Quotes about reason
page 11

“Every time you don't follow your inner guidance, you feel a loss of energy, loss of power, a sense of spiritual sadness.”

Shakti Gawain (1948–2018) Author

Sadness, Feeling, Loss, Time

“In a sense, I'm the one who ruined me: I did it myself.”

Haruki Murakami book 1Q84

Source: 1Q84

“It's fascinating. You know all these words, and they’re all English, but when you string them together into sentences, they just don’t make any sense.”

Cassandra Clare book City of Fallen Angels

Variant: It’s fascinating. You know all these words, and they’re all English, but when you string them together into sentences, they just don’t make any sense.
Source: City of Fallen Angels

“As Rilke observed, love requires a progressive shortening of the senses: I can see you for miles; I can hear you for blocks, I can smell you, maybe, for a few feet, but I can only touch on contact, taste as I devour”

William H. Gass (1924–2017) Fiction writer, critic, philosophy professor

Love

“I want to rip off your logic
and make passionate sense to you.”

Jeffrey McDaniel (1967) American writer

Passion

“Marrying a woman for her beauty makes no more sense than eating a bird for its singing. But it's a common mistake nonetheless.”

Charles Frazier book Cold Mountain

Source: Cold Mountain

Beauty, Bird, Singing

“Atheism, a religion dedicated to its own sense of smug superiority.”

Stephen Colbert (1964) American political satirist, writer, comedian, television host, and actor

Religion

“What we don't let out traps us. We think, "No one else feels this way, I must be crazy." So we don't say anything. And we become enveloped by a deep loneliness, not knowing where our feelings come from or what to do with them. "Why do I feel this way? Last week, I was on top of the world and now my feelings don't make sense." Voicing it, getting it out and letting it other people hear it, helps to dissipate it. The fears and self-criticisms begin to leak. And we begin to heal.”

Sabrina Ward Harrison (1975) Canadian writer

Quoted by Katherine Martin in Women of Courage: Inspiring Stories from the Women Who Lived Them, p. 268 (1999)

People, World, Fear, Way

“Simon: Anyone ever tell you your sense of timing really sucks?
Derek: That's why I don't play the drums. Now what's up?”

Kelley Armstrong book The Summoning

Source: The Summoning

Time

“The old women only stuck around this long out of a sense of duty. Your mom was the same way. That's why I loved her. She put her duty first, ahead of evverything.”

Rick Riordan book The Son of Neptune

Source: The Son of Neptune

Love, Women, Way, Moms

“Why are they going to disappear him?'
I don't know.'
It doesn't make sense. It isn't even good grammar.”

Joseph Heller book Catch-22

Source: Catch-22

“As a writer, even as a child, long before what I wrote began to be published, I developed a sense that meaning itself was resident in the rhythms of words and sentences and paragraphs… The way I write is who I am, or have become…”

Joan Didion The Year of Magical Thinking

Source: The Year of Magical Thinking

Way

“It's hard not to immediately fall in love witha dog who has a good sense of humor.”

Kate DiCamillo book Because of Winn-Dixie

Source: Because of Winn-Dixie

Love, Dogs

“When I look at narcissism through the vulnerability lens, I see the shame-based fear of being ordinary. I see the fear of never feeling extraordinary enough to be noticed, to be lovable, to belong, or to cultivate a sense of purpose.”

Brené Brown (1965) US writer and professor

Source: Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead

Fear, Feeling

We consider the quote as suspicious, we have no evidence supporting authorship

“Concerning matter, we have been all wrong. What we have called matter is energy, whose vibration has been so lowered as to be perceptible to the senses. There is no matter.”

Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity

“A sense of responsibility would spoil her. She's too pretty.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald book The Beautiful and Damned

Source: The Beautiful and Damned

“When your own life is threatened, your sense of empathy is blunted by a terrible, selfish hunger for survival.”

Yann Martel book Life of Pi

Source: Life of Pi

Life, Hunger, Selfishness

“Women don't have a sense of humor. They don't need one. The Almighty made them as a permanent joke on men. From which one may logically deduce tha the Almighty is a female.”

Loretta Chase book Lord of Scoundrels

Source: Lord of Scoundrels

Women, Men

“And it happened all the time that the compromise between two perfectly rational alternatives was something that made no sense at all.”

Neal Stephenson book Anathem

Source: Anathem

Time

“I understood that centuries of chains and lashes will not kill the spirit of man nor the sense of truth within him.”

Ayn Rand book Anthem

Source: Anthem

Truth

“I had come to a place where I was meant to be. I don't mean anything so prosaic as a sense of coming home. This was different, very different. It was like arriving at a place much safer than home.”

