Quotes about reason

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“The government of the United States is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion.”

“We lose a great deal, I think, when we lose this sense and feeling for the sun. When all has been said, the adventure of the sun is the great natural drama by which we live, and not to have joy in it and awe of it, not to share in it, is to close a dull door on natures's sustaining and poetic spirit.”

“Yes, very sensible… People die of common sense, Dorian, one lost moment at a time. Life is a moment. There is no hereafter. So make it burn always with the hardest flame.”

“The earth is speaking to us, but we can't hear because of all the racket our senses are making. Sometimes we need to erase them, erase our senses. Then - maybe - the earth will touch us. The universe will speak. The stars will whisper.”

“Look after the senses and the sounds will look after themselves”

“I like to say that while antimatter may seem strange, it is strange in the sense that Belgians are strange. They are not really strange; it is just that one rarely meets them.”

“Imagination was given to man to compensate him for what he isn't. A sense of humor was provided to console him for what he is.”

“Not being tense but ready.
Not thinking but not dreaming.
Not being set but flexible.
Liberation from the uneasy sense of confinement.
It is being wholly and quietly alive, aware and alert, ready for whatever may come.”

“Julian spoke with the clear, unequivocal lucidity of madmen who have escaped the hypocrisy of having to abide by a reality that makes no sense.”

“One has only to set a loved human being against the fact that we are all in peril all the time to get back a sense of proportion. What does anything matter compared to the reality of love and its span, so brief at best, maintained against such odds?”

“Time to leave now, get out of this room, go somewhere, anywhere; sharpen this feeling of happiness and freedom, stretch your limbs, fill your eyes, be awake, wider awake, vividly awake in every sense and every pore.”

“His progress through life was hampered by his tremendous sense of his own ignorance, a disability which affects all too few.”

“Human perception through the sense organs is always piecemeal. It can give you an illusion of completeness but can never comprehend the whole.”

“You may go over the world and you will find that every form of religion which has breathed upon this earth has degraded woman… I have been traveling over the old world during the last few years and have found new food for thought. What power is it that makes the Hindoo woman burn herself upon the funeral pyre of her husband? Her religion. What holds the Turkish woman in the harem? Her religion. By what power do the Mormons perpetuate their system of polygamy? By their religion/ Man, of himself, could not do this; but when he declares, 'Thus saith the Lord,' of course he can do it. So long as ministers stand up and tell us Christ is the head of the church, so is man the head of woman, how are we to break the chains which have held women down through the ages? You Christian women look at the Hindoo, the Turkish, the Mormon women, and wonder how they can be held in such bondage…

Now I ask you if our religion teaches the dignity of woman? It teaches us the abominable idea of the sixth century--Augustine's idea--that motherhood is a curse; that woman is the author of sin, and is most corrupt. Can we ever cultivate any proper sense of self-respect as long as women take such sentiments from the mouths of the priesthood?”

“We must doubt the certainty of everything which passes through the senses, but how much more ought we to doubt things contrary to the senses, such as the existence of God and the soul.”

“Don't you understand?" snarled Rincewind. "We are going over the Edge, godsdammit!"
"Can't we do anything about it?"
"No!"
"Then I can't see the sense in panicking," said Twoflower calmly.”

“Stop moping, sule," galladon said with a grunt."It doesn't suit you-it takes a fine sense of pessimism to brood with any sort of respectability.”

“I think the most important thing about music is the sense of escape.”

“I think books are like people, in the sense that they'll turn up in your life when you most need them.”

“Forgiveness requires a sense that bad behaviour is a sign of suffering rather than malice.”

“You Fill Up My Senses”

“All credibility, all good conscience, all evidence of truth come only from the senses.”

“Men in plural […] can experience meaningfulness only because they can talk with and make sense to each other and themselves.”

“Never has our future been more unpredictable, never have we depended so much on political forces that cannot be trusted to follow the rules of common sense and self-interest—forces that look like sheer insanity, if judged by the standards of other centuries. It is as though mankind had divided itself between those who believe in human omnipotence (who think that everything is possible if one knows how to organize masses for it) and those for whom powerlessness has become the major experience of their lives.”

