Quotes about reason

page 15

“He only employs his passion who can make no use of his reason.”

“Absolutely nothing visible to the eye provides a reason for or even evidence of those terrifying shifts which can in a matter of moments reconstitute a simple path into an extremely complicated one.”

“As long as I have a want, I have a reason for living. Satisfaction is death.”

“Anxiety, the next gumption trap, is sort of the opposite of ego. You're so sure you'll do everything wrong you're afraid to do anything at all. Often this, rather than "laziness," is the real reason you find it hard to get started. This gumption trap of anxiety, which results from over-motivation, can lead to all kinds of errors of excessive fussiness. You fix things that don't need fixing, and chase after imaginary ailments. You jump to wild conclusions and build all kinds of errors into the machine because of your own nervousness. These errors, when made, tend to confirm your original underestimation of yourself. This leads to more errors, which lead to more underestimation, in a self-stoking cycle. The best way to break this cycle, I think, is to work out your anxieties on paper. Read every book and magazine you can on the subject. Your anxiety makes this easy and the more you read the more you calm down.”

“Everyone had a reason for everything they did, even if that reason was sometimes stupidity.”

“He would write it for the reason he felt that all great literature, fiction and nonfiction, was written: truth comes out, in the end it always comes out. He would write it because he felt he had to.”

“He knew these last lines by heart and mouthed them now in the darkness. My reason for life. Not living, but life. That was the touch. And she was his reason for life, and why he must survive.”

“In most cases, those who want power probably shouldn't have it, those who enjoy it probably do so for the wrong reasons, and those who want most to hold on to it don't understand that it's only temporary.”

“The stage lost a fine actor, even as science lost an acute reasoner, when [Holmes] became a specialist in crime.”

“Tell me, did you summon me just so you could beat the crap out of me? Or is there a more productive reason for why I’m here? (Eros)”

“You would be better off having nobody than the wrong somebody. (On marrying for the wrong reasons.)”

“Without love, there is no reason to know anyone, for love will in the end connect us to our neighbors, our children and our hearts.”

“The only process you've mastered is the process of elimination, and the only reason you've mastered that is because you can do it in the toilet.”

“… the reason life works at all is that not everyone in your tribe is nuts on the same day. [pp. 65-66]”

“Sometimes all you need to live one more day is a good reason to stick around.”

“So we contemplate each other, and we want each other, and I give it life and warmth, and it gives me my reason for living.”

“Art is the reason I get up in the morning, but the definition ends there. It doesn't seem fair that I'm living for something I can't even define.”

“Reason must know the heart's reasons and every other reason”

“People have reasons for what they do, Beatrice. And even if those reasons can't be justified, that doesn't make them bad people, just flawed. You have to remember," she said, "someone or something has hurt them too.”

“sometimes there are reasons for our fears that we can’t
quite explain. Sometimes it’s just something we feel in our bones, something we know to be true, but
would sound foolish to anyone else.”

“I rarely dislike people for things they can't change, they usually give me sufficient cause to dislike them for other reasons.”

“To me, reason is as spiritual as anything else, the beauty of reason seems to me indelible and ineffable and numinous… the spirit is after all the same word we use to describe… essence”

“Don’t be flattered that he misses you. He should miss you. You are deeply missable. However, he’s still the same person who just broke up with you. Remember, the only reason he can miss you is because he’s choosing, every day, not to be with you.”

“You see, I don't belive that libraries should be drab places where people sit in silence, that has been the main reason for our policy of employing wild animals as librarians.”

“Mind is the Maker, for no reason at all, for all this creation, created to fall.”

“You destroy buildings, fight monsters openly in the streets of the city, work with the police, show up in newspapers, advertise in the phone book, and ride zombie dinosaurs down Michigan Avenue, and think that you work in the shadows? Be reasonable.”

“Without the voice of reason, every faith is its own curse."

()”

“You don't want him for a reason. You want him because he's your father.”

