Quotes about reason
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“For not one of us asserts that “God partakes of form or colour.” Nor does He even partake of “motion,” because He stands firm, and His nature is permanent, and He invites the righteous man also to do the same, saying: “But as for thee, stand thou here by Me.” And if certain expressions indicate a kind of motion, as it were, on His part, such as this, “They heard the voice of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day,” we must understand them in this way, that it is by sinners that God is understood as moving, or as we understand the “sleep” of God, which is taken in a figurative sense, or His “anger,” or any other similar attribute. But “God does not partake even of substance.””

Origen book Contra Celsum

Against Celsus, Book 6, Chapter 64

God, Way, Understanding, Nature

“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.”

Tatian Address to the Greeks

Chap. xii.—The two kinds of spirits.
Address to the Greeks

Men, God, Soul

“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.”

W.B. Yeats (1865–1939) Irish poet and playwright

Letter to Ellen O'Leary (3 February 1889)

“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.”

Berta Castañé (2002) Spanish actress and model

Quiero desarrollar mi sentido de la estética sin dejarme influir demasiado. En un vestido busco que sea personal y que me transmita mi propia inspiración, que me haga parecer y sentir única. <br class="br">From the interview of Begoña Clérigues, Cómo vestir a una actriz para la alfombra roja https://www.lasprovincias.es/revista-valencia/vestir-actriz-alfombra-20220208190641-nt.html, lasprovincias.es, 9 February 2022.

Feeling, Personality

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

Teal Swan (1984) American spiritual teacher

Feeling, Freedom

“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.”

Theodor W. Adorno (1903–1969) German sociologist, philosopher and musicologist known for his critical theory of society

Their applause, cued in by a light-signal, is transmitted directly on the popular radio programmes they are permitted to attend. They call themselves 'jitter-bugs', bugs which carry out reflex movements, performers of their own ecstasy. Merely to be carried away by anything at all, to have something of their own, compensates for their impoverished and barren existence. The gesture of adolescence, which raves for this or that on one day with the ever-present possibility of damning it as idiocy on the next, is now socialized.
Perennial fashion — Jazz, as quoted in The Sociology of Rock (1978) by Simon Frith, ISBN 0094602204

Star

“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.”

Neale Donald Walsch (1943) American writer

God, Soul, Imagination, Question

“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.”

Neale Donald Walsch (1943) American writer

Life, World, Feeling, Personality

“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.”

Neale Donald Walsch (1943) American writer

Love, Life, Happiness, Way

“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?”

Catherine Ryan Hyde (1955) American writer

Source: Pay It Forward

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

Cassandra Clare book City of Bones

Clary and Jace, pg. 170
Source: The Mortal Instruments, City of Bones (2007)

Fashion

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

Robert G. Ingersoll (1833–1899) Union United States Army officer

Education, Time

“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!”

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

Source: The Story of My Life: With Her Letters (1887 1901) and a Supplementary Account of Her Education Including Passages from the Reports and Letters of Her Teacher Anne Mansfield Sullivan by John Albert Macy

Life, World, Soul

“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.”

Thomas Pynchon book Inherent Vice

Source: Inherent Vice

People, Evil

“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.”

Brother Lawrence book The Practice of the Presence of God

Source: The Practice of the Presence of God

God, Thinking

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

Brandon Sanderson (1975) American fantasy writer

Source: The Final Empire

Fashion

“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.”

William Styron book Darkness Visible

Source: Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness

World

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

John Scalzi book Old Man's War

Source: Old Man’s War (2005), Chapter 17 (p. 305)
Source: Old Man's War

“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”

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus

Source: Frankenstein

Hell

“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.”

Melissa Bank book The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing

Source: The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing

Feeling

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

Cornelia Funke Inkheart trilogy

Source: Inkheart

“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.”

Jim Butcher book Storm Front

Source: Storm Front

Home, Waiting, Loneliness

“[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.”

Jodi Picoult book Handle With Care

Source: Handle with Care

Pain, Understanding, Thinking, Hurt

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

Anne Rice (1941) American writer

God, Evil, Perfection

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

Candace Bushnell book Sex and the City

Source: Sex and the City

Hell, Universe

“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.”

