Quotes about reason
A collection of quotes on the topic of sense.
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„Literature and the arts are also criticism in a more particular and practical sense. They embody an expository reflection on, a value judgement of, the inheritance and context to which they pertain.“
— George Steiner American writer 1929 - 2020
Source: Real Presences (1989), I: A Secondary City, Ch. 4 (p. 11).
„Whatever you see you gotta keep a sense of humor; you gotta be able to smile through all the bullshit.“
— Tupac Shakur rapper and actor 1971 - 1996
„If I had my way, if I was lucky enough, if I could be on the brink my entire life — that great sense of expectation and excitement without the disappointment — that would be the perfect state.“
— Cate Blanchett Australian actress 1969
As quoted in Vanity Fair, Vol. 62, (1999)
„There’s no way that Michael Jackson or whoever Jackson should have a million thousand droople billion dollars and then there’s people starving. There’s no way! There’s no way that these people should own planes and there people don’t have houses. Apartments. Shacks. Drawers. Pants! I know you’re rich. I know you got 40 billion dollars, but can you just keep it to one house? You only need ONE house. And if you only got two kids, can you just keep it to two rooms? I mean why have 52 rooms and you know there’s somebody with no room?! It just don’t make sense to me. It don’t.“
— Tupac Shakur rapper and actor 1971 - 1996
„It was in prison that we found the hope of salvation for the Communists. It was there that we developed a sense of responsibility toward them. It was in being tortured by them that we learned to love them.“
— Richard Wurmbrand Romanian Christian minister of Jewish descent 1909 - 2001
Source: Tortured For Christ (1967), p. 58.
„I was not a[n intelligence] resident, only a Polish officer. I carried out my orders until arrested. I had no sense that I was a spy, and I ask that this be taken into account in deciding my verdict.“
— Witold Pilecki World War II concentration camp leader and resistor 1901 - 1948
During his trial, 1948.
„It is a natural impulse of human beings to evade the narrowness of personal and family routine to venture into the wider universe of history, where you feel that your life is transcendent and get a higher "sense". The most banal and clumsy way to do it, accessible even to the poor, incapable and rogue is the militancy in a party or a "cause", that is, in some group embellished with pompous words like "freedom", "equality", "justice", "patriotism", "morality" or "human rights". These words can represent any substantive value, but not when the individual acquires from them all the value they may have, rather than filling them with his own personal substance. The most criminal illusion of modernity was to persuade men that they can be noble by identifying with a "cause", when in fact all causes, while names of abstract values, only acquire concrete value by the nobility of men who represent them. The bottom of degradation is achieved when some "causes" are so valued that they seem to infuse virtues automatically in any bum, fake or bandit who agrees to represent them.“
— Olavo de Carvalho Brazilian journalist, essayist and professor of philosophy 1947
Diário do Comércio - Causas Sagradas http://www.olavodecarvalho.org/semana/120117dc.html (17 January 2012)
„Anything physical is always changing, therefore, its reality is not constant, not eternal. Nature is in this sense like an actor who has only different roles.“
— B.K.S. Iyengar Indian yoga teacher and scholar 1918 - 2014
Source: Light on Life: The Yoga Journey to Wholeness, Inner Peace, and Ultimate Freedom, p. 8
„Is to accept the leadership of a crumbling country a crime? Is to prevent the Russians, the natural enemy of Germany, from obtaining our arms and manpower a crime? In Russian eyes it probably is. But I'm referring to the eyes of a westerner. I knew that we had to capitulate and I wanted it to be to the Americans and British, and not to the East. I'm not even accused of war crimes in the sense of the atrocities. It's clear they have no case against me. I came into a powerful position in 1943. How can I be accused of a conspiracy?“
— Karl Dönitz President of Germany; admiral in command of German submarine forces during World War II 1891 - 1980
To Leon Goldensohn, May 2, 1946, from "The Nuremberg Interviews" by Leon Goldensohn, Robert Gellately - History - 2004.
„The chief enemy of creativity is good sense.“
— Pablo Picasso Spanish painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist, and stage designer 1881 - 1973
„Death makes no sense except to people who have passionately loved life. How can one die without having something to part from? Detachment is a negation of both life and death. Whoever has overcome his fear of death has also triumphed over life. For life is nothing but another word for this fear.“
— Emil M. Cioran Romanian philosopher and essayist 1911 - 1995
Tears and Saints (1937)
„The only profound thinkers are the ones who do not suffer from a sense of the ridiculous.“
— Emil M. Cioran Romanian philosopher and essayist 1911 - 1995
Drawn and Quartered (1983)
„A minimum of unconsciousness is necessary if one wants to stay inside history. To act is one thing; to know one is acting is another. When lucidity invests the action, insinuates itself into it, action is undone, and with it, prejudice, whose function consists, precisely, in subordinating, in enslaving consciousness to action. The man who unmasks his fictions renounces his own resources and, in a sense, himself. Consequently, he will accept other fictions which will deny him, since they will not have cropped up from his own depths. No man concerned with his equilibrium may exceed a certain degree of lucidity and analysis.“
— Emil M. Cioran Romanian philosopher and essayist 1911 - 1995
The Temptation to Exist (1956)
„If we would regain our freedom, we must shake off the burden of sensation, no longer react to the world by our senses, break our bonds. For all sensation is a bond, pleasure as much as pain, joy as much as misery. The only free mind is the one that, pure of all intimacy with beings or objects, plies its own vacuity.“
— Emil M. Cioran Romanian philosopher and essayist 1911 - 1995
The Temptation to Exist (1956)
„It is striking that one of the most consequential representatives of this abstract scientific orientation of the seventeenth century became so personalistic. This is because as a juristic thinker he wanted to grasp the reality of societal life just as much as he, as a philosopher and natural scientist, wanted to grasp the reality of nature. He did not discover that there is a juristic reality and life that need not be reality in the sense of the natural sciences. Mathematical relativism and nominalism also operate concurrently. Often he seemed to be able to construct the unity of the state from any arbitrary given point. But juristic thought in those days had not yet become so overpowered by the natural sciences that he, in the intensity of his scientific approach, should unsuspectingly have overlooked the specific reality of legal life inherent in the legal form. The form that he sought lies in the concrete decision, one that emanates from a particular authority. In the independent meaning of the decision, the subject of the decision has an independent meaning, apart from the question of content. What matters for the reality of legal life is who decides.“
— Carl Schmitt German jurist, political theorist and professor of law 1888 - 1985
Political Theology (1922), Ch. 2 : The Problem of Sovereignty as the Problem of the Legal Form and of the Decision
„I honestly don't understand the big fuss made over nudity and sex in films. It's silly. On TV, the children can watch people murdering each other, which is a very unnatural thing, but they can't watch two people in the very natural process of making love. Now, really, that doesn't make any sense, does it?“
— Sharon Tate actress, victim of murder by Charles Manson followers 1943 - 1969
Quoted in Sharon Tate and the Manson Murders (2000), by Greg King