Quotes on Reason
Beware when the great God lets loose a thinker on this planet.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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It is the heart which experiences God, and not the reason. This, then, is faith: God felt by the heart, not by the reason.
Blaise Pascal
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I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.
Galileo Galilei
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It has been said that man is a rational animal. All my life I have been searching for evidence which could support this.
Bertrand Russell
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Our success in war and peace depends not on luck, or rhetoric, or the intervention of mythical gods; it depends on human character and modern scientific creations, and on respect for the meaning and methods of science.
Harlow Shapley
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Whatever is reasonable is true, and whatever is true is reasonable.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
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The heart has its reasons which reason knows nothing of.
Blaise Pascal
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Reason obeys itself; ignorance submits to what is dictated to it.
Thomas Paine
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With all your science can you tell me how it is, and whence it is, that light comes into the soul?
Henry David Thoreau
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What I believe in my heart must make sense in my mind.
Ravi Zacharias
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At the heart of science is an essential tension between two seemingly contradictory attitudes - an openness to new ideas, no matter how bizarre or counterintuitive they may be, and the most ruthless skeptical scrutiny of all ideas, old and new. This is how deep truths are winnowed from deep nonsense. Of course, scientists make mistakes in trying to understand the world, but there is a built-in error-correcting mechanism: The collective enterprise of creative thinking and skeptical thinking together keeps the field on track.
Carl Sagan
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There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.
Albert Einstein
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Conscience is our magnetic compass; reason our chart.
Joseph Cook
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It is useless to attempt to reason a man out of a thing he was never reasoned into.
Jonathan Swift
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That language is an instrument of human reason, and not merely a medium for the expression of thought, is a truth generally admitted.
George Boole
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This is the perpetual and pitiful tragedy of the practical man in practical affairs. He always begins with a flourish of contempt for what he calls theorizing and what people who can do it call thinking. He will not wait for logic - that is, in the most exact sense, he will not listen to reason. It will therefore appear to him an idle and ineffectual proceeding to say that there is a reason for his present failure. Nevertheless, it may be well to say it, and to try and make it clear even to him.
Gilbert Keith Chesterton
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The supreme function of reason is to show man that some things are beyond reason.
Blaise Pascal
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The man who believes that the secrets of this world are forever hidden lives in mystery and fear. Superstition will drag him down. The rain will erode the deeds of his life. But that man who sets himself the task of singling out the thread of order from the tapestry will by the decision alone have taken charge of the world and it is only by such taking charge that he will effect a way to dictate the terms of his own fate.
Cormac McCarthy
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Correlation doesn't imply causation, but it does waggle its eyebrows suggestively and gesture furtively while mouthing 'look over there'.
Randall Munroe
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Suppose he has a beautiful home and a handsome collection of servants, a lot of land under cultivation and a lot of money out at interest; not one of these things can be said to be in him - they are just things around him. Praise in him what can neither be given nor snatched away, what is peculiarly a man's. You ask what that is? It is his spirit, and the perfection of his reason in that spirit. For man is a rational animal. Man's ideal state is realized when he has fulfilled the purpose for which he was born. And what is it that reason demands of him? Something very easy - that he live in accordance with his own nature.
Seneca
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One of the causes of the troubles that beset us is the way our lives are guided by the example of others; instead of being set to rights by reason we're seduced by convention.
Seneca
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The brain is a flawed lens through which to see reality. This is true of both mouse brains and human brains. But a human brain is a flawed lens that can understand its own flaws - its systematic errors, its biases - and apply second-order corrections to them. This, in practice, makes the flawed lens far more powerful. Not perfect, but far more powerful.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
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Have no respect whatsoever for authority; forget who said it and instead look what he starts with, where he ends up, and ask yourself, "Is it reasonable?"
Richard Feynman
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There is one rule that's very simple, but not easy: observe reality and adjust.
Ran Prieur
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Many philosophers—particularly amateur philosophers, and ancient philosophers—share a dangerous instinct: If you give them a question, they try to answer it.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
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Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.
David Hume
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Man cannot make or invent or contrive principles. He can only discover them and he ought to look through the discovery to the Author.
Thomas Paine
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If you cannot examine your thoughts, you have no choice but to think them, however silly they may be.
Richard Mitchell
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Every generation before us believed...that it had things figured out. We now know that every generation before us was wrong about a lot of it. Is it likely that you were born at the tipping point of history, in which humans know enough about reality to say we understand it? This is another case where humility is your friend. When you can release on your ego long enough to view your perceptions as incomplete or misleading, it gives you the freedom to imagine new and potentially more useful ways of looking at the world.
Scott Adams
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If you believe people use reason for the important decisions in life, you will go through life feeling confused and frustrated that others seem to have bad reasoning skills.
Scott Adams
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It is tremendously useful to know when people are using reason and when they are rationalizing the irrational. You're wasting your time if you try to make someone see reason when reason is not influencing the decision.
Scott Adams
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If your view of the world is that people use reason for their important decisions, you are setting yourself up for a life of frustration and confusion. You'll find yourself continually debating people and never winning except in your own mind. Few things are as destructive and limiting as a worldview that assumes people are mostly rational.
Scott Adams
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Evolution did not give us brains that can comprehend our reality. All we have is the type of brains that did not get our ancestors killed. So our brains create delusions of reality and we try to force reason onto them.
Scott Adams
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Our minds are not quite designed to understand how the world works, but, rather, to get out of trouble rapidly and have progeny.
Nicholas Taleb
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We are not made to view things as independent from each other. When viewing two events A and B, it is hard not to assume that A causes B, B causes A, or both cause each other. Our bias is immediately to establish a causal link.
Nicholas Taleb
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