Motivational Quotes

Reason

Reason is a supple nymph, and slippery as a fish by nature. She had as leave give her kiss to an absurdity any day, as to syllogistic truth. The absurdity may turn out truer.

- Lawrence, D. H.

Best Quotes about Reason

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

Russell, Bertrand

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

Sophocles

Reason is the historian, but passions are the actors.

Rivarol, Antoine

Reason gains all people by compelling none.

Hill, Aaron

I am never upset for the reason I think.

A Course In Miracles

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

Aragon, Louis

That proves you are unusual, returned the Scarecrow; and I am convinced the only people worthy of consideration in this world are the unusual ones. For the common folks are like the leaves of a tree, and live and die unnoticed.

Baum, Lyman Frank

The person who is master of their passions is reason's slave.

Connolly, Cyril

No one ever excused his way to success.

Dotto, Dave Del

10.

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

11.

Don't ever take a fence down until you know why it was put up.

Frost, Robert

12.

Reason is a supple nymph, and slippery as a fish by nature. She had as leave give her kiss to an absurdity any day, as to syllogistic truth. The absurdity may turn out truer.

Lawrence, D. H.

13.

What is rational is actual, and what is actual is rational.

Hegel, Georg

14.

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.

Bronte, Charlotte

15.

I got fame and fortune, and I lost my sense of reasoning.

Richard, Little

16.

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

17.

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

Cioran, E. M.

18.

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

19.

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

20.

Reason is a whore, the greatest enemy that faith has.

Luther, Martin

21.

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

Wesley, John

22.

If you can once engage people's pride, love, pity, ambition (or whatever is their prevailing passion) on your side, you need not fear what their reason can do against you.

Chesterfield, Lord

23.

He who has a strong enough why can bear almost any how.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

24.

A noble heart will always capitulate to reason.

Schiller, Johann Friedrich Von

25.

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

Talleyrand, Charles Maurice De

26.

What is now reason was formerly impulse or instinct.

Ovid

27.

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

Voltaire

28.

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

Hazlitt, William

29.

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

Butler, Samuel

30.

Reason is a faculty far larger than mere objective force. When either the political or the scientific discourse announces itself as the voice of reason, it is playing God, and should be spanked and stood in the corner.

Guin, Ursula K. Le

31.

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

Proverb, Welsh

32.

I can stand brute force, but brute reason is quite unbearable. There is something unfair about its use. It is hitting below the intellect.

Wilde, Oscar

33.

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

Abbagnano, Nicola

34.

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

35.

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

Karl Marx

36.

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

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth

37.

Reasoning draws a conclusion, but does not make the conclusion certain, unless the mind discovers it by the path of experience.

Bacon, Roger

38.

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

Aquinas, St. Thomas

39.

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

40.

A person possessed with an idea cannot be reasoned with.

Froude, James A.

41.

Reason is a crutch for age, but youth is strong enough to walk alone.

Dryden, John

42.

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

43.

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

44.

Reason is the test of ridicule, not ridicule the test of truth.

Warburton, William

45.

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

Allen, Woody

46.

An appeal to the reason of the people has never been known to fail in the long run.

Lowell, James Russell

47.

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

Chamfort, Sebastien-Roch Nicolas De

48.

Reason can in general do more than blind force.

Gallus, Gaius C.

49.

Is there not some chosen curse, some hidden thunder in the stores of heaven, red with uncommon wrath, to blast the man who owes his greatness to his country's ruin!

Addison, Joseph

50.

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