“Reason, which is based upon the world common to us all, which furnishes us with truths like "twice two is four" and "nothing happens without a cause" this reason not only cannot justify and explain these new terrors and anxieties of Tolstoy's; it condemns them pitilessly as unreasonable, motiveless, arbitrary, and consequently unreal and visionary.”

— Lev Shestov

Source: In Job's Balances: on the sources of the eternal truths, The Last Judgment; Tolstoy's Last Words p. 101

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update Dec. 4, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "Reason, which is based upon the world common to us all, which furnishes us with truths like "twice two is four" and "no…" by Lev Shestov?

Lev Shestov 7

Russian theologian 1866–1938

Related quotes

“There is nothing reasonable about faith. Those two words mean completely opposite things. Putting them together creates an oxymoron, That’s why William Lyin’ Craig thought it would make a clever book title. Faith is an unreasonable conviction which is assumed without reason and defended against all reason. That’s why faith is the most dishonest position it is possible to have. It really is!”

Aron Ra (1962) Aron Ra is an atheist activist and the host of the Ra-Men Podcast

Patheos, A Letter to a Certain Christian http://www.patheos.com/blogs/reasonadvocates/2013/10/12/a-letter-to-a-certain-christian/ (October 12, 2013)

“We accept that there are legitimate casus belli: acts or situations "provoking or justifying war". The present debate feels off-centre, and faintly unreal, because the US and the UK are going to war for a new set of reasons (partly undisclosed) while continuing to adduce the old set of reasons (which in this case do not cohere or even overlap).”

Martin Amis (1949) Welsh novelist

"The Palace of the End" (2003)

“There is nothing so degrading as the constant anxiety about one's means of livelihood…Money is like a sixth sense without which you cannot make a complete use of the other five.”

W. Somerset Maugham book Of Human Bondage

Source: Of Human Bondage (1915), Ch. 51

“Anxiety, sickness, suffering, or danger now and then with a foregoing of the common conveniences and charities of this life, may make us pause and cause the spirit to waver and the soul to sink; but let this only be for a moment. All these are nothing when compared with the glory which shall be revealed in and for us. I never made a sacrifice.”

David Livingstone (1813–1873) Scottish explorer and missionary

Speech to students at Cambridge University (4 December 1857)
Context: People talk of the sacrifice I have made in spending so much of my life in Africa. Can that be called a sacrifice which is simply paid back as a small part of a great debt owing to our God, which we can never repay? Is that a sacrifice which brings its own blest reward in healthful activity, the consciousness of doing good, peace of mind, and a bright hope of a glorious destiny hereafter? Away with the word in such a view and with such a thought! It is emphatically no sacrifice. Say rather it is a privilege. Anxiety, sickness, suffering, or danger now and then with a foregoing of the common conveniences and charities of this life, may make us pause and cause the spirit to waver and the soul to sink; but let this only be for a moment. All these are nothing when compared with the glory which shall be revealed in and for us. I never made a sacrifice.

“The heart has its reasons which reason knows nothing of… We know the truth not only by the reason, but by the heart." - Blaise Pascal”

Blaise Pascal (1623–1662) French mathematician, physicist, inventor, writer, and Christian philosopher

“The goodness and greatness of a man do not justify us in accepting a belief upon the warrant of his authority, unless there are reasonable grounds for supposing that he knew the truth of what he was saying. And there can be no grounds for supposing that a man knows that which we, without ceasing to be men, could not be supposed to verify.”

William Kingdon Clifford (1845–1879) English mathematician and philosopher

The Ethics of Belief (1877), The Weight Of Authority

“Politics, as the word is commonly understood, are nothing but corruptions, and consequently of no use to a good king or a good ministry; for which reason Courts are so overrun with politics.”

Jonathan Swift (1667–1745) Anglo-Irish satirist, essayist, and poet

Thoughts on Various Subjects from Miscellanies (1711-1726)

“There is no truth but untruth. There is no reason but unreason.”

Edmund Cooper (1926–1982) British writer

The Overman Culture (1971)

“Reason is the life of the law; nay, the common law itself is nothing else but reason… The law, which is perfection of reason.”

Edward Coke (1552–1634) English lawyer and judge

The First Part of the Institutes of the Laws of England, or, A Commentary on Littleton (London, 1628, ed. F. Hargrave and C. Butler, 19th ed., London, 1832), Third Institute. Compare: "Let us consider the reason of the case. For nothing is law that is not reason", Sir John Powell, Coggs vs. Bernard, 2 Ld. Raym. Rep. p. 911.
Institutes of the Laws of England

“Openness to the new is the virtue that describes the moral consequence of the doctrine of the relation of spirit to structure. The religion of the future inherits this doctrine from the struggle with the world, and radicalizes it. This virtue acts out the human truth of our relation to the settled contexts of our life and thought. That they are ephemeral and defective, that they cannot accommodate all the experience and insight we have reason to value, that there is always more in us, individually as well as collectively, than is, or ever can be, in them are facts giving us persistent reason to rebel against such structures.”

Roberto Mangabeira Unger The Religion of the Future

Source: The Religion of the Future (2014), p. 385

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Lev Shestov 7

Related quotes

Related topics