Quotes about reason
page 12

“Man has no moral instinct. He is not born with moral sense. You were not born with it, I was not - and a puppy has none. We acquire moral sense, when we do, through training, experience, and hard sweat of the mind.”

Robert A. Heinlein book Starship Troopers

Source: Starship Troopers

Training

“It stands to reason that anyone who learns to live well will die well. The skills are the same: being present in the moment, and humble, and brave, and keeping a sense of humor. (361)”

Victoria Moran (1950) American writer

Source: Younger by the Day: 365 Ways to Rejuvenate Your Body and Revitalize Your Spirit

Learning

“You look at where you're going and where you are and it never makes sense, but then you look back at where you've been and a pattern seems to emerge. And if you project forward from that pattern, then sometimes you can come up with something.”

Robert M. Pirsig book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974)
Source: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values

“The learned ignore the evidence of their senses to preserve the coherence of the ideas of their imagination.”

Adam Smith (1723–1790) Scottish moral philosopher and political economist

Imagination, Idea, Learning

“Nothing makes sense, why should I?”

Suad Amiry (1951) author and architect

Source: Nothing to Lose But Your Life: An 18-Hour Journey With Murad

“One loses everything when one loses one's sense of humor.”

Ayn Rand book The Fountainhead

Source: The Fountainhead

“Nothing about this entire scenario made sense. But who cares? Once in a while, everyone was entitled to be a bit flaky, and now it was his turn.”

Nicholas Sparks book True Believer

Source: True Believer

“I feel a sense of responsibility," said Jordan.
"And where is this feeling located? In your pants, perhaps?”

Cassandra Clare book City of Fallen Angels

Source: City of Fallen Angels

Feeling

“The last refuge of the insomniac is a sense of superiority to the sleeping world.”

Leonard Cohen (1934–2016) Canadian poet and singer-songwriter

World, Sleep

“You think she’ll be able to talk sense into him?” she asked. “His sister?”
"If he listens to anyone, it would be her.”
“That’s sweet,” said Maia. “That he loves his sister like that.”
“Yeah,” Simon said. “It’s precious”

Cassandra Clare book City of Ashes

Source: City of Ashes

Love, Thinking, Sister

“Mythology may, in a real sense, be defined as other people's religion. And religion may, in a sense, be understood as popular misunderstanding of mythology. (8)”

Joseph Campbell (1904–1987) American mythologist, writer and lecturer

Source: Thou Art That: Transforming Religious Metaphor

People, Religion

“Does anything on you work properly?" Asked ter Borcht.
"Well, I do have a highly developed sense of irony." Replied Iggy.”

James Patterson (1947) American author

Source: Saving the World and Other Extreme Sports

“Common sense tells us that the things of the earth exist only a little, and that true reality is only in dreams.”

Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867) French poet

Dreams, Reality

“Now it's like a fog has lifted. I sense Leetu just as clearly as I can see the moon.'
Your eyes are closed, and the moon as a haze around it.”

Donita K. Paul (1950) American writer

Source: DragonSpell

“What we lose in our great human exodus from the land is a rooted sense, as deep and intangible as religious faith, of why we need to hold on to the wild and beautiful places that once surrounded us.”

Barbara Kingsolver book Small Wonder

Source: Small Wonder

Faith, Beauty

“Did the Order return your sense of humor as part of the severance package?”

Ilona Andrews American husband-and-wife novelist duo

Source: Magic Slays

Parting

“Going to work just looked crazy. Eating another meal, ever, made about as much sense as planting tulip bulbs in the shadow of a falling atom bomb.”

Chuck Palahniuk book Haunted

Source: Haunted

“Atheists’ anger doesn’t prove that we’re selfish, or joyless, or miserable. It shows that we have compassion, and a sense of justice. We’re angry because we see terrible harm all around us, and we feel desperately motivated to stop it.”

