Quotes about reason

page 9

“We recognise two varieties of spirit, one of which is called the soul (ψυχή), but the other is greater than the soul, an image and likeness of God: both existed in the first men, that in one sense they might be material (ὑλικοί), and in another superior to matter.”

“Words are always getting conventionalized to some secondary meaning. It is one of the works of poetry to take the truants in custody and bring them back to their right senses. Poets are the policemen of language; they are always arresting those old reprobates the words.”

“I want to develop my aesthetic sense without being too influenced. In a dress I try to be personal and that transmits my inspiration, that makes me look and feel unique.”

“The greatest sense of freedom comes when our actions flow directly from feelings.”

“In general they are intoxicated by the fame of mass culture, a fame which the latter knows how to manipulate; they could just as well get together in clubs for worshipping film stars or for collecting autographs. What is important to them is the sense of belonging as such, identification, without paying particular attention to its content.”

“When we have a willingness to ask that first question, Who Am I?, and then to create the answer, it is immensely powerful to not simply respond to the question intellectually, as an intellectual excursion, but to create a response that makes sense to our Soul. A response that announces Who We Choose To Be, as opposed to who we imagine ourselves to be. Who I choose to be is an Individuation of Divinity, a wave on the Ocean of God.”

“Cause everyone whose life you touch to feel worthy. Give everyone a sense of their own worthiness as a person, a sense of the true wonder of who they are. Give this gift and you will heal the world.”

“Success in any area of your life is not found in producing what you think you must produce on your journey, it’s found in the love, the joy, the happiness, and the sense of True Self that you experience—and that others experience in their life because of you—along the way. That alone can produce the rest of what you think you are “supposed to” produce.”

“If you want to see a man come to his senses, try something like, Do you happen to carry a rubber in your wallet? Did I mention I'm not on the pill?”

“"Oh-Simon!"
"No, I'm Jace," said Jace patiently. "Simon is the weaselly little one with the bad haircut and dismal fashion sense."”

“It is a thousand times better to have common sense without education than to have education without common sense.”

“I am conscious of a soul-sense that lifts me above the narrow, cramping circumstances of my life. My physical limitations are forgotten- my world lies upward, the length and the breadth and the sweep of the heavens are mine!”

“What, I should only trust good people? Man, good people get bought and sold every day. Might as well trust somebody evil once in a while, it makes no more or less sense.”

“That we should establish ourselves in a sense of GOD’s Presence, by continually conversing with Him. That it was a shameful thing to quit His conversation, to think of trifles and fooleries.”

“Have you finally grown so jealous of my impeccable fashion sense that you've decided to have me disposed of?”

“my brain had begun to endure its familiar siege: panic and dislocation, and a sense that my thought processes were being engulfed by a toxic and unnameable tide that obliterated any enjoyable response to the living world.”

“I’m not insane, sir,” I said. “I have a finely calibrated sense of acceptable risk.”

“I was seized by remorse and the sense of guilt, which hurried me away to a hell of intense tortures as no language can describe”

“You sense that he's dangerous but don't now why - and wonder if it's because he makes you feel safer than you've ever felt.”

“I prefer a story that has the good sense to stay on the page where it belongs.
- Elinor”

“Here had lived someone else who knew that the only thing waiting at home was a sense of loneliness.

Sometimes it is comforting.

Most often, it isn't.”

“[I] don't think I was trying to kill myself. I just wanted to hurt, and understand exactly whay I was hurting. This made sense: you cut, you felt pain, period.”

“A perfectly evil Devil makes even less sense than a perfect God.”

“The universe may not always play fair, but at least it's got a hell of a sense of humor.”

“Most of us, even if only for two minutes in our lives, have experienced at some time or another an inexplicable and random sense of complete bliss, unrelated to anything that was happening in the outside world.”

“The root of all difficulties is a lack of the sense of the Presence of God.”

“Arranging a bowl of flowers in the morning can give a sense of quiet in a crowded day- like writing a poem or saying a prayer.”

