Quotes about reason (7298 quotes, page 72)

“Morality, to be effective, has to be well-reasoned. To want to repress evil only by coercion, and to obtain morality by a kind of education using constraint, without motivating it from within, is to make an artificial thing, devoid of lasting value.”

African Spir (1837–1890) Russian philosopher

Source: Words of a Sage : Selected thoughts of African Spir (1937), p. 59.

Motivation , Education , Making love , Evil

“I’ll stay awake while reason sleeps.”

Ron English (1959) American artist

Ron English's Fauxlosophy (2016)

Sleep

“You would think that pot had some kind of power; I mean come on, it’s a plant, not a reason for living. Controlled by a plant, how hilarious. A plant! A fucking plant!”

Henry Rollins (1961) American singer-songwriter

Get In The Van

Thinking

“It is not without good reason said, that he who has not a good memory should never take upon him the trade of lying.”

Michel De Montaigne book Essays

Book I, Ch. 9. Of Liars
Essais (1595), Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

Lying , Memory

“You were a treasonous pussy if you had second thoughts about killing and dying for plain and simple reasons.”

Tim O'Brien book The Things They Carried

The Things They Carried (1990), On the Rainy River

“Education is considered the peculiar business of women; perhaps for that very reason it is one of the worst-paid business in the world; the salaries of men who engage in it are double those of women, who do better work and more of it.”

Katharine Pearson Woods (1853–1923) 1853-1923 , author

World , Business , Education , Women

“Every age before this one has performed or permitted acts that to us are morally stupefying. So unless we have any reason to think we are more reasonable, morally better or wiser than at any time in the past, it is reasonable to assume there will be some things we are presently doing – possibly while flushed with moral virtue – that our descendants will whistle through their teeth at, and say ‘What the hell were they thinking?’”

Douglas Murray (1979) British political commentator and far-right activist

The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity (2019)

Hell , Time , Thinking , Age

“Sir, a wise Government in its home policy considers the reasonable wants of the people; in its foreign policy, it is prepared to resist the unjust demands and the unreasonable views of foreign powers.”

Henry Temple, 3rd Viscount Palmerston (1784–1865) British politician

Speech https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1843/jul/28/state-of-the-nation#column_1462 in the House of Commons (28 July 1843)
1840s

Home , People

“There are always differences that can be brought to the fore and provide reasons for disagreement. But it seems to me there's nothing insurmountable now – no sharp conflicts and confrontations, thank God.”

Nicolai Dubinin (1973) Russian Roman Catholic bishop

Russian bishop sees positive signs for Church https://www.thetablet.co.uk/news/13469/russian-bishop-sees-positive-signs-for-church (15 October 2020)

God

“Corporations are good things. They encourage people to take risk. They're smart vehicles for building wealth, but they also have to be controlled. ...The reason is, they are soulless entities. A corporation has no morals and its purpose is to make money.”

David Cay Johnston (1948) Investigative journalist and author

The Tyrant Next Time (November 7, 2019)

Money , Wealth , Making love , People

“I was always determined to find just the right book for that one child who maybe was a reluctant reader. I knew there was a book to turn him on to reading. I just had to find it. I do have a special place in my heart for kids who maybe have trouble reading or who just don't want to for various reasons. It's always my goal to write books that will somehow entice them to want to read.”

Debbie Dadey (1959) American children's writer

Children's author Debbie Dadey visiting downtown library to sign books, brainstorm. https://lancasteronline.com/features/entertainment/children-s-author-debbie-dadey-visiting-downtown-library-to-sign/article_bf6e4607-f0ba-5e73-a88f-64c9cb876bb2.html (July 29, 2013)

Reading , Books , Heart

“I'm the guy in the eighth grade who did not go across the floor and ask the girl to dance for two reasons. One is, she might say no and I'd be embarrassed; two, she might say yes and I'd have to dance…”

Newt Gingrich (1943) Professor, Speaker of the United States House of Representatives

1980s

Girl , Guy , Dance

“A woman's smile deactivates reason.”