Greta Christina (1961) American activist

Source: Why Are You Atheists So Angry? 99 Things That Piss Off the Godless

Justice, Feeling, Motivation, Selfishness

“Common sense in an uncommon degree is what the world calls wisdom.”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) English poet, literary critic and philosopher

Source: Literary Remains, Vol. 1

Wisdom, World

“Of course it doesn't make sense." Lady Wendall said. "The rules of society rarely do.”

Patricia C. Wrede (1953) author

Source: Magician's Ward

“A sense of humor is part of the art of leadership, of getting along with people, of getting things done.”

Dwight D. Eisenhower (1890–1969) American general and politician, 34th president of the United States (in office from 1953 to 1961)

People, Art, Parting

“But what am I going to see?

I don't know. In a certain sense, it depends on you.”

Stanisław Lem book Solaris

Source: Solaris

Dependency

“Guy don't need no sense to be a nice fella. Seems to me sometimes it jus' works the other way around. Take a real smart guy and he ain't hardly ever a nice fella.”

John Steinbeck Of Mice and Men

Source: Of Mice and Men (1937), Ch. 3, p. 41

Way, Guy

“My sense of god is my sense of wonder about the universe.”

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

God, Universe

“Charity even for one person does not make sense except in terms of an effort to love all Creation in response to the Creator's love for it.”

Wendell Berry (1934) author

Source: The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays

Love, Effort, Personality

“Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.”

Václav Havel book Disturbing the Peace

Source: Disturbing the Peace (1986), Ch. 5 : The Politics of Hope
Variant translation or similar statement: Hope is a state of mind, not of the world. Hope, in this deep and powerful sense, is not the same as joy that things are going well, or willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously heading for success, but rather an ability to work for something because it is good.
Context: Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.

Hope, Hope

“You would have made a fine warrior, you know that?"

I am one. Death is my enemy."

Yeah, it is, isn't it." God, it made such sense that he'd bonded with her. She was a fighter… like him. "Your scalpel's your dagger."

Yup.”

Jessica Bird book Lover Unbound

Source: Lover Unbound

Death, God

“I am not asking for sensational revelations, but I would like to sense the meaning of that minute, to feel it's urgency…”

Jean Paul Sartre (1905–1980) French existentialist philosopher, playwright, novelist, screenwriter, political activist, biographer, and …

Feeling

“There is a dead spot in the night, that coldest, blackest time when the world has forgotten evening and dawn is not yet a promise. A time when it is far too early to arise, but so late that going to bed makes small sense.”

Robin Hobb book Assassin's Quest

Source: Assassin's Quest

World, Time, Night, Dead

“Though I often run out of courage and good sense, stubbornness keeps me going.”

Simon R. Green (1955) British writer

Courage

“I don't profess to be profound; but I do lay claim to common sense.”

Emily Dickinson (1830–1886) American poet

“It may be that DMT makes us able to perceive what the physicist call "dark matter" - the 95 per cent of the universe's mass that is known to exist but that at present remains invisible to our senses and instruments.”

Graham Hancock (1950) British writer and journalist

Universe

“I'm always so glad I have no idea what you're vacantly chatting about," said Jace. It fills me with a sense of peace and well-being.”

Cassandra Clare book City of Fallen Angels

Source: City of Fallen Angels

Peace, Idea

“It's a good thing to have all the props pulled out from under us occasionally. It gives us some sense of what is rock under our feet, and what is sand.”

Madeleine L'Engle (1918–2007) American writer

“I have learned that faith means trusting in advance what will only make sense in reverse.”

Philip Yancey (1949) American writer

Variant: Faith means believing in advance what will only make sense in reverse.
Source: Disappointment with God: Three Questions No One Asks Aloud

Faith, Learning

“The basic fact about human existence is not that it is a tragedy, but that it is a bore. It is not so much a war as an endless standing in line. The objection to it is not that it is predominantly painful, but that it is lacking in sense.”