“Every worldview has to bring together reason and faith.”

“An artist is someone who produces things that people don't need to have but that he - for some reason - thinks it would be a good idea to give them.”

“With reasonable men, I will reason; with humane men I will plead; but to tyrants I will give no quarter, nor waste arguments where they will certainly be lost.”

“It seems to me that if you wish to apply laws to us, it were only reasonable to consult us on them, and from what you have read to me about Parliament, I do not think any dragons are invited to go there”

“Satire is a sort of glass wherein beholders do generally discover everybody’s face but their own; which is the chief reason for that kind reception it meets with in the world, and that so very few are offended with it.”

“It was futile to attack with reason the stout wall of irrational feelings that, as is known, is the stuff of which the female mind is made.”

“If you can't win by reason, go for volume.”

“There is science, logic, reason; there is thought verified by experience. And then there is California.”

“I knit the afternoon away. I knit reasons for Elijah to come back. I knit apologies for Emma. I knit angry knots and slipped stitches for every mistake I ever made, and I knit wet, swollen stitches that look awful. I knit the sun down.”

“The reason why so few good books are written is, that so few people that can write know anything.”

“For outward show is a wonderful perverter of the reason.”

“One good reason to only maintain a small circle of friends is that three out of four murders are committed by people who know the victim.”

“For whatever reason, we like to focus on the 2 percent that's different, and most of the conflict in the world comes from that.”

“At times to be silent is to lie. You will win because you have enough brute force. But you will not convince. For to convince you need to persuade. And in order to persuade you would need what you lack: Reason and Right”

“for some reason, dying men always ask the question they know the answer to. perhaps it's so they can die being right.”

“Why not? Why not? Why not not, then, if the best reasoning you can contrive is why not?”

“The only reason he can miss you is because he’s choosing, every day, not to be with you.”

“The gospel is not a doctrine of the tongue, but of life. It cannot be grasped by reason and memory only, but it is fully understood when it possesses the whole soul and penetrates to the inner recesses of the heart.”

“Never get angry. Never make a threat. Reason with people.”

“Being afraid you'll look like a coward is the worst reason for doing anything.”

“All of us who are concerned for peace and triumph of reason and justice must be keenly aware how small an influence reason and honest good will exert upon events in the political field.”

“They had spent a year in France for no particular reason, and then drifted here and there unrestfully wherever people played polo and were rich together.”

“I believe there is a reason such as autism, severe manic-depression, and schizophrenia remain in our gene pool even though there is much suffering as a result.”

“The reason you will not say it is, when you say it, even to yourself, you will know it is true.”

“The rich world likes and wishes to believe that someone, somewhere, is doing something for the Third World. For this reason, it does not inquire too closely into the motives or practices of anyone who fulfills, however vicariously, this mandate.”

“I may have had good reasons. I may have had the best of intentions.
But intentions aren’t enough, no matter how good they are. Intentions can lead you to a place where you’re able to make a choice.
It’s the choice that counts.”

“I would miss Colby, but it wasn't going anywhere. All the more reason why I should.”

“We need to decide that we will not go to war, whatever reason is conjured up by the politicians or the media, because war in our time is always indiscriminate, a war against innocents, a war against children. War is terrorism, magnified a hundred times.”

“One of the ironies of courage, and the reason why we prize it so highly, is that we find it easier to be brave for someone else than we do for ourselves alone.”

“It's a sin to hate, and for that reason alone, we must not hate the Normans… We can, however, thoroughly dislike them, Alice.”

“It is not, what a lawyer tells me I may do; but what humanity, reason, and justice, tell me I ought to do.”

“Not being heard is no reason for silence.”

“By unnerving definition, anything that the heart has chosen for its own mysterious reasons it can always unchoose later—again, for its own mysterious reasons.”

“That deep emotional conviction of the presence of a superior reasoning power, which is revealed in the incomprehensible universe, forms my idea of God.”

“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.”

