quotations about reason
When God is contriving misfortunes for man, He first deprives him of his reason.
EURIPIDES
attributed, Day's Collacon
Whenever he was required to use his reason he felt like someone who had always used his right hand but was now required to do something with his left.
GEORG CHRISTOPH LICHTENBERG
"Notebook B", The Waste Books
Pagan philosophers set up reason as the sole guide of life, of wisdom and conduct; but Christian philosophy demands of us that we surrender our reason to the Holy Spirit; and this means that we no longer live for ourselves, but that Christ lives and reigns within us.
JOHN CALVIN
Golden Booklet of the True Christian Life
There is a revelation of God to man in the light of reason.
JOHN GRIER HIBBEN
The Problems of Philosophy
To say that man is a reasoning animal is a very different thing than to say that most of man's decisions are based on his rational process. That I don't believe at all.
REX STOUT
Royal Decree Revisited
My reason is the universe's voice.
ALPHONSE DE LAMARTINE
"Prayer", Poetical Meditations
Changing from the ghosts of faith to the spectres of reason is just changing cells.
FERNANDO PESSOA
The Book of Disquiet
Who builds on Reason builds upon the sand
A fabric mortal as the human brain.
FRANCIS HOWARD WILLIAMS
"Sic Itur Ad Astra"
Reason always cuts a poor figure beside sentiment; the one being essentially restricted, like everything that is positive, while the other is infinite.
HONORE DE BALZAC
A Woman of Thirty
He that gives Reason for what he saith, has done what is fit to be done; and the most that can be done: He, that gives not Reason, speaks nothing, though he saith never so much.
BENJAMIN WHICHCOTE
Moral and Religious Aphorisms
There are so many kinds of madness, so many ways in which the human brain may go wrong; and so often it happens that what we call madness is both reasonable and just. It is so. Yes. A little reason is good for us, a little more makes wise men of some of us--but when our reason over-grows us and we reach too far, something breaks and we go insane.
JAMES OLIVER CURWOOD
"The Case of Beauvais", Back to God's Country and Other Stories
If we would guide by the light of reason, we must let our minds be bold.
LOUIS BRANDEIS
dissenting opinion, New State Ice Co. v. Liebmann, 1932
Water cannot rise higher than its source, neither can human reason. Now, all reasoning respecting transcendent truths must have its source where the truths or ideas themselves originate.
SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE
notes appended to the third edition of Southey's Life of Wesley
People are content to live in contradictory worlds, so long as they know the reason for each.
ALAN LIGHTMAN
Einstein's Dreams
There is nothing without reason.
GOTTFRIED WILHELM LEIBNIZ
Studies in Physics and the Nature of the Body
It is to no manner of purpose that we have reason on our side, when the laugh is against us.
ROBERT BOLTON
attributed, Day's Collacon
Pure Reason left to herself
relieth on axioms and essential premises
which she can neither question nor resolve.
ROBERT BRIDGES
The Testament of Beauty
Man cannot survive except by gaining knowledge, and reason is his only means to gain it.
AYN RAND
Atlas Shrugged
Beware gentle knight. There is no greater monster than reason.
CORMAC MCCARTHY
All the Pretty Horses
Human reason needs only to will more strongly than fate, and she is fate.
THOMAS MANN
The Magic Mountain