“Woe to him who saw no more sense in his life, no aim, no purpose, and therefore no point in carrying on.”

“The true value of a human being is determined primarily by the measure and the sense in which he has attained to liberation from the self.”

“A woman has to be intelligent, have charm, a sense of humor, and be kind. It's the same qualities I require from a man.”

“She had the perpetual sense, as she watched the taxi cabs, of being out, out, far out to sea and alone; she always had the feeling that it was very, very, dangerous to live even one day.”

“A sense of humor is the best indicator that you will recover; it is often the best indicator that people will love you. Sustain that and you have hope.”

“Common sense is in spite of, not the result of, education.”

“The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.”

“the evolution of sense, in a sense, is the evolution of non sense”

“If some things don't make you lose your sense of reason, then you have none to lose.”

“No passion is stronger in the breast of man than the desire to make others believe as he believes. Nothing so cuts at the root of his happiness and fills him with rage as the sense that another rates low what he prizes high.”

“Last hopeless chances have got to work. Nothing makes sense otherwise. You might as well not be alive.”

“He probably was mediocre after all, though in a very honorable sense of that word.”

“A sense of duty is useful in work but offensive in personal relations. People wish to be liked, not to be endured with patient resignation.”

“If you really want to possess a woman, you must think like her, and the first thing to do is win over her soul. The rest, that sweet, soft wrapping that steals away your senses and your virtue, is a bonus.”

“Think you of the fact that a deaf person cannot hear. Then, what deafness may we not all possess? What senses do we lack that we cannot see and cannot hear another world all around us?”

“I know all those words, but that sentence makes no sense to me.”

“Everyone returns us to a different sense of ourselves, for we become a little of who they think we are.”

“But, said Alice, if the world has absolutely no sense, who's stopping us from inventing one?”

“Goodwin scowled at her cup. "With all due respect, my lord, I hate it when you make sense.”

“The pendulum of the mind oscillates between sense and nonsense, not between right and wrong.”

“Nowadays most people die of a sort of creeping common sense, and discover when it is too late that the only things one never regrets are one's mistakes.”

“I don't think that people accept the fact that life doesn't make sense. I think it makes people terribly uncomfortable.”

“People wanted the world to be a story, because stories had to sound right and they had to make sense. People wanted the world to make sense.”

“Children can have a cruel, absolute sense of justice. Children can kill monsters and feel quite proud of themselves.”

“Death and disaster are at our shoulders every second of our lives, trying to get at us. Missing, a lot of the time. A lot of miles on the motorway without a front wheel blow-out. A lot of viruses that slither through our bodies without snagging. A lot of pianos that fall a minute after we've passed. Or a month, it makes no difference.
So unless were going to get down on our knees and give thanks every time disaster misses, it makes no sense to moan when it strikes.”

“Take it in what sense thou wilt.”

“Okay, you were probably taught there are five senses," he said. "We see, hear, touch, smell and taste. But how do we know those are the only five? What are the senses that we don't have? What are we failing to perceive?”

“To romanticize the world is to make us aware of the magic, mystery and wonder of the world; it is to educate the senses to see the ordinary as extraordinary, the familiar as strange, the mundane as sacred, the finite as infinite.”

“You might want to lie down. I find that helps when the crushing sense of horrible realization sets in.”

“If I correctly understand the sense of this succinct observation, our poet suggests here that human life is but a series of footnotes to a vast obscure unfinished masterpiece.”

“As your girlfriend, you've just pissed me off. As your High Priestess, you've just insulted me. And as someone with a working brain, you've made me wonder if you've lost every bit of your sense. (Zoey Redbird)”

“Maybe the only thing that hints at a sense of Time is rhythm; not the recurrent beats of the rhythm but the gap between two such beats, the gray gap between black beats: the Tender Interval.”

“I prefer to have some beliefs that don't make logical sense.”

“In all our contacts it is probably the sense of being really needed and wanted which gives us the greatest satisfaction and creates the most lasting bond.”

“It's a mystery of human chemistry and I don't understand it, some people, as far as their senses are concerned, just feel like home.”

“I think the girl who is able to earn her own living and pay her own way should be as happy as anybody on earth. The sense of independence and security is very sweet.”