H.L. Mencken (1880–1956) American journalist and writer

Baltimore Evening Sun (9 August 1926)
1920s
Source: A Mencken Chrestomathy

Pain, War

“Everything, absolutely everything on this earth makes sense, and even the smallest things are worthy of our consideration.”

Paulo Coelho (1947) Brazilian lyricist and novelist

Source: The Witch Of Portobello

“How much longer will I live? (Urian)
You’re immortal, barring death. (Acheron)
That doesn’t make sense. (Urian)
Most of life doesn’t. (Acheron)”

Sherrilyn Kenyon (1965) Novelist

Source: Kiss of the Night

Life, Death

“As I walk back to the school on my own, I realise I'm crying. So I go back to the stories I've read about the five and I try to make sense of their lives because in making sense of theirs, I may understand mine.”

Melina Marchetta book On the Jellicoe Road

Source: On the Jellicoe Road

School, Understanding, Reading, Cry

“Courage moral and physical: 'anima'—the ability to think like a woman. Also a sense of the absurd. Courage moral and physical: “anima”—the ability to visualize the mind and need of a man. Also a sense of the absurd.”

Christopher Hitchens (1949–2011) British American author and journalist

Source: Hitch-22: A Memoir

Courage, Thinking

“Surely being in love doesn't cause you to lose your sense of good taste. If I ever buy a gown with sequins on it, someone just shoot me.”

Laurell K. Hamilton (1963) Novelist

Love

“Life doesn't make any sense, and we all pretend it does. Comedy's job is to point out that it doesn't make sense, and that it doesn't make much difference anyway.”

Eric Idle (1943) British comedian, actor, singer and writer

Life

“A good book is an education of the heart. It enlarges your sense of human possibility what human nature is of what happens in the world. It's a creator of inwardness.”

Susan Sontag (1933–2004) American writer and filmmaker, professor, and activist

Books, World, Education, Nature

“Does a man of sense run after every silly tale of hobgoblins or fairies, and canvass particularly the evidence? I never knew anyone, that examined and deliberated about nonsense who did not believe it before the end of his enquiries.”

David Hume (1711–1776) Scottish philosopher, economist, and historian

Letters
Source: Letters of David Hume 2 vols

“The greater a child’s terror, and the earlier it is experienced, the harder it becomes to develop a strong and healthy sense of self.”

Nathaniel Branden (1930–2014) Canadian–American psychotherapist and writer

Source: Six Pillars of Self-Esteem

Strong

“people with a sense of fulfillment think it is a good world and would like to conserve it as it is, while the frustrated favor radical change.”

Eric Hoffer (1898–1983) American philosopher

Source: The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements

People, World, Thinking, Change

“But really, the term “forgive and forget” doesn’t make sense to me. Forgiving does allow us to stop dwelling on an issue, which isn’t always healthy. But if we forget, we don’t learn from our mistakes. And that can be deadly.”

Meg Cabot (1967) Novelist

Source: Abandon

Forgiveness, Learning, Forgetting

“You don't read it in the sense of reading a message; it doesn't work like that. What's happening is that the Shadows are responding to the attention you pay them.”

Philip Pullman book Northern Lights

Source: The Golden Compass

Reading

“Feeling in love (or lust) and fear feel a lot alike. They both give you that anxious butterfly feeling in your stomach, a sense of excitement, and a general unease physically and mentally. It's easy to confuse love with fear.”

Greg Behrendt (1963) American comedian

Source: It's Called a Breakup Because It's Broken: The Smart Girl's Break-Up Buddy

Love, Fear, Feeling

“Insecurity is the worst sense that lovers feel: sometimes the most humdrum desireless marriage seems better. Insecurity twists meanings and poisons trust.”