Prevale (1983) Italian DJ and producer

Original: (it) Il sorriso di una donna disattiva la ragione.
Source: prevale.net

Smile

“A further reason why industrial society cannot be reformed in favor of freedom is that modern technology is a unified system in which all parts are dependent on one another. You can’t get rid of the "bad" parts of technology and retain only the "good" parts.”

Theodore Kaczynski book Industrial Society and Its Future

The ‘Bad’ Parts of Technology Cannot Be Separated From the ‘Good’ Parts, paragraph 121
Industrial Society and Its Future (1995)

Bad luck , Freedom , Parting , Dependency

“If an idea, I reasoned, were really a valuable one, there must be some way of realising it. The idea of winning a doctor's degree gradually assumed the aspect of a great moral struggle, and the moral fight possessed great attraction for me.”

Elizabeth Blackwell (1821–1910) England-born American physician, abolitionist, women's rights activist

p. 29 https://books.google.com/books?id=GHkIAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA29
Pioneer Work in Opening the Medical Profession to Women (1895)

Fight , Idea , Way

“In society, we do horrible things to one another because we don't see the person it affects. We don't see their face. We don't see them as people. Which was the whole reason the hood was built in the first place, to keep the victims of apartheid out of sight and out of mind. Because if white people ever saw black people as human, they would see that slavery is unconscionable. We live in a world where we don't see the ramifications of what we do to others, because we don't live with them. It would be a whole lot harder for an investment banker to rip off people with subprime mortgages if he actually had to live with the people he was ripping off. If we could see one another's pain and empathize with one another, it would never be worth it to us to commit the crimes in the first place.”

Trevor Noah book Born a Crime

page 222
Born a Crime

World , Personality , Pain , People

“Like many who have no reason for pride, that very lack of reason for it made me the prouder. But certain realities have a way of making themselves felt, and debt is one of them.”

Brent Weeks book The Way of Shadows

Source: The Way of Shadows (2008), Chapter 45 (pp. 400-401)

Way , Reality , Making love

“Sanskrit was a complete success and became the language of all cultured people in India and in countries under Indian influence. All scientific, philosophical, historical works were henceforth written in Sanskrit, and important texts existing in other languages were translated and adapted into Sanskrit. For this reason, very few ancient literary, religious, or philosophical documents exits in India in other languages. The sheer volume of Sanskrit literature is immense, and it remains largely unexplored.”

Alain Daniélou (1907–1994) French historian, musicologist, Indologist and expert on Shaivite Hinduism

Alain Danielou in: Virtue, Success, Pleasure, and Liberation: The Four Aims of Life in the Tradition of Ancient India https://books.google.co.in/books?id=IMSngEmfdS0C&pg=PA17, Inner Traditions / Bear & Co, 1 August 1993, p. 17.

Country , Literature , People , Success

“In the mysterious way in which life is given to us in evolution on this planet, it pushes in the direction of its own expansion. We don’t understand it simply because we don’t know the purpose of creation; we only feel life straining in ourselves and see it thrashing others about as they devour each other. Life seeks to expand in an unknown direction for unknown reasons.”

Ernest Becker book The Denial of Death

Psychology and Religion: What Is the Heroic Individual?
The Denial of Death (1973)

Way , Life , Feeling , Understanding

“The fact that no one has come up with a really convincing reason for giving greater moral weight to members of our own species, simply because they are members of our species, strongly suggests that there is no such reason. Like racism and sexism, speciesism is wrong.”

Peter Singer (1946) Australian philosopher

Source: The Point of View of the Universe: Sidgwick and Contemporary Ethics (2017), p. 343

“I have no doubt that the only reason I’m alive today at 92 is because God has work for me to do. I have a message to deliver; God has kept me alive to deliver it.”

René Henry Gracida (1923) American Roman Catholic bishop

Airman, Monk, Priest, Bishop: An interview with Bp. Rene Henry Gracida https://www.catholicworldreport.com/2016/01/11/airman-monk-priest-bishop-an-interview-with-bp-rene-henry-gracida/ (January 11, 2016)

God

“Excellence, then, is a state concerned with choice, lying in a mean, relative to us, this being determined by reason and in the way in which the man of practical wisdom would determine it.”