“Why has government been instituted at all? Because the passions of men will not conform to the dictates of reason and justice, without constraint.”

“Time is given us to be happy and for no other reason […] When we waste time, we waste happiness.”

“He who establishes his argument by noise and command shows that his reason is weak.”

“People like you are the reason
People like me need medication.”

“His invitation lingers. So does my question. Why me? I don't know the answer. When I look at myself in the mirror, all I see is a starving, stunted bird who never grew wings and lost all reason to sing.”

“In the middle of the night, things well up from the past that are not always cause for rejoicing--the unsolved, the painful encounters, the mistakes, the reasons for shame or woe. But all, good or bad, give me food for thought, food to grow on.”

“He would wake for no reason in the middle of the night, and the memory of the self-absorbed love was revealed to him for what it was: a pitfall of happiness that he despised and desired at the same time, but from which it was impossible to escape.”

“Why would you do that? Why would you act like you didn't know how to drive?"
"Isn't it obvious, Sage? No, of course it isn't. I did it so I'd have a reason to be around you - one I knew you couldn't refuse”

“ISABEL: Sorry I missed my session Monday.

DR. RUSH: Would you like to tell me why?

ISABEL: I was depressed.

DR. RUSH: That's a good reason to come to therapy.”

“The future belongs to those who give the next generation reason for hope.”

“It is time that we admitted that faith is nothing more than the license religious people give one another to keep believing when reasons fail.”

“I do not need a reason to be angry with God.”

“The voice of passion is better than the voice of reason. The passionless cannot change history.”

“I’m not dangerous,” I breathed.

He brought his face toward mine. “You are to me.”

And somehow, against all reason, we were kissing.”

“Sometimes, as much as writing saves one’s own life, you cannot imagine how it will save another’s. This is another reason why it is important to do the work, over and over again. It is food, the kind a soul needs.”

“I try to give'em a reason, you see. It helps folks if they can latch onto a reason.”

“I don't remember Moses writing, 'Thou shalt not kill.. unless you think you have a good reason.”

“Or. I hate that word. It’s two letters long and stuffed to the gills with reasonable doubt.”

“There are many reasons why novelists write but they all have one thing in common a need to create an alternative world.”

“For some unknown reason, success usually occurs in private, while failure occurs in
full view.”

“There comes a time for everybody when words and reasons can become such a great weariness.”

“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.”

“There's no reason to speak. I have nothing to say.”

“Be reasonable. I know you can be. If you try very, very hard.” - Al to Rachel”

“You don't need a reason to forgive… If you want to go on with someone, that is what you do.”

“If a man wants to be romantically involved with you, he tries to kiss you. That's the entire story, and if he doesn't kiss you, there is never a reason to wait around for him.”

“Women need a reason for having sex, men just need a place”

“For no reason I can think of, I've wandered far astray. And that is how I got to where I find myself today.”

“Fancy thinking the Beast was something you could hunt and kill! You knew, didn’t you? I’m part of you? Close, close, close! I’m the reason why it’s no go? Why things are what they are?”

“There are enough cowards in the world without killing a brave creature for so little reason.”

“I stood on Susan Boone's front porch, feeling lame. But then, since I've pretty much felt lame my entire life, this was no big surprise. On the other hand, usually I felt lame for no particular reason. This time I really had a reason to feel lame.”

“The masters of life know the way, for they listen to the voice within them, the voice of wisdom and simplicity, the voice that reasons beyond cleverness and knows beyond knowledge.”

“It's as if when you love someone, they become your reason.”

“But the law of loving others could not be discovered by reason, because it is unreasonable.”

“Why didn’t you sleep with the headrest?”
I shrugged. “It was uncomfortable.” I looked at Sadie for support. “You didn’t use it, did you?”
Sadie rolled her eyes. “Well, of course I did. It was obviously there for a reason.”

“Ford Prefect suppressed a little giggle of evil satisfaction, realized that he had no reason to suppress it, and laughed out loud, a wicked laugh.”