Pat Conroy The Lords of Discipline

Source: The Lords of Discipline

Home

“Dogs make sense. They understand hierarchy and the need to cooperate. They come when you call them. A cat though—a cat will take your number and get back to you. Maybe. If he’s in a good mood.”

Eileen Wilks Mortal Danger

Source: Mortal Danger

Dogs, Cats, Mood, Understanding

“Until the great mass of the people shall be filled with the sense of responsibility for each others welfare, social justice can never be attained.”

Helen Keller (1880–1968) American author and political activist

People, Justice

“I love arguing with you, Claire. You always surprise me. And occasionally, you even make sense.”

Rachel Caine (1962) American writer

Source: Ghost Town

Love

“The disappearance of a sense of responsibility is the most far-reaching consequence of submission to authority.”

Stanley Milgram (1933–1984) Social psychologist

Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View (1974), ch. 1: The Dilemma of Obedience
Obedience to Authority : An Experimental View (1974)

“Human communities depend upon a diversity of talent, not a single conception of ability. At the heart of the challenge is to reconstitute our sense of ability and of intelligence.”

Ken Robinson (1950) UK writer

TED Conference http://www.ted.com/talks/sir_ken_robinson_bring_on_the_revolution.html

Intelligence, Communication, Heart, Dependency

“But all I could think of was how when nothing made sense and hadn't for ages, you just have to grab onto anything you feel sure of.”

Sarah Dessen book The Truth About Forever

Source: The Truth About Forever

Age, Feeling, Thinking

“Sex had been amazing, but it wasn't a magical cure for everything. Damn. Somewhere along the way, I'd picked up common sense.”

Richelle Mead book Last Sacrifice

Source: Last Sacrifice

Sex, Way

“People love to admit they have bad handwriting or that they can't do math. And they will readily admit to being awkward: 'I'm such a klutz!' But they will never admit to having a poor sense of humor or being a bad driver.”

George Carlin (1937–2008) American stand-up comedian

Love, People

“When you do nothing you feel overwhelmed and powerless. But when you get involved you feel the sense of hope and accomplishment that comes from knowing you are working to make things better.”

Maya Angelou (1928–2014) American author and poet

Hope, Feeling, Hope

“The romantics were prompted to seek exotic subjects and to travel to far off places. They failed to realize that, though the transcendental must involve the strange and unfamiliar, not everything strange or unfamiliar is transcendental. The unfriendliness of society to his activity is difficult for the artists to accept. Yet this very hostility can act as a lever for true liberation... Both the sense of community and of security depend on the familiar. Free of them, transcendental experiences become possible.”

Mark Rothko (1903–1970) American painter

Source: after 1970, posthumous, Abstract Expressionism, Creators and Critics', 1990, p. 167

Hostility, Travel, Communication, Dependency

“The world makes much less sense than you think. The coherence comes mostly from the way your mind works.”

Daniel Kahneman book Thinking, Fast and Slow

Source: Thinking, Fast and Slow

World, Way, Thinking

“We accept reality so readily - perhaps because we sense that nothing is real.”

Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) Argentine short-story writer, essayist, poet and translator, and a key figure in Spanish language literature

Reality

“and he would probably not agree with my conviction that a sense of humor is the main measure of sanity. But who can say for sure? Humor is a very private thing.”

Hunter S. Thompson Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72

Source: Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72

“"Is," "is." "is" — the idiocy of the word haunts me. If it were abolished, human thought might begin to make sense. I don't know what anything "is"; I only know how it seems to me at this moment.”

Robert Anton Wilson (1932–2007) American author and polymath

The Historical Illuminatus as spoken by Sigismundo Celine
Source: Nature's God

“Once you realize what a joke everything is, being the Comedian is the only thing that makes sense.”

Alan Moore book Watchmen

Source: Watchmen

“… she opened the door very slowly and carefully, half hiding behind it, as if badly frightened of what might be waiting for her on the other side. And considering that it was me waiting, this showed rare common sense.”

Jeff Lindsay book Darkly Dreaming Dexter

Source: Darkly Dreaming Dexter

Waiting

“… your mind was seizing on something to try to make sense of the emotion… Can you see the power emotion has to distort our outlook? Makes you wonder, did you have a bad day, or did you make it a bad day?”

Brandon Mull (1974) American fiction writer

Source: Rise of the Evening Star

“There is nothing more uncommon than common sense.”