Aristotle (-384–-321 BC) Classical Greek philosopher, student of Plato and founder of Western philosophy

Lying , Way , Wisdom

“Reason and free inquiry are the only effectual agents against error.”

Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) 3rd President of the United States of America

Error

“Humanity is acquiring all the right technology for all the wrong reasons.”

Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983) American architect, systems theorist, author, designer, inventor and futurist

“The world is miserable because men live beneath themselves; the error of modern man is that he wants to reform the world without having either the will or the power to reform man, and this flagrant contradiction, this attempt to make a better world on the basis of a worsened humanity, can only end in the very abolition of what is human, and consequently in the abolition of happiness too. Reforming man means binding him again to Heaven, reestablishing the broken link; it means tearing him away from the reign of the passions, from the cult of matter, quantity and cunning, and reintegrating him into the world of the spirit and serenity, we would even say: into the world of sufficient reason.”

Frithjof Schuon book Understanding Islam

[1998, Understanding Islam, World Wisdom, 26, 0-941532-24-0]
Miscellaneous, Modernity

Tear , Men , Happiness , Passion

“It ought to be possible to restore to the word "philosophy" its original meaning: philosophy − the "love of wisdom" − is the science of all the fundamental principles; this science operates with intuition, which "perceives," and not with reason alone, which "concludes."”

Frithjof Schuon book The Transfiguration of Man

Subjectively speaking, the essence of philosophy is certitude; for the moderns, on the contrary, the essence of philosophy is doubt: the philosopher is supposed to reason without any premise (voraussetzungsloses Denken), as if this condition were not itself a preconceived idea; this is the classical contradiction of all relativism. Everything is doubted except for doubt. The solution to the problem of knowledge − if there is a problem − could not possibly be this intellectual suicide that is the promotion of doubt; on the contrary, it lies in having recourse to a source of certitude that transcends the mental mechanism, and this source − the only one there is − is the pure Intellect, or Intelligence as such.
[2005, The Transfiguration of Man, World Wisdom, 3, 978-0-94153219-8]
Miscellaneous, Philosophy

Science , Love , Wisdom

“The assumption that government must be neutral among conceptions of the good generally appears in cases in which the Court protects speech that government would restrict. But the force of this assumption can also be seen where the Court has upheld restrictions on speech, most notably, in obscenity cases. Although the Court has been reluctant to protect obscenity under the First Amendment, its reasoning in recent obscenity cases displays the powerful influence of neutrality assumptions on constitutional law.”

Michael J. Sandel (1953) American political philosopher

Chap. 3. Religious Liberty and Freedom of Speech
Democracy's Discontent (1996)

Appearance , Law

“There is a process known as parthenogenesis, literally virgin birth, by which a uniparental embryo can be created out of a normal egg. It’s been done with animals. The only reason no one ever did it with humans is because it seemed ethically dodgy, as well as completely unnecessary given the willingness of men to impregnate women every chance they got.”

Neal Stephenson book Seveneves

“Cleft” (pp. 552-553)
Seveneves (2015), Part Two

Birth , Chance , Animals , Women

“Religion translates metaphysical or universal truths into dogmatic language; now though dogma is not accessible to all men in its intrinsic truth, which can only be directly attained by the Intellect, it is nonetheless accessible through faith, which is, for the great majority, the only possible mode of participation in the Divine Truths. As for intellectual knowledge, which proceeds neither from belief nor from a process of reasoning, it goes beyond dogma in the sense that, without ever contradicting the latter, it penetrates its internal dimension, that is, the infinite Truth that dominates all forms.”

Frithjof Schuon book The Transcendent Unity of Religions

[1993, The Transcendent Unity of Religions, Quest Books, xxxi, 978-0-8356-0587-8]
Miscellaneous, Religion

Knowledge , Sense , Men , Universe

“I saw no reason to stop my life for other people’s theories.”