Graham Greene book The End of the Affair

Variant: Insecurity is the worst sense that lovers feel; sometimes the most humdrum desireless marriage seems better. Insecurity twists meanings and poisons trust.
Source: The End of the Affair

Marriage, Feeling, Lovers

“Much madness is divinest sense
To a discerning eye;
Much sense the starkest madness.
’T is the majority
In this, as all, prevails.
Assent, and you are sane;
Demur,—you ’re straightway dangerous,
And handled with a chain.”

Emily Dickinson book The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson

Life, p. 9
Collected Poems (1993)
Source: The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson

Madness

“I'm trying to make some sense out of the phrase "Everything happens for a reason," and I think I've figured out what the reason is - to pissed me off.”

Cecelia Ahern book Love, Rosie

Variant: I’m trying to make some sense out of the phrase “Everything happens for a reason,” and I think I’ve ﬁgured out what the reason is—to piss me off.
Source: Love, Rosie

Thinking

“They did not know what we can now sense as we contemplate the course of history: that change begins in the soul before it shows in our lives…”

Franz Kafka book The Great Wall of China

Source: The Great Wall of China

Soul, History, Change

“Remember, despite the fact that this book is being sold as a 'fantasy' novel, you must take all of the things it says extremely seriously, as they are quite important, are in no way silly, and always make sense.

Rutabaga.”

Brandon Sanderson Alcatraz Versus the Evil Librarians

Source: Alcatraz Versus the Evil Librarians

Books, Way

“if you’re making sense, you’ve just unmade confusion.”

Karen Marie Moning book Darkfever

Darkfever

“I like people who have a sense of individuality. I love expression and anything awkward and imperfect, because that’s natural and that’s real.”

Marc Jacobs (1963) American fashion designer

Love, People, Nature

“Marriage is not a ritual or an end. It is a long, intricate, intimate dance together and nothing matters more than your own sense of balance and your choice of partner.”

Amy Bloom (1953) Fiction writer, screenwriter, social worker, psychotherapist

Marriage, Dance, Wedding

“Nonsense is that which does not fit into the prearranged patterns which we have superimposed on reality… Nonsense is nonsense only when we have not yet found that point of view from which it makes sense.”

Gary Zukav (1942) American writer and revivalist

Reality

“I could only stare, any sense that maybe I understood him evaporating as it always did. I'd glimpse something underneath, and he'd snatched it away so fast it left bruises that called me a fool for hoping for more.”

Kelley Armstrong (1968) Canadian writer

Hope, Fools

“You weren't able to talk sense into him?"
Well, we kind of tried to kill each other in a duel to the death."
I see. You tried the diplomatic approach.”

Rick Riordan book The Sea of Monsters

Source: The Sea of Monsters

Death

“Remember this… develop a sense of nostalgia for something, or you'll never figure out what's important.”

Gary Shteyngart Super Sad True Love Story

Source: Super Sad True Love Story

Nostalgia

“Perhaps I'm old and tired, but I always think that the chances of finding out what really is going on are so absurdly remote that the only thing to do is to say hang the sense of it and just keep yourself occupied.”

Douglas Adams The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy pentalogy

Source: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

Thinking, Chance

“Blake said that the body was the soul's prison unless the five senses are fully developed and open. He considered the senses the 'windows of the soul.' When sex involves all the senses intensely, it can be like a mystical experience.”

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

Sex, Soul

“A sense of humour is the only divine quality of man”

Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860) German philosopher

For Men

“He took pains to avoid self-depreciation, self-mockery, ambiguity, irony, subtlety, vulnerability, a civilized world-weariness and a tragic sense of history--the very things, he says, that are most natural to him.”

Don DeLillo (1936) American novelist, playwright and essayist

Pain, World, History, Nature

“The Divine light is always in man, presenting itself to the senses and to the comprehension, but man rejects it.”

Giordano Bruno (1548–1600) Italian philosopher, mathematician and astronomer

As quoted in Life and Teachings of Giordano Bruno : Philosopher, Martyr, Mystic 1548 - 1600 (1913) by Coulson Turnbull

Light

“I have a sense of melancholy isolation, life rapidly vanishing, all the usual things. It's very strange how often strong feelings don't seem to carry any message of action.”