Frank Lloyd Wright (1867–1959) American architect (1867-1959)

Anonymous saying, dating back at least to its citation in Natural Theology (1836) by Thomas Chalmers, Bk. II, Ch. III : On the Strength of the Evidences for a God in the Phenomena of Visible and External Nature, § 15, where the author states: "It has been said that there is nothing more uncommon than common sense."; it has since become misattributed to particular people, including Frank Lloyd Wright.
Misattributed

“If you look at it from any other side, it looks like a pile of enormous deer droppings, but Chiron wouldn't let us call the place the Poop Pile, especially after it had been named for Zeus, who doesn't have much of a sense of humor.”

Rick Riordan book The Titan's Curse

Source: The Titan's Curse

“No good has ever come from feeling guilty, neither intelligence, policy, nor compassion. The guilty do not pay attention to the object but only to themselves, and not even to their own interests, which might make sense, but to their anxieties.”

Paul Goodman (1911–1972) American novelist, playwright, poet and psychotherapist

Feeling, Intelligence

“People say, "What is the sense of our small effort?" They cannot see that we must lay one brick at a time, take one step at a time.”

Dorothy Day (1897–1980) Social activist

People, Effort, Time

“She had made him possible. In that sense she was his god. Like God, she was neglected.”

Jeanette Winterson book The Passion

Source: The Passion

God

“It is not true that women cannot keep secrets. Where they love, they can be trusted to death and beyond, against all sense and reason. It is their weakness, and their great strength.”

Mary Stewart book The Hollow Hills

Source: The Hollow Hills

Love, Death, Women, Secret

“Not that it was beautiful,
but that, in the end, there was
a certain sense of order there;
something worth learning
in that narrow diary of my mind”

Anne Sexton (1928–1974) poet from the United States

Source: To Bedlam and Part Way Back

Beauty, Learning

“Music, when soft voices die,
Vibrates in the memory —
Odours, when sweet violets sicken,
Live within the sense they quicken.
Rose leaves, when the rose is dead,
Are heaped for the beloved's bed;
And so thy thoughts, when thou art gone,
Love itself shall slumber on.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822) English Romantic poet

Music, When Soft Voices Die http://www.readprint.com/work-1367/Percy-Bysshe-Shelley (1821) <br class="br">Source: The Complete Poems

Love, Art, Music, Memory

“When the ship docks, I'm getting off with you.
This is crazy.
I know it doesn't make any sense, that's why I trust it.”

James Cameron (1954) Canadian film director

Source: James Cameron's Titanic

“From a distance, it makes perfect sense that the people and the things you think will save you are the very ones that have the power to disappoint you most bitterly, but up close it can hit you as a bewildering surprise.”

Tom Perrotta (1961) American novelist and screenwriter

Source: Joe College

People, Disappointment, Thinking, Perfection

“criticism is dangerous, because it wounds a person's precious pride, hurt his sense of importace and arouse resentment.”

Dale Carnegie How to Win Friends and Influence People

Source: How to Win Friends and Influence People

Hurt, Personality

“Common sense is the most widely shared commodity in the world, for every man is convinced that he is well supplied with it.”

René Descartes (1596–1650) French philosopher, mathematician, and scientist

World

“It’s precisely because of the pain, the we can get the feeling, through this process, of really being alive—or at least a partial sense of it.”

Haruki Murakami book What I Talk About When I Talk About Running

Source: What I Talk About When I Talk About Running

Pain, Feeling

“There is a sense in which we are all each other's consequences.”

Wallace Stegner (1909–1993) American historian, writer, and environmentalist

Source: All the Little Live Things (1967)

“He repeated until his dying day that there was no one with more common sense, no stone cutter more obstinate, no manager more lucid or dangerous, than a poet.”

Gabriel García Márquez (1927–2014) Colombian writer

“Our exclusive dependence on rational thought and language has obscured our natural ability to sense the flow of energy.”

Ilchi Lee (1950) South Korean businessman

Source: Brain Wave Vibration: Getting Back Into the Rhythm of a Happy, Healthy Life

Nature, Dependency

“The sense of loss is such a tricky one, because we always feel like our worth is tied up into stuff that we have, not that our worth can grow with things we are willing to lose.”

Tori Amos (1963) American singer

Feeling, Loss

“There is hope for the future because God has a sense of humor and we are funny to God.”

Bill Cosby (1937) American actor, comedian, author, producer, musician, activist

God, Hope, Future

“Better be without sense than misapply it as you do.”

Jane Austen book Emma

Source: Emma

“Occasionally I sense an insane wail deep down in the pit, the echo alone reaching me, striking without warning, a child weeping uninhibitedly, imprisoned forever.”

Ingmar Bergman (1918–2007) Swedish filmmaker

Source: The Magic Lantern

“She closed one eye and looked at me and said, "I know there is a blessing in this somewhere."