Lois McMaster Bujold book The Hallowed Hunt

Source: World of the Five Gods series, The Hallowed Hunt (2005), Chapter 4 (p. 65)

People , Life

“You are the most exciting reason in my life.”

Prevale (1983) Italian DJ and producer

From the Quotes http://www.prevale.net/quotes.html page of the official website of Prevale
Original: (it) Sei la ragione più emozionante della mia vita.
Source: prevale.net

Life

“God has no rhyme or reason to who he gives a sense of humor to.”

Jerry Seinfeld (1954) American comedian and actor

Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee (2012 — Present), Season 2 (2013)

God , Sense

“Nothing in this world is useless in the eyes of God. Not a leaf from a tree falls, not a hair from your head, not even an insect dies because it was of no use. Everything has a reason to exist.”

Paulo Coelho book Manuscript Found in Accra

Manuscript Found in Accra (2012), Uselessness

God , Tree , World

“An observer studying the Solar system dispassionately, and finding himself capable of bringing the four giant planets to his notice, could reasonably say that the Solar system consisted of one star, four planets, and some traces of debris.”

Isaac Asimov (1920–1992) American writer and professor of biochemistry at Boston University, known for his works of science fiction …

"Worlds In Order" in The Secret of the Universe (1992), p. 63
General sources

Study , Star

“We are what our ancestors have been, and to destroy that destroys the very reason that people fight and die and sacrifice to preserve this country.”

Robert Wilkie (1962) 10th United States Secretary of Veterans Affairs

Exclusive — Robert Wilkie: Democrats Want to Rewrite VA Motto to Remove Language from Lincoln’s Second Inaugural https://www.breitbart.com/radio/2021/05/31/va-robert-wilkie-abraham-lincoln-second-inaugural-veterans-affairs/ (31 May 2021)

Country , People , Fight

“The reason we feel alienated is because the society is infantile, trivial, and stupid. So the cost of sanity in this society is a certain level of alienation. I grapple with this because I’m a parent. And I think anybody who has children, you come to this realization, you know—what’ll it be? Alienated, cynical intellectual? Or slack-jawed, half-wit consumer of the horseshit being handed down from on high? There is not much choice in there, you see. And we all want our children to be well adjusted; unfortunately, there’s nothing to be well adjusted to!”

Terence McKenna (1946–2000) American ethnobotanist

Thinking , Parent , Children , Stupidity

“The person who constantly catches your attention dominates: instinct, heart, mood and reason.”

Prevale (1983) Italian DJ and producer

Original: La persona che cattura costantemente la tua attenzione domina: istinto, cuore, umore e ragione.
Source: prevale.net

Personality , Heart , Mood

“In life, for one reason or another, we are all slaves of power.”

Prevale (1983) Italian DJ and producer

Original: (it) Nella vita, per un motivo o per un altro, siamo tutti schiavi del potere.
Source: prevale.net

Life

“Every morning I get up for two reasons: one is the alarm that rings, the other is you.”

Prevale (1983) Italian DJ and producer

Original: (it) Ogni mattina mi alzo per due motivi: uno è la sveglia che suona, l'altro sei tu.
Source: prevale.net

“It's all about the balance of the team. That's the most important point, nothing else. For that reason, it's easy for me to adapt to several different styles of play. I know I have to adapt and play for the good of the team. For me, being a strong striker is not only about being a good goalscorer.”

Robert Lewandowski (1988) Polish association football player

Strong

“It speaks to our feelings and imaginations, as it were by suggestion; reaching for this very reason depths of our being quite beyond the power of mere words.”

Walter Raymond Spalding (1865–1962) American music pedagogue and author

On instrumental music, page 2 https://books.google.com/books?id=pQARAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA2.
Music: An Art and a Language (1920), Preliminary Considerations (Ch. I)

Imagination , Feeling

“A law is a social monument, a page of history, a lesson in ethnography, a reason for state.”