Philip Larkin (1922–1985) English poet, novelist, jazz critic and librarian

Source: Philip Larkin: Letters to Monica

Life, Feeling, Strong

“He was born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad.”

Rafael Sabatini book Scaramouche

This is the opening line of the novel. Sabatini used it as his epitaph.
Variant: He was born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad. And that was all his patrimony.
Source: Scaramouche (1921), Ch. I: "The Republican"

World, Laughter, Madness

“guileless and without vanity, we were still in love with ourselves then. We felt comfortable in our own skins, enjoyed the news that our senses released to us, admired our dirt, cultivated our scars, and could not comprehend this unworthiness.”

Toni Morrison book The Bluest Eye

Source: The Bluest Eye

Love

“She returned his gaze, struck by the sense of her own transformation, and overwhelmed by the beauty which a lifetime havit had taught her to ignore.”

Ian McEwan book Atonement

Source: Atonement

Beauty

“The woods were my Ritalin. Nature calmed me, focused me, and yet excited my senses.”

Richard Louv (1949) American journalist

Source: Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder

Nature

“Phillip is a repository of random snatches of film dialogue and song lyrics. To make room for all of it in his brain, he apparently cleared out all the areas where things like reason and common sense are stored.”

Jonathan Tropper (1970) American writer

Source: This is Where I Leave You

“Don't wish me happiness — I don't expect to be happy; it's gotten beyond that, somehow. Wish me courage and strength and a sense of humor — I will need them all.”

Anne Morrow Lindbergh book Gift from the Sea

Letter to Corliss Lamont on her engagement (1928)
Bring Me a Unicorn (1971)
Source: Gift from the Sea

Happiness, Courage

“They laughed. Things were funny. They weren't afraid to care. There was no sense to life, to the structure of things.”

Charles Bukowski book Ham on Rye

Source: Ham on Rye

Life

“Why do men delight in work? Fundamentally, I suppose, because there is a sense of relief and pleasure in getting something done—a kind of satisfaction not unlike that which a hen enjoys on laying an egg.”

Gene Bedell

Three Steps to Yes: The Gentle Art of Getting Your Way
—H. L. Mencken O

Men, Pleasure

“Writing is making sense of life. You work your whole life and perhaps you've made sense of one small area.”

Nadine Gordimer (1923–2014) South african Nobel-winning writer

Interview with Jannika Hurwitt, published in Paris Review, 88 (Summer 1983) 82–127; reprinted in Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews, Sixth Series (1984) (the interview took place in two parts: fall 1979/spring 1980)

Life

“So much of liberalism in its classical sense is taken for granted in the West today and even disrespected. We take freedom for granted, and because of this we don't understand how incredibly vulnerable it is.”

Niall Ferguson (1964) British historian

"Niall Ferguson: 'Westerners don't understand how vulnerable freedom is'" https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/feb/20/niall-ferguson-interview-civilization, The Guardian, February 20, 2011.

Understanding, Freedom

“The universe only makes sense when we have someone to share our feelings with.”

Paulo Coelho book Eleven Minutes

Source: Eleven Minutes

Feeling, Universe

“I love inscriptions on flyleaves and notes in margins, I like the comradely sense of turning pages someone else turned, and reading passages someone long gone has called my attention to.”

Helene Hanff book 84, Charing Cross Road

Source: 84, Charing Cross Road

Love, Reading

“He was my first boyfriend, and I made him my everything - he was my new life, my new love, my new compass point. I guess that's the danger with firsts - you lose all sense of proportion.”

David Levithan Boy Meets Boy

Source: Boy Meets Boy

Love, Life

“The moral truth here is obvious: anyone who feels that the interests of a blastocyst just might supersede the interests of a child with a spinal cord injury has had his moral sense blinded by religious metaphysics.”