“He didnt know what was defeating him, but he sensed it was something he could not cope with, something that was far beyond his power to control or even at this point in time comprehend.”

“Still, they have one thing I envy. Humans, if nothing else, have the good sense to die.”

“I fell in love with her for her sense of humour. If she ever lost her sense of humour, I would have to dump her. Then I'd kill myself because I couldn't live without her.”

“The mind is like a richly woven tapestry in which the colors are distilled from the experiences of the senses, and the design drawn from the convolutions of the intellect.”

“But we were all young once. It passes, like innocence and a sense of fair play. The only thing left in the end is a good instinct for survival.”

“Human lives are hard, even those of health and privilege, and don't make much sense. This is the message of the Book of Job: Any snappy explanation of suffering you come up with will be horseshit.”

“A hero is someone who simply got too frightened to use his good sense and run away, then somehow lived through it all.”

“But this…this kid wasn’t dead yet. Makes no sense to me. (Bubba)
Maybe someone spiked his Wheaties? (Nick)”

“Never ignore the feelings that don't seem to make sense.”

“I've never had any intentions about anything. That's why I am where I am today, which is neither here nor there, in a literal sense.”

“You don't make me feel like you used to.
That's why I'm leaving
That's why people leave each other
They come to their senses and get selfish again.”

“You don’t realise how language actually interferes with communication until you don’t have it, how it gets in the way like an overdominant sense.”

“For the first time Valentine glanced down at the body of Brother Jeremiah. "I did kill him, and the rest of the Silent Brothers as well. I had to. They had something I needed."
"What? A sense of decency?”

“Disbelief is more resistant than faith because it is sustained by the senses.”

“The answer must be, I think, that beauty and grace are performed whether or not we will or sense them. The least we can do is try to be there.”

“When a woman rises up in glory, her energy is magnetic and her sense of possibility contagious.”

“I tried to make sense of the Four Books,
until love arrived,
and it all became a single syllable.”

“To a man utterly without a sense of belonging, mere life is all that matters. It is the only reality in an eternity of nothingness, and he clings to it with shameless despair.”

“We Greeks are a moody people. Suicide makes sense to us. Putting up Christmas lights after your own daughter does it—that makes no sense. What mycould never understand about America was why everyone pretended to be happy all the time.”

“In the uncertain ebb and flow of time and emotions much of one's life history is etched in the senses.”

“I had a feeling that Pandora's box contained the mysteries of woman's sensuality, so different from man's and for which man's language was inadequate. The language of sex had yet to be invented. The language of the senses was yet to be explored. D. H. Lawrence began to give instinct a language, he tried to escape the clinical, the scientific, which only captures what the body feels.”

“Driving a motorcycle is like flying. All your senses are alive. Being House is like flying, too. He's free of the gravity of what people think.”

“and our few good times will be rare because we have the critical sense
and are not easy to fool with laughter”

“Our language has wisely sensed these two sides of man’s being alone. It has created the word “loneliness” to express the pain of being alone. And it has created the word “solitude” to express the glory of being alone.”

“What sense did the world make? Where was God, the Bloody Fool? Did He have no notion of fair and unfair? Couldn't He read a simple balance sheet? He would have been sacked long ago if He were managing a corporation, the things he allowed to happen…”

“We cannot discuss the state of our minorities until we first have a sense of what we are, who we are, what our goals are, and what we take life to be.”

“In my experience, there are two things that no one will admit to: having no sense of humor and being susceptible to flattery.”

“Things usually make sense in time, and even bad decisions have their own kind of correctness.”

“Relationships dont always make sense. Especially from the outside”

“We never choose which words to use, for as long as they mean what they mean to mean, we don’t care if they make sense or nonsense.”

“The true New Yorker secretly believes that people living anywhere else have to be, in some sense, kidding.”

“I’ve suffered betrayal with all five senses. For over a year.”

“Stuart must have sensed my despair from the way I began lightly banging my forehead on the table.”