“In a very real sense we have two minds, one that thinks and one that feels. These two fundamentally different ways of knowing interact to construct our mental life.”

“From the greatest to the smallest, happiness and usefulness are largely found in the same soul, and the joy of life is won in its deepest and truest sense only by those who have not shirked life's burdens.”

“Reject your sense of injury and the injury itself disappears.”

“For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth.”

“Well, she's not responding to my advances," he observed more brightly than he felt, "so she must be dead."
"Or she's a woman of good taste and sense.”

“Whoever named Himmel Street certainly had a healthy sense of irony. Not that is was a living hell. It wasn't. But is sure as hell wasn't heaven, either.”

“Only one thing is impossible for God: To find any sense in any copyright law on the planet.”

“All the being and the doing, expansive, glittering, vocal, evaporated; and one shrunk, with a sense of solemnity, to being oneself, a wedge-shaped core of darkness, something invisible to others.”

“The lack of a sense of history is the damnation of the modern world.”

“That woman doesn't have the sense God gave a retarded flea.”

“Find ecstasy in life; the mere sense of living is joy enough.”

“True alchemy lies in this formula: ‘Your memory and your senses are but the nourishment of your creative impulse’.”

“The more abstract the truth you wish to teach, the more you need to seduce the senses to it.”

“All our knowledge begins with the senses, proceeds then to the understanding, and ends with reason. There is nothing higher than reason.”

“It would be so nice if something made sense for a change.”

“the neighborhood is nothing but a protective zone- remodeling, disinfection, a snobbish and hygenic design- but above all in a figurative sense: it is a machine for making emptiness.”

“Imagination was given to man to compensate him for what he is not; a sense of humor to console him for what he is.”

“When law and morality contradict each other, the citizen has the cruel alternative of either losing his moral sense or losing his respect for the law.”

“Imagination is a quality that was given to man compensate him from whats not. The sense of humor was given to console him from what is.”

“His mind worked fast, flying in emergency supplies of common sense, as human minds do, to construct a huge anchor in sanity and prove that what happened hadn't really happened and, if it had happened, hadn't happened much.”

“You cannot win in a fight against women, cause men have a need to make sense”

“In some sense, gravity does not exist; what moves the planets and the stars is the distortion of space and time.”

“A part of my depression lies, I think, in my unanswered question: Where is home? I feel a sense, always, of trying to find my way back to a place that doesn't exist.”

“A sense of calm came over me. More and more often I found myself thinking, "This is where I belong. This is what I came into this world to do.”

“I am glad that the country world…retains a power to use our English tongue. It is a part of its sense of reality, of its vocabulary of definite terms, and of its habit of earthly common sense. I find this country writing an excellent corrective of the urban vocabulary of abstractions and of the emotion disguised as thinking which abstractions and humbug have loosed upon the world. May there always be such things as a door, a milk pail, and a loaf of bread, and words to do them honor.”

“Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one.”

“A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness.”

“There's plenty of sense in nonsense sometimes, if you wish to look for it.”

“Science is simply common sense at its best, that is, rigidly accurate in observation, and merciless to fallacy in logic.”

“Principles for the Development of a Complete Mind: Study the science of art. Study the art of science. Develop your senses- especially learn how to see. Realize that everything connects to everything else.”

“First principle: one must need to be strong — otherwise one will never become strong. — Those large hothouses [Treibhäuser] for the strong, for the strongest kind of human being that has ever been, the aristocratic commonwealths of the type of Rome or Venice, understood freedom exactly in the sense in which I understand the word freedom: as something one has and does not have, something one wants, something one conquers…”

“The rhythm is then the life, in the sense in which it can be said to be included within nature.”

“Were I called on to define, very briefly, the term "Art," I should call it "the reproduction of what the Senses perceive in Nature through the veil of the soul." The mere imitation, however accurate, of what is in Nature, entitles no man to the sacred name of "Artist".”

