“Reason is in fact the path to faith, and faith takes over when reason can say no more.”
Thomas Merton (1915–1968) Priest and author
“The division between faith and reason is a half-measure, till it is frankly admitted that faith has to do with fiction, and reason with fact.”
Fraser's Magazine, New Series, vol. 5 (1872) p. 160
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Leslie Stephen11
British author, literary critic, and first editor of the Di… 1832–1904Related quotes
Abraham Joshua Heschel (1907–1972) Polish-American Conservative Judaism Rabbi
"The Holy Dimension", p. 338
Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity: Essays (1997)
Context: There is neither advance nor service without faith. Nobody can rationally explain why he should sacrifice his life and his happiness for the sake of the good. The conviction that I must obey the ethical imperatives is not derived from logical argument but originates from an intuitive certitude, in a certitude of faith.
There is no conspiracy against reason, no random obstinacy, no sluggish inertia of mind or smug self-assurance entrenched behind the walls of believing. Faith does not detach a man from thinking, it does not suspend reason. It is opposed not to knowledge but to backwardness and dullness, to indifferent aloofness to the essence of living. … It is a distortion to regard reason and faith as alternatives. Reason is a necessary coefficient of faith. Faith without explication by reason is mute, reason without faith is deaf. There can be a true symbiosis of reason and faith.
Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) logician, one of the first analytic philosophers and political activist
1920s, The Prospects of Industrial Civilization (1923)
Charlie Chaplin book My Autobiography
My Autobiography, p. 291
Context: I believe that faith is a precursor of all our ideas. Without faith, there never could have evolved hypothesis, theory, science or mathematics. I believe that faith is an extension of the mind. It is the key that negates the impossible. To deny faith is to refute oneself and the spirit that generates all our creative forces. My faith is in the unknown, in all that we do not understand by reason; I believe that what is beyond our comprehension is a simple fact in other dimensions, and that in the realm of the unknown there is an infinite power for good.
Reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 74.
James Hudson Taylor (1832–1905) Missionary in China
(A.J. Broomhall. Hudson Taylor and China’s Open Century, Book Four: Survivors’ Pact. London: Hodder and Stoughton and Overseas Missionary Fellowship, 1984, 58).