Sam Harris Letter to a Christian Nation

Source: 2000s, Letter to a Christian Nation (2006), p. 32

Truth, Feeling

“I have lost all sense of home, having moved about so much. It means to me now--only that place where the books are kept.”

John Steinbeck (1902–1968) American writer

Books, Home

“Well, these sad and hopeless obstacles are welcome in one sense, for they enable us to look with indifference upon the cruel satires that Fate loves to indulge in.”

Thomas Hardy (1840–1928) English novelist and poet

Love, Fate, Sadness, Indifference

“In an insane world, sanity made very little sense.”

Rachel Caine (1962) American writer

Source: Bitter Blood

World

“Nothing astonishes men so much as common sense and plain dealing.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) American philosopher, essayist, and poet

1840s, Essays: First Series (1841), Art

Men

“One must never allow oneself to acquire an exaggerated sense of one's own importance. There's no necessity to burden oneself with absolutes”

Ayn Rand book The Fountainhead

Source: The Fountainhead

“Isn't it the moment of most profound doubt that gives birth to new certainties? Perhaps hopelessness is the very soil that nourishes human hope; perhaps one could never find sense in life without first experiencing its absurdity...”

Václav Havel (1936–2011) playwright, essayist, poet, dissident and 1st President of the Czech Republic

Quoted in Amnesty International's essay "From Prisoner to President – A Tribute"

Life, Hope, Birth

“The poet makes himself a voyant through a long, immense reasoned deranging of all his senses. All the forms of love, of suffering, of madness; he tries to find himself, he exhausts in himself all the poisons, to keep only their quintessences.”

Arthur Rimbaud (1854–1891) French Decadent and Symbolist poet

Love, Suffering, Madness

“Every reader exists to ensure for a certain book a modest immortality. Reading is, in this sense, a ritual of rebirth.”

Alberto Manguel (1948) writer

Source: The Library at Night

Books, Reading

“There is no sense in loving someone you can never wake up to except by chance.”

Jeanette Winterson book The Passion

Source: The Passion

Love, Chance

“Common sense is seeing things as they are; and doing things as they ought to be.”

Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811–1896) Abolitionist, author

“I avoid that bleak first hour of the working day during which my still sluggish senses and body make every chore a penance. I find that in arriving later, the work which I do perform is of a much higher quality.”

John Kennedy Toole A Confederacy of Dunces

Source: A Confederacy of Dunces

“Readers love fantasy, but we need horror. Smart horror. Truthful horror. Horror that helps us make sense of a cruelly senseless world.”

Brian K. Vaughan (1976) American screenwriter, comic book creator

Love, Truth, World, Help

“The truth is more magical - in the best and most exciting sense of the word - than any myth or made-up mystery or miracle. Science has its own magic: the magic of reality.”

Richard Dawkins book The Magic of Reality

Duke University, 01/03/2012 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rYcOoqxuroI&t=54m51s <br class="br">The Magic Of Reality (2012) <br class="br">Source: The Magic of Reality: How We Know What's Really True <br class="br">Context: Don’t ever be lazy enough, defeatist enough, cowardly enough to say “I don't understand it so it must be a miracle - it must be supernatural - God did it”. Say instead, that it’s a puzzle, it’s strange, it’s a challenge that we should rise to. Whether we rise to the challenge by questioning the truth of the observation, or by expanding our science in new and exciting directions - the proper and brave response to any such challenge is to tackle it head-on. And until we've found a proper answer to the mystery, it's perfectly ok simply to say “this is something we don't yet understand - but we're working on it”. It's the only honest thing to do. Miracles, magic and myths, they can be fun. Everybody likes a good story. Myths are fun, as long as you don't confuse them with the truth. The real truth has a magic of its own. The truth is more magical, in the best and most exciting sense of the word, than any myth or made-up mystery or miracle. Science has its own magic - the magic of reality.

Truth, Reality, Science