Quotes about reason

I am never upset for the reason I think.

— A Course In Miracles

Reason itself is fallible, and this fallibility must find a place in our logic.

— Nicola Abbagnano

A man has free choice to the extent that he is rational.

— St. Thomas Aquinas

Most men seem to live according to sense rather than reason.

— St. Thomas Aquinas

O reason, reason, abstract phantom of the waking state, I had already expelled you from my dreams, now I have reached a point where those dreams are about to become fused with apparent realities: now there is only room here for myself.

— Louis Aragon

There are strange flowers of reason to match each error of the senses.

— Louis Aragon

Reasoning draws a conclusion, but does not make the conclusion certain, unless the mind discovers it by the path of experience.

— Roger Bacon

Everything that is beautiful and noble is the product of reason and calculation.

— Charles Baudelaire

As if reasoning were any kind of writing or talking which tends to convince people that some doctrine or measure is true and right.

— Catharine Esther Beecher

Reason transformed into prejudice is the worst form of prejudice, because reason is the only instrument for liberation from prejudice.

— Allan Bloom

Some excel in rhyme who reason foolishly.

— Nicholas Boileau

We can only reason from what is; we can reason on actualities, but not on possibilities.

— Henry Bolingbroke

To reason about love is to lose reason.

— Boufflers

Reason sits firm and holds the reins, and she will not let the feelings burst away and hurry her to wild chasms. The passions may rage furiously, like true heathens, as they are; and the desires may imagine all sorts of vain things: but judgment shall still have the last word in every argument, and the casting vote in every decision.

— Charlotte Bronte

As reason is a rebel to faith, so passion is a rebel to reason.

— Sir Thomas Browne

If you follow reason far enough it always leads to conclusions that are contrary to reason.

— Samuel Butler

A person usually has two reasons for doing something: a good reason and the real reason.

— Thomas Carlyle

People are governed with the head; kindness of heart is little use in chess.

— Sebastien-Roch Nicolas De Chamfort

The more you reason the less you create.

— Raymond Chandler

If you can once engage people's pride, love, pity, ambition (or whatever is their prevailing passion) on your side, you need not fear what their reason can do against you.

— Lord Chesterfield

The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. He is the man who has lost everything except his reason.

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

Reason should direct and appetite obey.

— Marcus T. Cicero

Let reason govern desire.

— Marcus T. Cicero

Reason is a whore, surviving by simulation, versatility, and shamelessness.

— E. M. Cioran

The person who is master of their passions is reason's slave.

— Cyril Connolly

The trouble with Reason is that it becomes meaningless at the exact point where it refuses to act.

— Bernard Devoto

It was not reason that besieged Troy; it was not reason that sent forth the Saracen from the desert to conquer the world; that inspired the crusades; that instituted the monastic orders; it was not reason that produced the Jesuits; above all, it was not reason that created the French Revolution. Man is only great when he acts from the passions; never irresistible but when he appeals to the imagination.

— Benjamin Disraeli

No one ever excused his way to success.

— Dave Del Dotto

He that will not reason is a bigot; he that cannot reason is a fool; and he that dares not reason is a slave.

— William Drummond

Reason is a crutch for age, but youth is strong enough to walk alone.

— John Dryden

Neither great poverty nor great riches will hear reason.

— Henry Fielding

Just as love is an orientation which refers to all objects and is incompatible with the restriction to one object, so is reason a human faculty which must embrace the whole of the world with which man is confronted.

— Erich Fromm

Don't ever take a fence down until you know why it was put up.

— Robert Frost

A person possessed with an idea cannot be reasoned with.

— James A. Froude

Reason can in general do more than blind force.

— Gaius C. Gallus

Rationalists are admirable beings, rationalism is a hideous monster when it claims for itself omnipotence. Attribution of omnipotence to reason is as bad a piece of idolatry as is worship of stock and stone believing it to be God. I plead not for the suppression of reason, but for a due recognition of that in us which sanctifies reason.

— Mahatma Gandhi

I'll not listen to reason. Reason always means what someone else has got to say.

— Elizabeth Gaskell

Reason can never be popular. Passions and feelings may become popular, but reason will always remain the sole property of a few eminent individuals.

— Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

Reason is a faculty far larger than mere objective force. When either the political or the scientific discourse announces itself as the voice of reason, it is playing God, and should be spanked and stood in the corner.

— Ursula K. Le Guin

Man is a reasoning rather than a reasonable animal.

— Alexander Hamilton

As soon as man began considering himself the source of the highest meaning in the world and the measure of everything, the world began to lose its human dimension, and man began to lose control of it.

— Vaclav Havel

To give a reason for anything is to breed a doubt of it.

— William Hazlitt

What is rational is actual, and what is actual is rational.

— Georg Hegel

To him who looks upon the world rationally, the world in its turn presents a rational aspect. The relation is mutual.

— Georg Hegel

Reason gains all people by compelling none.

— Aaron Hill

Nothing is divine but what is agreeable to reason.

— Immanuel Kant

Reason is a supple nymph, and slippery as a fish by nature. She had as leave give her kiss to an absurdity any day, as to syllogistic truth. The absurdity may turn out truer.

— D. H. Lawrence

Reason now gazes above the realm of the dark but warm feelings as the Alpine peaks do above the clouds. They behold the sun more clearly and distinctly, but they are cold and unfruitful.

— Georg C. Lichtenberg

It takes less time to do a thing right than to explain why you did it wrong.

— Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

An appeal to the reason of the people has never been known to fail in the long run.

— James Russell Lowell

Reason is a whore, the greatest enemy that faith has.

— Martin Luther

Our reason may prove what it will: our reason is only a feeble ray that has issued from Nature.

— Maurice Maeterlinck

I prefer the company of peasants because they have not been educated sufficiently to reason incorrectly.

— Michel Eyquem De Montaigne

A man always has two reasons for doing anything -- a good reason and the real reason.

— John Pierpont Morgan

There is really nothing more to say except why. But since why is difficult to handle, one must take refuge in how.

— Toni Morrison

He who has a strong enough why can bear almost any how.

— Friedrich Nietzsche

Reason clears and plants the wilderness of the imagination to harvest the wheat of art.

— Austin O'Malley

What is now reason was formerly impulse or instinct.

— Ovid

Most of us, when all is said and done, like what we like and make up reasons for it afterwards.

— Soren F. Petersen

Whenever a person strives, by the help of dialectic, to start in pursuit of every reality by a simple process of reason, independent of all sensuous information -- never flinching, until by an act of the pure intelligence he has grasped the real nature of good -- he arrives at the very end of the intellectual world.

— Plato

On life's vast ocean diversely we sail. Reasons the card, but passion the gale.

— Alexander Pope

Reason lies between the bridle and the spur.

— Italian Proverb

Reason is the wise man's guide, example the fool's.

— Welsh Proverb

Everyone has his reasons.

— Jean Renoir

I got fame and fortune, and I lost my sense of reasoning.

— Little Richard

Reason is the historian, but passions are the actors.

— Antoine Rivarol

Most of our so-called reasoning consists in finding arguments for going on believing as we already do.

— James H. Robinson

Reason is like an officer when the king appears. The officer then loses his power and hides himself. Reason is the shadow cast by God; Go is the sun.

— Jalal-Uddin Rumi

Reason is a harmonizing, controlling force rather than a creative one.

— Bertrand Russell

The irrational in the human has something about it altogether repulsive and terrible, as we see in the maniac, the miser, the drunkard or the ape.

— George Santayana

A noble heart will always capitulate to reason.

— Johann Friedrich Von Schiller

What is a man, If his chief good and market of his time Be but to sleep and feed? a beast, no more. Sure, he that made us with such large discourse, Looking before and after, gave us not That capability and god-like reason To fust in us unused.

— William Shakespeare

Strong reasons make strong actions.

— William Shakespeare

Never try to reason the prejudice out of a man. It was not reasoned into him, and cannot be reasoned out.

— Sydney Smith

The gods plant reason in mankind, of all good gifts the highest.

— Sophocles

Our passion and principles are constantly in a frenzy, but begin to shift and waver, as we return to reason.

— Laurence Sterne

Reason is a very light rider, and easily shook off.

— Jonathan Swift

Too much sensibility creates unhappiness and too much insensibility creates crime.

— Charles Maurice De Talleyrand

He that speaketh against his own reason speaks against his own conscience, and therefore it is certain that no man serves God with a good conscience who serves him against his reason.

— Jeremy Taylor

Reason over passion.

— Pierre Elliott Trudeau

Man always has two reasons for the things he does; the logical one and the real one.

— Source Unknown

You can't reason someone out of a position they didn't reason themselves into.

— Source Unknown

Many are destined to reason wrongly; others, not to reason at all; and others, to persecute those who do reason.

— Voltaire

The true triumph of reason is that it enables us to get along with those who do not possess it.

— Voltaire

Reason is the test of ridicule, not ridicule the test of truth.

— William Warburton

Passion and prejudice govern the world; only under the name of reason.

— John Wesley

An epigram often flashes light into regions where reason shines but dimly.

— Edwin P. Whipple

Reason has never failed men. Only force and repression have made the wrecks in the world.

— William Allen White

I can stand brute force, but brute reason is quite unbearable. There is something unfair about its use. It is hitting below the intellect.

— Oscar Wilde

Reason is emotion for the sexless.

— Heathcote Williams

The only business of the head in the world is to bow a ceaseless obeisance to the heart.

— William Butler Yeats

That proves you are unusual, returned the Scarecrow; and I am convinced the only people worthy of consideration in this world are the unusual ones. For the common folks are like the leaves of a tree, and live and die unnoticed.

— Lyman Frank Baum

I tried being reasonable, I didn't like it.

— Clint Eastwood

Nothing is ever accomplished by a reasonable man.

— George Bernard Shaw

Reasonable people adapt themselves to the world. Unreasonable people attempt to adapt the world to themselves. All progress, therefore, depends on unreasonable people.

— George Bernard Shaw

Is there not some chosen curse, some hidden thunder in the stores of heaven, red with uncommon wrath, to blast the man who owes his greatness to his country's ruin!

— Joseph Addison

Treason is like diamonds; there is nothing to be made by the small trader.

— Douglas William Jerrold

There is something peculiarly sinister and insidious in even a charge of disloyalty. Such a charge all too frequently places a strain on the reputation of an individual which is indelible and lasting, regardless of the complete innocence later proved.

— John Lord O'Brian

We are a rebellious nation. Our whole history is treason; our blood was attained before we were born; our creeds were infidelity to the mother church; our constitution treason to our fatherland.

— Theodore Parker

Write on my gravestone: Infidel, Traitor.--infidel to every church that compromises with wrong; traitor to every government that oppresses the people.

— Wendell Phillips