“Since everything that lives is obliged to expend and receive life, there is an exchange of modifications between the living creature and its environment.
And yet, once that vital necessity is satisfied, our species—a positively strange species—thinks it must create for itself other needs and tasks besides that of preserving life. … Whatever may be the origin or cause of this curious deviation, the human species is engaged in an immense adventure, an adventure whose objective and end it does not know. …
The same senses, the same muscles, the same limbs—more, the same types of signs, the same instruments of exchange, the same languages, the same modes of logic—enter into the most indispensable acts of our lives, as they figure into the most gratuitous. …
In short, man has not two sets of tools, he has only one, and this one set must serve him for the preservation of his life and his physiological rhythm, and expend itself at other times on illusions and on the labours of our great adventure. …
The same muscles and nerves produce walking as well as dancing, exactly as our linguistic faculty enables us to express our needs and ideas, while the same words and forms can be combined to produce works of poetry. A single mechanism is employed in both cases for two entirely different purposes.”

“I was already almost 30, and by then everyone was talking about the Americans. Picasso was irrelevant. He was history. I found myself in this deep pool, and there were all these figures swimming around, like Rauschenberg and Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein|Lichtenstein]]. I wanted to go where they were. Seeing Pollock and Fontana in Kassel had given me a sense of what it meant to be a modern artist and take risks, but it was a distant admiration because they were a different generation. This was my generation”

“I'm very sorry to inconvenience you [ the art dealers G. and J. Berheim-Jeune ], but I find it impossible to supply you with any more Venice pictures. It was useless trying to persuade my self otherwise, the work that's left is too poor for exhibition. Don't insist... I've enough good sense in me to know whether what I'm doing is good or bad, and it' utterly bad, and I can't believe that people of taste, if they have any knowledge at all, could see any value in it. Things have been dragging on like this for far too long..”

“However—the crucial thing is my lack of interest in ordinary life. No one ever wrote a story yet without some real emotional drive behind it—and I have not that drive except where violations of the natural order… defiances and evasions of time, space, and cosmic law… are concerned. Just why this is so I haven't the slightest idea—it simply is so. I am interested only in broad pageants—historic streams—orders of biological, chemical, physical, and astronomical organisation—and the only conflict which has any deep emotional significance to me is that of the principle of freedom or irregularity or adventurous opportunity against the eternal and maddening rigidity of cosmic law… especially the laws of time…. Hence the type of thing I try to write. Naturally, I am aware that this forms a very limited special field so far as mankind en masse is concerned; but I believe (as pointed out in that Recluse article) that the field is an authentic one despite its subordinate nature. This protest against natural law, and tendency to weave visions of escape from orderly nature, are characteristic and eternal factors in human psychology, even though very small ones. They exist as permanent realities, and have always expressed themselves in a typical form of art from the earliest fireside folk tales and ballads to the latest achievements of Blackwood and Machen or de la Mare or Dunsany. That art exists—whether the majority like it or not. It is small and limited, but real—and there is no reason why its practitioners should be ashamed of it. Naturally one would rather be a broad artist with power to evoke beauty from every phase of experience—but when one unmistakably isn't such an artist, there's no sense in bluffing and faking and pretending that one is.”

“Still I only feel alive when the view is flashing, alarms going off in my head…
I want to grab you and just kiss you; maybe I should sit down. No sense in cashing us now.
Yeah, I only feel alright when the view is flashing, bombs going off in my head…
I want to grab you, want to scream at you, no icing me down. The party's crashing us now. The party's crashing us now.”

“Our senses enable us to perceive only a minute portion of the outside world. Our hearing extends to a small distance. Our sight is impeded by intervening bodies and shadows. To know each other we must reach beyond the sphere of our sense perceptions. We must transmit our intelligence, travel, transport the materials and transfer the energies necessary for our existence. Following this thought we now realize, forcibly enough to dispense with argument, that of all other conquests of man, without exception, that which is most desirable, which would be most helpful in the establishment of universal peaceful relations is — the complete ANNIHILATION OF DISTANCE.
To achieve this wonder, electricity is the one and only means. Inestimable good has already been done by the use of this all powerful agent, the nature of which is still a mystery. Our astonishment at what has been accomplished would be uncontrollable were it not held in check by the expectation of greater miracles to come. That one, the greatest of all, can be viewed in three aspects: Dissemination of intelligence, transportation, and transmission of power.”