Quotes about reason
page 13

“A poem is never a put-up job, so to speak. It begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness. It is never a thought to begin with.”

Robert Frost (1874–1963) American poet

“Flaming enthusiasm, backed up by horse sense and persistence, is the quality that most frequently makes for success.”

Dale Carnegie (1888–1955) American writer and lecturer

As quoted in A Joke, a Quote, & the Word : Feed Your Body, Soul and Spirit (2006) by Ronald P. Keeven, p. 147

Success, Horse

“What really holds their marriage together are mutual respect of an awesome depth, a shared sense of humor, faith that they were brought together by a force greater than themselves, and a love so unwavering and pure that it is sacred.”

Dean Koontz book Forever Odd

Source: Forever Odd

Love, Marriage, Faith

“Each day I live in a glass room
Unless I break it with the thrusting
Of my senses and pass through
The splintered walls to the great landscape.”

Mervyn Peake (1911–1968) English writer, artist, poet and illustrator

"Each Day I Live in a Glass Room," A Reverie of Bone and other Poems (1967)

“I saw something even more beautiful than a sense of humor: an appreciation for life’s essential absurdity.”

Stephen King book 11/22/63

Source: 11/22/63

Life, Beauty

“I suppose it’s comfort, perhaps a sense of self-control, doing worse things to yourself than the world will ever dare inflict.”

Chuck Palahniuk book Tell-All

Source: Tell-All

World

“My turn shall also come:
I sense the spreading of a wing.”

Osip Mandelstam (1891–1938) Russian poet and essayist

Source: The Selected Poems

“I believe that the community - in the fullest sense: a place and all its creatures - is the smallest unit of health and that to speak of the health of an isolated individual is a contradiction in terms. (pg. 146, Health is Membership)”

Wendell Berry (1934) author

Source: The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays

Health, Communication

“Where humans are concerned, the only emotion that made sense was wonder, at their ability to endure…”

Rohinton Mistry A Fine Balance

Source: A Fine Balance

“The ancient dialogue between reason and the senses is almost always more interestingly and passionately resolved in favor of the senses.”

Kay Redfield Jamison (1946) American bipolar disorder researcher

Source: An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness

Passion

“Let us beware of common folk, common sense, sentiment, inspiration, and the obvious.”

Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867) French poet

“Nothing made sense to me anymore. I knew I was young, I knew I was small. But I was worried that I might already be ruined.”

Augusten Burroughs book A Wolf at the Table

Source: A Wolf at the Table

“Fuckin' A… hope didn't so much spring eternal as it drowned out common sense and self-preservation.”

Jessica Bird (1969) U.S. novelist

Source: Lover Mine

Hope, Spring

“A jolly young fellow from Yuma
Told an elephant joke to a puma;
now his skeleton lies
beneath hot western skies-
the puma had no sense of huma”

Ogden Nash (1902–1971) American poet

“If every library is in some sense a reflection of its readers, it is also an image of that which we are not, and cannot be.”

Alberto Manguel (1948) writer

Source: The Library at Night

“And none at all has ridden at the king's side since Aerinha, goddess of honor and flame, first taught men to forge their blades. You'd think Aerinha would have had better sense.”

Robin McKinley book The Hero and the Crown

Source: The Hero and the Crown

Men, Thinking

“A man speaking sense to himself is no madder than a man speaking nonsense not to himself.”

Tom Stoppard (1937) British playwright

“Once you learn what life is about, there is no way to erase that knowledge. If you try to do something else with your life, you will always sense that you are missing something”

James Redfield (1950) American author, lecturer, screenwriter and film producer

Source: The Celestine Prophecy: A Pocket Guide to the Nine Insights

Life, Way, Knowledge, Learning

“To think what is true, to sense what is beautiful and to want what is good, hereby the spirit finds purpose of a life in reason.”

Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803) German philosopher, theologian, poet, and literary critic

Life, Beauty, Thinking

“Nor would anybody suspect. If was one thing all people took for granted, was conviction that if you feed honest figures into a computer, honest figures come out. Never doubted it myself till I met a computer with a sense of humor.”

Robert A. Heinlein book The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress

Source: The Moon is a Harsh Mistress

People

“The trouble with fiction… is that it makes too much sense. Reality never makes sense.”

Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) English writer

"John Rivers" in The Genius and the Goddess (1955)
Source: The Genius And The Goddess

Reality

“I feel that the dormant goodwill in people needs to be stirred. People need to hear that it makes sense to behave decently or to help others, to place common interests above their own, to respect the elementary rules of human coexistence.”

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

People, Feeling, Help

“A man said to the universe:
"Sir I exist!"
"However," replied the universe,
"The fact has not created in me
A sense of obligation."”

Stephen Crane (1871–1900) American novelist, short story writer, poet, and journalist

A Man Said to the Universe, No. 20
War Is Kind and Other Lines (1899)
Source: War Is Kind and Other Poems

Universe

“Do go on,' he said. 'There's nothing I enjoy more than listening to a highly trained intelligence leapfrogging common sense and coming to the wrong conclusions. It gives me renewed faith in parliamentary democracy.”

Tom Sharpe (1928–2013) English satirical novelist

Source: Wilt On High

Faith, Democracy, Intelligence, Training

“Within that moment was trust, compassion, and our mutual sense of irony. He was carrying death within him and I was carrying life. We were both aware of that, I know.”

Patti Smith Just Kids

Source: Just Kids

Life, Death

“If you think of yourselves as helpless and ineffectual, it is certain that you will create a despotic government to be your master. The wise despot, therefore, maintains among his subjects a popular sense that they are helpless and ineffectual.”

Frank Herbert (1920–1986) American writer

Thinking

“Books, for me, are a home. Books don’t make a home – they are one, in the sense that just as you do with a door, you open a book, and you go inside. Inside there is a different kind of time and a different kind of space.”

Jeanette Winterson (1959) English writer

Source: Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

Books, Home, Time

“The birth of the mind is the death of the senses”

Dan Millman (1946) American self help writer

Source: Way of the Peaceful Warrior: A Book That Changes Lives

Death, Birth

“I was glad I wasn’t in love, that I wasn’t happy with the world. I like being at odds with everything. People in love often become edgy, dangerous. They lose their sense of perspective.”

Charles Bukowski book Women

Source: Women (1978)
Context: I was glad I wasn't in love, that I wasn't happy with the world. I like being at odds with everything. People in love often become edgy, dangerous. They lose their sense of perspective. They lose their sense of humor. They become nervous, psychotic bores. They even become killers.

Love, Happiness, People, World

“There are periods of history when the visions of madmen and dope fiends are a better guide to reality than the common-sense interpretation of data available to the so-called normal mind. This is one such period, if you haven't noticed already.”

Robert Anton Wilson book The Illuminatus! Trilogy

Part I : The Eye in the Pyramid, p. 32
The Illuminatus! Trilogy (1975)

History, Reality

“Luckily, even as a young man not yet become himself, John Bridgens had two things besides indecision that kept him from self-destruction - books and a sense of irony.”

Dan Simmons book The Terror

Source: The Terror

Books, Indecision

“I mean, say that you figure that everything is senseless, then it can't be quite senseless because you are aware that it's senseless and your awareness of senselessness almost gives it sense. You
know what I mean?”

Charles Bukowski book Pulp

Source: Pulp

“That's just your ego, trying to make sure it stays in charge. This is what ego does. It keeps you feeling separate, keeps you with a sense of duality, tries to convince you that you're flawed and broken and alone instead of whole.”

Elizabeth Gilbert book Eat, Pray, Love

Source: Eat, Pray, Love

Feeling

“Common sense is as rare as genius.”

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

“Literature is my Utopia. Here I am not disenfranchised. No barrier of the senses shuts me out from the sweet, gracious discourse of my book friends. They talk to me without embarrassment or awkwardness. The things I have learned and the things I have been taught seem of ridiculously little importance compared with their "large loves and heavenly charities."”

Helen Keller book The Story of My Life

Source: The Story of My Life (1903), Ch. 21

Love, Books, Literature, Learning

“You get so alone at times that it just makes sense.”

Charles Bukowski (1920–1994) American writer

Time

“I don't try to imagine a personal God; it suffices to stand in awe at the structure of the world, insofar as it allows our inadequate senses to appreciate it.”