Luís Gama (1830–1882) Brazilian lawyer, poet, abolitionist and journalist

Gazeta da Tarde, [Carta a Ferreira de Menezes], January 07, 1881. Source: Defendeu escravizados: O inestimável legado do jornalista Luiz Gama https://aventurasnahistoria.uol.com.br/noticias/reportagem/defendeu-escravizados-o-inestimavel-legado-do-jornalista-luiz-gama-.phtml.

History , Law

“The only reason you can’t see how crazy this is is because we’ve been neck-deep in crazy for years.”

Robert Charles Wilson (1953) author

Source: Burning Paradise (2013), Chapter 22 (p. 222)

“There is no reason right now — no clinical reason to go get vaccinated.”

Peter A. McCullough (1962) American cardiologist and medical professor

July 13, 2021 on the Fox News program The Ingraham Angle (['Ingraham Angle' on Biden's speech, CRT, The Ingraham Angle, Fox News, https://www.foxnews.com/transcript/ingraham-angle-on-bidens-speech-critical-race-theory, July 14, 2021]; [Holmes, Jack, July 8, 2021, Fox News Is Moving From 'Just Asking Questions' to Full-On Anti-Vax Crapola, Esquire, https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a36967699/fox-news-anti-vax-tucker-carlson-just-asking-questions/]; [Vaccine doubters' strange fixation with Israel, The Washington Post, Aaron, Blake, July 19, 2021, https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/07/19/vaccine-skeptics-zero-israel-again-some-reason/]; [Fox News hosts railed against 'vaccine passports' – the company requires one to return to work without a mask, Alex, Woodward, https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/fox-clear-pass-vaccine-passports-b1887260.html, The Independent, July 20, 2021]; [Vaccines Remain Largely Effective Against Delta Variant, Counter to Claims From Fox News Guest, Jessica, McDonald, July 30, 2021, FactCheck.org, Annenberg Public Policy Center, https://www.factcheck.org/2021/07/vaccines-remain-largely-effective-against-delta-variant-counter-to-claims-from-fox-news-guest/]; [Justin, Baragona, Meghan McCain Claims Nobody at Fox News Is Saying ‘Don’t Get the Vaccine’, The Daily Beast, https://www.thedailybeast.com/meghan-mccain-claims-nobody-at-fox-news-is-saying-dont-get-the-vaccine, July 19, 2021]; [How Vaccine Companies Have Bankrolled Fox News’ Anti-Vaxx Insanity, Justin, Baragona, July 22, 2021, https://www.thedailybeast.com/how-vaccine-companies-have-bankrolled-fox-news-anti-vaxx-insanity, The Daily Beast]; [Transcript: The ReidOut, 7/19/21, https://www.msnbc.com/transcripts/transcript-reidout-7-19-21-n1274460, July 19, 2021, The ReidOut, MSNBC])

“Well, I remember!
I remember, don't worry
How could I ever forget?
It's the first time, the last time we ever met
But, I know the reason why you keep your silence up,
No you don't fool me.
The hurt doesn't show
But the pain still grows
It's no stranger to you and me.”

Phil Collins (1951) English musician, songwriter and actor

"In the Air Tonight"
Face Value (1981)

Hurt , Pain , Silence , Time

“In reading authors, when you find
Bright passages that strike your mind,
And which perhaps you may have reason
To think on at another season,
Be not contented with the sight,
But take them down in black and white;
Such a respect is wisely shown
That makes another's sense one's own.”

John Byrom (1692–1763) Poet, inventor of a shorthand system

"A Hint to a young Person, for his better Improvement by Reading or Conversation"
Miscellaneous Poems (1773)

Reading , Season , Thinking , Sense

“I have gone through ups and downs in my relatively short career. And one thing I’ve learned is a bit of a cliché, but everything does happen for a reason.”

Chloé Zhao (1982) Chinese film director, screenwriter, and film producer

Learning

“General relativity has changed our understanding of space and time. ...The spacetime of general relativity ...is likely to be just a classical approximation that loses its meaning in the quantum theory, for the same reason the trajectory of a particle does.”

