“So convenient a thing it is to be a reasonable creature, since it enables one to find or make a reason for everything one has a mind to do.”

— Benjamin Franklin

Part I, p. 28.
The Autobiography (1818)
Context: I believe I have omitted mentioning that in my first Voyage from Boston, being becalm'd off Block Island, our People set about catching Cod and haul'd up a great many. Hitherto I had stuck to my Resolution of not eating animal Food and on this Occasion, I consider'd with my Master Tryon, the taking every Fish as a kind of unprovok'd Murder, since none of them had or ever could do us any Injury that might justify the Slaughter. All this seem'd very reasonable. But I had formerly been a great Lover of Fish, and when this came hot out of the Frying Pan, it smelt admirably well. I balanc'd some time between Principle and Inclination: till I recollected, that when the Fish were opened, I saw smaller Fish taken out of their Stomachs: Then, thought I, if you eat one another, I don't see why we mayn't eat you. So I din'd upon Cod very heartily and continu'd to eat with other People, returning only now and then occasionally to a vegetable Diet. So convenient a thing it is to be a reasonable creature, since it enables one to find or make a reason for everything one has a mind to do.

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Benjamin Franklin183

American author, printer, political theorist, politician, p… 1706–1790

Shantananda Saraswati (1934–2005) Hindu spiritual teacher

Teaching of His Holiness Shantanand Saraswati, The Study Society 2018

“Everything that is ever done is done for one reason and one reason only, because the doer thinks they will feel better in the doing of it.”

Teal Swan (1984) American spiritual teacher

“Morgan has the artist's mind; he says the simple things that clever people don't say; I find him the best of critics for that reason. Suddenly out comes the obvious thing that one has overlooked.”

Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) English writer

6 November 1919
A Moment's Liberty (1990)

“Reason can always disarm the irrational. If reason finds itself to be irrational, it can disarm it; and if one finds reason and discovers that eating animals is immoral, unnecessary, and done largely for superstitious reasons, then one is delivered from the compulsion to do it.”

Brigid Brophy (1929–1995) novelist, essayist

Interview in The Vegetarians by Rynn Berry (Autumn Press, 1979), p. 82.

“If you do everything for one reason, then all you have done will become meaningless when the reason does.”

James Richardson (1950) American poet

#41
Vectors: Aphorisms and Ten Second Essays (2001)

“Love and the gracious heart are a single thing…
one can no more be without the other
than the reasoning mind without its reason.”

Dante Alighieri book Vita Nuova

Amore e 'l cor gentil sono una cosa...
e così esser l'un sanza l'altro osa
com'alma razional sanza ragione.
Source: La Vita Nuova (1293), Chapter XVI (tr. Mark Musa)

“There can be as many wrong reasons to do the right thing as there are stars in the sky. There might even be more than one legitimate right reason. But there is never a right reason to do the wrong thing. Not ever.”

Donita K. Paul (1950) American writer

Source: DragonKnight