It is worth living long enough to outlast whatever sense of grievance you may acquire. Another reason why you must be careful of your health.”

Marilynne Robinson Gilead

Source: Gilead

Health

“Bailing out people who made ill-advised mortgages makes no more sense that bailing out people who lost their life savings in Las Vegas casinos.”

Thomas Sowell (1930) American economist, social theorist, political philosopher and author

Life, People

“There are many sources of spirituality; religion may be the most common, but it is by no means the only. Anything that generates a sense of awe may be a source of spirituality. Science does this in spades.”

Michael Shermer (1954) American science writer

Religion, Science

“Everybody gets so much information all day long that they lose their common sense.”

Gertrude Stein (1874–1946) American art collector and experimental writer of novels, poetry and plays

Reflections on the Atom Bomb (1946)

“The word love has by no means the same sense for both sexes, and this is one cause of the serious misunderstandings that divide them.”

Simone de Beauvoir (1908–1986) French writer, intellectual, existentialist philosopher, political activist, feminist, and social theorist

Love, Sex

“I feel like Alice falling into Wonderland.
A line came to him: It would be so nice if something made sense for a change.”

Eoin Colfer (1965) Irish author of children's books

Source: The Last Guardian

Feeling, Change

“You're dead, George. You just don't have the sense to lie down.”

Stephen King The Dark Half

Source: The Dark Half

Lie, Dead

“Our world was created with a sense of order. For every loss, there is a gain. Sometimes we are so blinded by the loss that we don't see the gain, don't recognize the gift.”

Debbie Macomber (1948) American writer

World, Loss

“because being with you makes perfect sense”

Tim McGraw (1967) American country singer

Perfection

“A sense of humor is just common sense dancing.”

William James (1842–1910) American philosopher, psychologist, and pragmatist

Dance, Funny

“Besides my great fashion sense? I play a mean harmonica.”

James Patterson (1947) American author

Source: Saving the World and Other Extreme Sports

Fashion

“It is very difficult to be a hero without an audience, although, in a sense, we are each the hero of a peculiar, half-ruined film called our life.”

Sebastian Barry book The Secret Scripture

Source: The Secret Scripture

Life

“Yoga allows you to rediscover a sense of wholeness in your life, where you do not feel like you are constantly trying to fit broken pieces together.”

B.K.S. Iyengar (1918–2014) Indian yoga teacher and scholar

Source: Light on Life: The Yoga Journey to Wholeness, Inner Peace, and Ultimate Freedom, p.xiv

Life, Feeling

“Dead bodies didn't resemble unconscious ones; it was as if you could sense that something had fled from them, that some essential spark was now missing.”

Cassandra Clare book City of Glass

Source: City of Glass

Dead

“I was not content to believe in a personal devil and serve him, in the ordinary sense of the word. I wanted to get hold of him personally and become his chief of staff.”

Aleister Crowley (1875–1947) poet, mountaineer, occultist

Source: The Confessions of Aleister Crowley (1929), Ch. 5.
Context: I resolved passionately to reach the spiritual causes of phenomena, and to dominate the material world which I detested by their means. I was not content to believe in a personal devil and serve him, in the ordinary sense of the word. I wanted to get hold of him personally and become his chief of staff.

Personality

“And though I can hide my cold gaze, and you can shake my hand and feel flesh gripping yours and maybe you can even sense our lifestyles are probably comparable… I simply am not there.”

Bret Easton Ellis (1964) American novelist

Feeling

“Sense is never common.”

Robert A. Heinlein Time Enough for Love

Source: Time Enough for Love

“The trip was to be an odyssey in the fullest sense of the word, an epic journey that would change everything.”

Jon Krakauer book Into the Wild

Source: Into the Wild

Change

“Life forces enough final decisions on us. We should have the sense to avoid as many of the unnecessary ones as we can.”

John Irving book Until I Find You

Source: Until I Find You (2005), ch. 25, p. 493

Life, Decision

“Success is a function of persistence and doggedness and the willingness to work hard for twenty-two minutes to make sense of something that most people would give up on after thirty seconds.”

Malcolm Gladwell (1963) journalist and science writer

Source: Outliers: The Story of Success

People, Success

“Reading enables me to maintain a sense of something substantive– my ethical integrity, my intellectual integrity.”

Jonathan Franzen book How to Be Alone

Source: How to Be Alone

Reading

“You can't substitute material things for love or for gentleness or for tenderness or for a sense of comradeship”

Mitch Albom Tuesdays with Morrie

Source: Tuesdays with Morrie

Love

“you have to ‘lose your mind’ before you can come to your senses.”