Carlo Rovelli (1956) Italian physicist

"Forget time" (Aug, 2008)

Change , Time , Understanding

“The inability to isolate software components from each other is the main reason why many popular programming languages cannot be used for making robust system software.”

Joe Armstrong (1950–2019) British computer scientist

page 32
Making Reliable Distributed Systems in the Presence of Software Errors

“I think we seem to have forgotten that things can be small. This way of decomposing systems into small things that I can reason about.”

Joe Armstrong (1950–2019) British computer scientist

The forgotten advantage of concurrent programming

Thinking , Way

“The reason for the collapse of the USSR was only the betrayal of Gorbachev and Yeltsin, who were led by the United States. The American administration has always, all the years, strived to destroy the USSR, and now Russia, and take advantage of our wealth.”

Valentin Varennikov (1923–2009) Soviet general and russian politician

"Горбачев сказал нам: "Действуйте, как хотите" " https://ytro.news/articles/2007/08/20/672987.shtml

Betrayal , Wealth

“The one constant in my life is the landscape, in a broad sense of the word. I love the openness of the land and worry about how we’ve built our lives upon it, how little we maintain it, and how we assault it. It’s one reason for me to want to photograph it.”

An-My Lê (1960) American photographer

Interview with ARTNews (3 March 2020)

Sense , Love , Life

“It is only by poets that the life of any epoch can be synthesized. Encyclopaedias and guides to knowledge cannot do it, for the good reason that they affect only the intellectual surface of a man’s life. The lower layers, the core of his being, they leave untouched.”

Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) English writer

Source: Texts and Pretexts (1932), p. 4

Knowledge , Life

“There is no reason whatever to assume that woman, in her climb to emancipation, has been, or will be, helped by the ballot.”

Emma Goldman book Anarchism and Other Essays

Anarchism and Other Essays (1910), Woman Suffrage

Help

“Human nature asserts itself regardless of all laws, nor is there any plausible reason why nature should adapt itself to a perverted conception of morality.”

Emma Goldman book Anarchism and Other Essays

Anarchism and Other Essays (1910), The Traffic in Women

Law , Nature

“My basic ideas have not changed. I see no reason to change them.”

Israel Epstein (1915–2005) Chinese politician

Israel Epstein, Prominent Chinese Communist, Dies at 90 in The New York Times https://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/02/world/asia/israel-epstein-prominent-chinese-communist-dies-at-90.html (2 June 2005)

Idea , Change

“The reason why some shows do not last is that their main focus is on making money bu that is not the case with me.What i seek is to add value first in people`s lives with what I do.”

Mai Chisamba (1952)

https://www.chronicle.co.zw/mai-chisamba-show-will-go-on-as-long-as-i-live-says-dr-chisamba/ The Chronicle ( May 25, 2019)

Money , People

“People can be fooled into thinking of mathematics as logical, formal, symbolic reasoning. But this is far from reality...computers are far better at formal computation and formal reasoning, but humans are far better mathematicians.”

William Thurston (1946–2012) mathematician

Foreword to Teichmüller Theory

Fools , People , Thinking , Reality

“Reason quite properly rejects contradiction, but rationalism abhors mystery, which every heresy attempts in its own way to resolve.”

Michael Horton (theologian) (1964) American theologian

Source: Pilgrim Theology (2013), p. 177

Way

“We shall have faith, that, at the writing of peace, America and our other gallant Allies will not be obtunded by the mirage of contingent reasons of expediency.”

Soong Mei-ling (1897–2003) Chiang Kai-shek's wife, First Lady of the Republic of China

Address to the U.S. House of Representatives (February 18, 1943)

Peace , Faith

“God had given men reason, by which they could find out things for themselves, but He had given animals knowledge which did not depend on reason, and which was much more prompt and perfect in its way, and by which they had often saved the lives of men.”

Anna Sewell book Black Beauty

Source: Black Beauty (1877), Ch. XII, p. 61

God , Dependency , Perfection , Knowledge