts the highest.
Sophocles
From his cradle to his grave a man never does a single thing which has any FIRST AND FOREMOST object but one -- to secure peace of mind, spiritual comfort, for HIMSELF.
Mark Twain
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
Our reason may prove what it will: our reason is only a feeble ray that has issued from Nature.
Maurice Maeterlinck
Respectable men and women content with good and easy living are missing some of the most important things in life. Unless you give ;yourself to some great cause you haven't even begun to live.
William P. Merrill
If I had a choice, if I had understood earlier that the reason my days were all the same was because I wanted them like that, perhaps...
Paulo Coelho
A noble heart will always capitulate to reason.
Friedrich von Schiller
Once the people begin to reason, all is lost
Voltaire
The person who is master of their passions is reason's slave.
Cyril Connolly
Reason can never be popular. Passions and feelings may become popular, but reason will always remain the sole property of a few eminent individuals.
Johann von Goethe
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 pu
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
If you would win a man to your cause, first convince him that you are his sincere friend. Therein is a drop of honey that catches his heart, which, say what you will, is the great high-road to his reason, and which, when once gained, you will find but little trouble in convincing his judgment of the justice of your cause.
Abraham Lincoln
Why does man kill? He kills for food. And not only food: frequently there must be a beverage.
Woody Allen
I can stand brute force, but brute reason is quite unbearable. There is something unfair about its use. It is hitting below the intellect.
Oscar Wilde
It is only after an unknown number of unrecorded labors, after a host of noble hearts have succumbed in discouragement, convinced that ;their cause is lost; it is only then that cause triumphs.
Madame Guizot
Reason lost the battle, and all I could do was surrender and accept I was in love.
Eating, drinking, dying - three primary manifestations of the universal and impersonal life. Animals live that impersonal and universal life without knowing its nature. Ordinary people know its nature but don't live it and, if they think seriously about it, refuse to accept it. An enlightened person knows it, lives it, and accepts it completely. He eats, he drinks, and in due course he dies - but he eats with a difference, drinks with a difference, dies with a difference.
Aldous Huxley
Your reason and your passion are the rudder and the sails of your seafaring soul. If either your sails or your rudder be broken you can but toss and drift, or else be held at a stand still in mid-seas.For reason, ruling alone, is a force confining; and a passion unattended, is a flame that burns to its own destruction. Therefore let your soul exalt your reason to the height of passion, that it may sing; and let it direct your passion with reason, that your passion may live through its own daily ressurrection, and like the phoenix rise above its own ashes.
Kahlil Gibran
The heart has its reasons which reason knows not.
Blaise Pascal