Elizabeth Gilbert book Eat, Pray, Love

Source: Eat, Pray, Love

World, Time

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

Emmet Fox (1886–1951) American New Thought writer

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.”

Anne Morrow Lindbergh book Gift from the Sea

Source: Gift from the Sea

Flowers

“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.”

Hubert Selby Jr. Requiem for a Dream

Source: Requiem for a Dream

Time

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

Markus Zusak book The Book Thief

Variant: Humans, if nothing else, have the good sense to die.
Source: The Book Thief

Envy

“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.”

Dean Koontz book Relentless

Source: Relentless

Love

“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.”

Carson McCullers (1917–1967) American writer

Color

“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.”

Laurell K. Hamilton book Circus of the Damned

Source: Circus of the Damned

“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.”

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

Source: Help Thanks Wow: The Three Essential Prayers

Health, Books, Suffering

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

Raymond E. Feist book Silverthorn

Source: Silverthorn

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

Sherrilyn Kenyon (1965) Novelist

Source: Infinity

Dead

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

Susan Mallery (1950) American author

Source: The Knitting Diaries: The Twenty-First Wish\Coming Unraveled\Home to Summer Island

Feeling

“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.”

Edward Gorey (1925–2000) American writer, artist, and illustrator

Source: Ascending Peculiarity: Edward Gorey on Edward Gorey

“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.”

Henry Rollins (1961) American singer-songwriter

Source: See A Grown Man Cry/Now Watch Him Die

People, Feeling, Selfishness

“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.”

Lily King (1963) American writer

Source: Euphoria

Way, Communication

“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?”

Cassandra Clare book City of Ashes

Source: City of Ashes

Time

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

Gabriel García Márquez book Of Love and Other Demons

Source: Of Love and Other Demons

Faith

“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.”

Annie Dillard book Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

Source: Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

Beauty, Thinking

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

Marianne Williamson (1952) American writer

Source: A Woman's Worth

For women

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

Yunus Emre (1240–1321) Turkish sufi

Love, Books

“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.”

Eric Hoffer (1898–1983) American philosopher

Life, Reality, 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.”

Jeffrey Eugenides book The Virgin Suicides

Source: The Virgin Suicides

Happiness, People, Understanding, Suicide

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

Banana Yoshimoto book Kitchen

Source: Kitchen

Life, History, Time

“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.”

Anaïs Nin book Delta of Venus

As quoted in D. H. Lawrence and Nine Women Writers (1996) by Leo Hamalian, p. 90
Source: Delta of Venus

Sex, Feeling, Box

“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.”

Hugh Laurie (1959) British actor, comedian, writer, musician and director

People, Thinking, Housing, Flying

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

Charles Bukowski (1920–1994) American writer

Fools, Laughter, Time

“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.”

Paul Tillich (1886–1965) German-American theologian and philosopher

Source: The Eternal Now

Pain, Solitude, Loneliness

“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…”

Rohinton Mistry A Fine Balance

Source: A Fine Balance

God, World, Fools, Reading

“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.”

James Baldwin (1924–1987) (1924-1987) writer from the United States

Life

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

Margaret George book The Memoirs of Cleopatra

Source: The Memoirs of Cleopatra

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

Miranda July (1974) American performance artist, musician and writer

Decision, Time

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

Sarah Dessen book Along for the Ride

Source: Along for the Ride

“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.”

Norton Juster book The Phantom Tollbooth

Source: The Phantom Tollbooth

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

John Updike (1932–2009) American novelist, poet, short story writer, art critic, and literary critic

The New Yorker (March 29, 1976)

People

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

Gillian Flynn book Gone Girl

Source: Gone Girl

Suffering, Betrayal

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

Maureen Johnson book Let It Snow

Source: Let It Snow: Three Holiday Romances

Way, Despair

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

Assata Shakur (1947) American activist who was a member of the Black Panther Party and Black Liberation Army

Variant: Nobody in the world, nobody in history, has ever gotten their freedom by appealing to the moral sense of the people who were oppressing them.
Source: Assata: An Autobiography

People, World, History, Freedom