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

God, World, Imagination, Personality

“A certain ruthlessness and a sense of alienation from society is as essential to creative writing as it is to armed robbery.”

Nelson Algren book Nonconformity

Source: Nonconformity (1953/1996)
Context: You don't write a novel out of sheer pity any more than you blow a safe out of a vague longing to be rich. Compassion is all to the good, but vindictiveness is the verity Faulkner forgot: the organic force in every creative effort, from the poetry of Villon to the Brinks Express Robbery, that gives shape and color to all our dreams. [... ] A certain ruthlessness and a sense of alienation from society is as essential to creative writing as it is to armed robbery. The strong-armer isn't out merely to turn a fast buck any more than the poet is out solely to see his name on the cover of a book, whatever satisfaction that event may afford him. What both need most deeply is to get even. And, of course, neither will.

“It would be possible to describe everything scientifically, but it would make no sense; it would be without meaning, as if you described a Beethoven symphony as a variation of wave pressure.”

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

“Work. Like pain, I sensed that this was an experience I would want to avoid as often as possible.”

Joanne Harris book The Gospel of Loki

Source: The Gospel of Loki

Pain

“The future is there… looking back at us. Trying to make sense of the fiction we will have become.”

William Gibson book Pattern Recognition

Source: Pattern Recognition

Future

“Death,—a stopping of impressions through the senses, and of the pulling of the cords of motion, and of the ways of thought, and of service to the flesh.”

Marcus Aurelius book Meditations

VI, 28
Source: Meditations (c. 121–180 AD), Book VI

Death, Way

“I think fantasy is best described as a kind of fiction that evokes wonder, mystery or magic, a sense of possibility beyond the ordinary world in which we live, and yet which reflects and comments upon that known world.”

Kate Forsyth (1966) Australian writer

World, Thinking

“I suppose if we couldn't laugh at things that don't make sense, we couldn't react to a lot of life.”

Bill Watterson (1958) American comic artist

Source: The Days Are Just Packed: A Calvin and Hobbes Collection

Life

“In modern times, if the sole measure of what’s out there flows from your five senses then a precarious life awaits you.”

Neil deGrasse Tyson (1958) American astrophysicist and science communicator

Source: Death by Black Hole - And Other Cosmic Quandaries

Life, Time

“But the Church cannot be, in any political sense, either conservative or liberal, or revolutionary. Conservatism is too often conservation of the wrong things: liberalism a relaxation of discipline; revolution a denial of the permanent things.”

T.S. Eliot (1888–1965) 20th century English author

Source: Christianity and Culture: The Idea of a Christian Society and Notes Towards the Definition of Culture

“Just because it makes no sense doesn't mean it's not good advice.”

Mick Farren (1943–2013) English journalist, author and singer

“When we meet someone and fall in love, we have a sense that the whole universe is on our side. And yet if something goes wrong, there is nothing left!”

Paulo Coelho book Eleven Minutes

Source: Eleven Minutes (2003), p. 9.
Context: When we meet someone and fall in love, we have a sense that the whole universe is on our side. And yet if something goes wrong, there is nothing left! How is it possible for the beauty that was there only minutes before to vanish so quickly? Life moves very fast. It rushes from heaven to hell in a matter of seconds.

Love, Universe

“If anybody thinks they should listen to me because I'm a professor at MIT, that's nonsense. You should decide whether something makes sense by its content, not by the letters after the name of the person who says it.”

Noam Chomsky (1928) american linguist, philosopher and activist

Thinking, Personality

“We were, the two of us, still fragmentary beings, just beginning to sense the presence of an unexpected, to be-aquired reality that would fill us and make us whole.”

Haruki Murakami book South of the Border, West of the Sun

Source: South of the Border, West of the Sun

Reality

“A great photograph is a full expression of what one feels about what is being photographed in the deepest sense, and is, thereby, a true expression of what one feels about life in its entirety.”

Ansel Adams (1902–1984) American photographer and environmentalist

"A Personal Credo" (1943), published in American Annual of Photography (1944), reprinted in Nathan Lyons, editor, Photographers on Photography (1966), reprinted in Vicki Goldberg, editor, Photography in Print: Writings from 1816 to the Present (1988)

Life, Feeling