Motivational Quotes

Reason

To give a reason for anything is to breed a doubt of it.

- Hazlitt, William

Best Quotes about Reason

It takes less time to do a thing right than to explain why you did it wrong.

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth

The trouble with Reason is that it becomes meaningless at the exact point where it refuses to act.

Devoto, Bernard

As if reasoning were any kind of writing or talking which tends to convince people that some doctrine or measure is true and right.

Beecher, Catharine Esther

The gods plant reason in mankind, of all good gifts the highest.

Sophocles

On life's vast ocean diversely we sail. Reasons the card, but passion the gale.

Pope, Alexander

I'll not listen to reason. Reason always means what someone else has got to say.

Gaskell, Elizabeth

Reason is the historian, but passions are the actors.

Rivarol, Antoine

Let reason govern desire.

Cicero, Marcus T.

Reason has always existed, but not always in a reasonable form.

Karl Marx

10.

The more you reason the less you create.

Chandler, Raymond

11.

Nothing is ever accomplished by a reasonable man.

Shaw, George Bernard

12.

To give a reason for anything is to breed a doubt of it.

Hazlitt, William

13.

The only business of the head in the world is to bow a ceaseless obeisance to the heart.

Yeats, William Butler

14.

Whenever a person strives, by the help of dialectic, to start in pursuit of every reality by a simple process of reason, independent of all sensuous information -- never flinching, until by an act of the pure intelligence he has grasped the real nature of good -- he arrives at the very end of the intellectual world.

Plato

15.

If you follow reason far enough it always leads to conclusions that are contrary to reason.

Butler, Samuel

16.

Nothing is divine but what is agreeable to reason.

Kant, Immanuel

17.

Why does man kill? He kills for food. And not only food: frequently there must be a beverage.

Allen, Woody

18.

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

Swift, Jonathan

19.

Reason itself is fallible, and this fallibility must find a place in our logic.

Abbagnano, Nicola

20.

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.

Gandhi, Mahatma

21.

Reason has never failed men. Only force and repression have made the wrecks in the world.

White, William Allen

22.

Treason is like diamonds; there is nothing to be made by the small trader.

Jerrold, Douglas William

23.

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

Cioran, E. M.

24.

Reasonable people adapt themselves to the world. Unreasonable people attempt to adapt the world to themselves. All progress, therefore, depends on unreasonable people.

Shaw, George Bernard

25.

It was not reason that besieged Troy; it was not reason that sent forth the Saracen from the desert to conquer the world; that inspired the crusades; that instituted the monastic orders; it was not reason that produced the Jesuits; above all, it was not reason that created the French Revolution. Man is only great when he acts from the passions; never irresistible but when he appeals to the imagination.

Disraeli, Benjamin

26.

Just as love is an orientation which refers to all objects and is incompatible with the restriction to one object, so is reason a human faculty which must embrace the whole of the world with which man is confronted.

Fromm, Erich

27.

Some excel in rhyme who reason foolishly.

Boileau, Nicholas

28.

Reason is the wise man's guide, example the fool's.

Proverb, Welsh

29.

A person possessed with an idea cannot be reasoned with.

Froude, James A.

30.

No one ever excused his way to success.

Dotto, Dave Del

31.

I am never upset for the reason I think.

A Course In Miracles

32.

There are strange flowers of reason to match each error of the senses.

Aragon, Louis

33.

Reason now gazes above the realm of the dark but warm feelings as the Alpine peaks do above the clouds. They behold the sun more clearly and distinctly, but they are cold and unfruitful.

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

34.

Most men seem to live according to sense rather than reason.

Aquinas, St. Thomas

35.

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

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

36.

As reason is a rebel to faith, so passion is a rebel to reason.

Browne, Sir Thomas

37.

What is a man, If his chief good and market of his time Be but to sleep and feed? a beast, no more. Sure, he that made us with such large discourse, Looking before and after, gave us not That capability and god-like reason To fust in us unused.

Shakespeare, William

38.

Too much sensibility creates unhappiness and too much insensibility creates crime.

Talleyrand, Charles Maurice De

39.

Passion and prejudice govern the world; only under the name of reason.

Wesley, John

40.

Our passion and principles are constantly in a frenzy, but begin to shift and waver, as we return to reason.

Sterne, Laurence

41.

Do not banish reason for inequality; but let your reason serve to make the truth appear where it seems hid, and hide the false seems true.

William Shakespeare

42.

People are governed with the head; kindness of heart is little use in chess.

Chamfort, Sebastien-Roch Nicolas De

43.

Many are destined to reason wrongly; others, not to reason at all; and others, to persecute those who do reason.

Voltaire

44.

His reasons are as two grains of wheat his in two bushels of chaff: you shall seek all day ere you find them, and when you have them, they are not worth the search.

William Shakespeare

45.

As soon as man began considering himself the source of the highest meaning in the world and the measure of everything, the world began to lose its human dimension, and man began to lose control of it.

Havel, Vaclav

46.

Man is a reasoning rather than a reasonable animal.

Hamilton, Alexander

47.

We are a rebellious nation. Our whole history is treason; our blood was attained before we were born; our creeds were infidelity to the mother church; our constitution treason to our fatherland.

Parker, Theodore

48.

Man always has two reasons for the things he does; the logical one and the real one.

49.

Reason is a harmonizing, controlling force rather than a creative one.

Russell, Bertrand

50.

There is really nothing more to say except why. But since why is difficult to handle, one must take refuge in how.

Morrison, Toni