“Nobody in the world, nobody in history, has ever gotten their freedom by appealing to the moral sense of people who oppressing them.”

“I could almost see common sense and denial fighting away at each other within her. In the end, denial won, as it so often does.”

“I woke up in the morning and I didn’t want anything, didn’t do anything, couldn’t do it anyway, just lay there listening to the blood rush
through me and it never made any sense, anything.”

“Regain your senses, call yourself back, and once again wake up. Now that you realize that only dreams were troubling you, view this 'reality' as you view your dreams.”

“A sense of humor, properly developed, is superior to any religion so far devised.”

“The chances of finding out what’s really going on in the universe are so remote, the only thing to do is hang the sense of it and keep yourself occupied.”

“Philosophy is common sense with big words.”

“The older Nico got, the more juvenile Percy seemed to him, though Percy was three years older. Nico found his sense of humour equal parts endearing and annoying. He decided to concentrate on the annoying.”

“She began to feel the sense of wonderful elation that always came to her when beauty took hold of her and made her forget her fears.”

“It doesn't have to make sense, it just has to sound like it does.”

“Once you lose that sense of wonder at being alive, you're pretty much on the way out…”

“No one starts a war--or rather, no one in his sense ought to do so--without first being clear in his mind what he intends to achieve by the war and how he intends to conduct it.”

“I've seen the truth, and it makes no sense.”

“Common sense is genius dressed in its working clothes.”

“I'm having the weirdest sense of deja vu right now," said the green caterpiller.
Duh!" said the blue caterpiller. "Do you think, just maybe, that's because you predicted this?"
Oh, yeah."
--The Looking Glass Wars”

“We know that the war against intelligence is always waged in the name of common sense.”

“My sleep wasn't peaceful, though. I have the sense of emerging from a world of dark, haunted places where I traveled alone.”

“People of little understanding are most apt to be angry when their sense is called into question.”

“I can't think of anything that excites a greater sense of childlike wonder than to be in a country where you are ignorant of almost everything.”

“He shook his head again. 'I just can't figure out why anyone in his right head would bother these Virgin River women.'

'Yeah. Makes no sense.' Jack said.”

“The more you learn, the less you fear. "Learn" not in the sense of academic study, but in the practical understanding of life.”

“A poem is this:/A nuance of sound/delicately operating/upon a cataract of sense/… the particulars/of a song waking/upon a bed of sound.”

“Southerners have many fine qualities, charm and civility among them, and a sense of the tragic….”

“Stars on our door, stars in our eyes, stars exploding in the bits of our brains where the common sense should have been”

“When a sense of dissatisfaction persists, that means it was placed there by God for one reason only: you need to change everything and move forward.”

“That love which does not build a foundation on good sense is doomed.”

“Never lose your sense of humor. Tomorrow could be worse.”

“It made perfect sense, and at the same time nothing seemed to.”

“I want all my senses engaged. Let me absorb the world's variety and uniqueness.”

“Just tell me how to be different in a way that makes sense.”

“Character comes from following our highest sense of right, from trusting ideas without being sure they’ll work.”

“I know I should just leave. Just go. Because there's a point where a mistake turns into a big mistake, and I should probably come to my senses before I get there.”

“Most people say about graveyards: "Oh, it's just a bunch of dead people. It's creepy." But for me, there's an energy to it that it not creepy, or dark. It has a positive sense to it.”

“It's easy to make up weird stuff. It gets trickier when you want the weird stuff to be interesting and make sense.”

“My brief flash of relief and confidence melted away. Good thing it did, too. I'm sure the world would come to an end if I were allowed to feel a sense of relief and well-being for any length of time.”

“I mean it as a compliment when I say that you could almost define a philosopher as someone who won't take common sense for an answer.”

“Symbolism exists to adorn and enrich, not to create an artificial sense of profundity.”

“Being six feet off the ground does give one a sense of superiority.”

“Bold knaves thrive without one grain of sense,
But good men starve for want of impudence.”