Dan Millman book Way of the Peaceful Warrior

Source: Way of the Peaceful Warrior

“employers sense in me a denial of their values… they fear me. i suspect that they can see that i am forced to function in a century which i loathe.”

John Kennedy Toole A Confederacy of Dunces

Source: A Confederacy of Dunces

Fear

“Most men seem to live according to sense rather than reason.”

Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) Italian Dominican scholastic philosopher of the Roman Catholic Church

Men

“I believe in a long, prolonged, derangement of the senses in order to obtain the unknown.”

Jim Morrison (1943–1971) lead singer of The Doors

“He's got a great sense of humor for a guy who never says anything.”

Cassandra Clare book City of Bones

Source: City of Bones

Guy

“Good sense is the most equitably distributed of all things because no matter how much or little a person has, everyone feels so abundantly provided with good sense that he feels no desire for more than he already possesses.”

René Descartes (1596–1650) French philosopher, mathematician, and scientist

Feeling, Personality

“When I look back, I am so impressed again with the life-giving power of literature. If I were a young person today, trying to gain a sense of myself in the world, I would do that again by reading, just as I did when I was young.”

Maya Angelou (1928–2014) American author and poet

Life, World, Literature, Reading

“… only the victims and survivors can truly comprehend the awfulness of that time and place; the rest of us live on the other side of the fence, staring through from our own comfortable place, trying in our own clumsy ways to make sense of it all.”

John Boyne (1971) Irish novelist, author of children's and youth fiction

Source: The Boy in the Striped Pajamas

Way, Time

“If you reveal everything, bare every feeling, ask for understanding, you lose something crucial to your sense of yourself. You need to know things that others don't know. It's what no one knows about you that allows you to know yourself.”

Don DeLillo Point Omega

Source: Point Omega

Feeling, Understanding

“if we could act a little more according to common sense, and a good deal less according to fashion, we should find many things work easier;”

Anna Sewell book Black Beauty

Source: Black Beauty

Fashion

“Cats cant speak, that's common sense.
-Yoruichi”

Tite Kubo (1977) Japanese manga artist

Cats

“Rats have a sense of humor. Rats, in fact think the world is very funny. And they are right, dear reader. They are right.”

Kate DiCamillo book The Tale of Despereaux

Source: The Tale of Despereaux

World, Thinking

“I don’t think Will Herondale and a sense of responsibility are even on speaking terms”

Cassandra Clare book Clockwork Prince

Source: Clockwork Prince

Thinking

“Love is not to be found in someone else, but in ourselves; we simply awaken it. But in order to do that, we need the other person. The universe only makes sense when we have someone to share our feelings with.”

Paulo Coelho book Eleven Minutes

Source: Eleven Minutes

Love, Feeling, Universe, Personality

“Every fairy tale offers the potential to surpass present limits, so in a sense the fairy tale offers you freedoms that reality denies.”

Azar Nafisi book Reading Lolita in Tehran

Source: Reading Lolita in Tehran

Reality, Freedom

“Writing and reading decrease our sense of isolation. They deepen and widen and expand our sense of life: they feed the soul.”

Anne Lamott (1954) Novelist, essayist, memoirist, activist

Source: Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

Life, Soul, Reading

“Who's Myrnin?"
Claire controlled an urge to roll her eyes. "Badass crazy vampire scientist who's my boss."
"You realize no part of that sentence made sense, right?”

Rachel Caine (1962) American writer

Source: Ghost Town

Parting

“Raising children is, in a sense, the reason the society exists in the first place. It's the most important thing that happens, and it's the culmination of all the tools and language and social structure that has evolved.”

Michael Crichton book The Lost World

Source: The Lost World

Children

“Nature was tough, it could be dangerous, but unlike Dr. Cable or shay, or peris-unlike people in general-it made sense. The problems it threw at you could be solved rationally.”

Scott Westerfeld book Pretties

Source: Pretties

People, Nature, Problem

“The difference between reality and fiction? Fiction has to make sense.”

Tom Clancy (1947–2013) American author

Attributed to an interview on Larry King Live; also quoted in Quotable Quotes (1997) edited by Deborah Deford
Attributed variant: The difference between fiction and reality is that fiction has to make sense.
Clancy here expresses an idea evoked in similar statements made by others, all derived from the orignial made by Lord Byron:
Lord Byron: Truth is always strange; stranger than fiction.
Mark Twain: Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities, truth isn't.
G. K. Chesterton: Truth must necessarily be stranger than fiction, for fiction is the creation of the human mind and therefore congenial to it.
Leo Rosten: Truth is stranger than fiction; fiction has to make sense. (attributed)
1990s

Reality

Quotes about reason page 11

Quotes about reason
page 11