Motivational Quotes

Reason

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

- Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth

Best Quotes about Reason

Everything that is beautiful and noble is the product of reason and calculation.

Baudelaire, Charles

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

Nietzsche, Friedrich

Reason gains all people by compelling none.

Hill, Aaron

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

Hazlitt, William

O reason, reason, abstract phantom of the waking state, I had already expelled you from my dreams, now I have reached a point where those dreams are about to become fused with apparent realities: now there is only room here for myself.

Aragon, Louis

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 unus'd.

William Shakespeare

Reason is like an officer when the king appears. The officer then loses his power and hides himself. Reason is the shadow cast by God; Go is the sun.

Rumi, Jalal-Uddin

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

Frost, Robert

You can't reason someone out of a position they didn't reason themselves into.

10.

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

Karl Marx

11.

Let reason govern desire.

Cicero, Marcus T.

12.

Man is a reasoning rather than a reasonable animal.

Hamilton, Alexander

13.

To him who looks upon the world rationally, the world in its turn presents a rational aspect. The relation is mutual.

Hegel, Georg

14.

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.

15.

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

Devoto, Bernard

16.

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

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth

17.

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

18.

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

19.

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

Bacon, Roger

20.

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

Yeats, William Butler

21.

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

Wesley, John

22.

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

Warburton, William

23.

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

24.

There is something peculiarly sinister and insidious in even a charge of disloyalty. Such a charge all too frequently places a strain on the reputation of an individual which is indelible and lasting, regardless of the complete innocence later proved.

O'Brian, John Lord

25.

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

26.

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

Luther, Martin

27.

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.

28.

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

29.

What is now reason was formerly impulse or instinct.

Ovid

30.

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

31.

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

Cioran, E. M.

32.

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

Allen, Woody

33.

To reason about love is to lose reason.

Boufflers

34.

Many that are not mad have, sure, more lack of reason.

William Shakespeare

35.

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

Chamfort, Sebastien-Roch Nicolas De

36.

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.

37.

A man has free choice to the extent that he is rational.

Aquinas, St. Thomas

38.

A person possessed with an idea cannot be reasoned with.

Froude, James A.

39.

The more you reason the less you create.

Chandler, Raymond

40.

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

White, William Allen

41.

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

42.

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

Richard, Little

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.

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

Connolly, Cyril

45.

Nothing is divine but what is agreeable to reason.

Kant, Immanuel

46.

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

Gaskell, Elizabeth

47.

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

48.

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

49.

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

Hegel, Georg

50.

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