Reason Quotes - Page 4

So it follows that those who have reason have freedom to will or not to will, although this freedom is not equal in all of them. [...] human souls are more free when they persevere in the contemplation of the mind of God, less free when they descend to the corporeal, and even less free when they are entirely imprisoned in earthly flesh and blood.

The Encyclopedia-the advance artillery of reason, the armada of philosophy, the siege engine of the enlightenment...

God is a philosophical black hole – the point where reason breaks down.

Δύο υπερβολές : ν' αποκλείουμε το Λόγο, και να μη δεχόμαστε παρά μόνο το Λόγο.

I know how men in exile feed on dreams of hope.

This only is denied to God: the power to undo the past.

Rousseau identified reason as the disease for which it pretended to be the cure.

Blessed are the doubters: for they shall not be easily fooled.

In our reasonings concerning matter of fact, there are all imaginable degrees of assurance, from the highest certainty to the lowest species of moral evidence. A wise man, therefore, proportions his belief to the evidence.

Even corpses had purpose, or could be given one. A man could make himself an island his entire life, only to have reason itself laid about him, a fabricated existence. Identity became relative, history nonexistent. As they said, dead men told no tales.

I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.

We owe a huge debt to Galileo for emancipating us all from the stupid belief in an Earth-centered or man-centered (let alone God-centered) system. He quite literally taught us our place and allowed us to go on to make extraordinary advances in knowledge.

He is not apprehended by reason, but by life.

Reason is incompetent to answer any fundamental question about God, or morality, or the meaning of life.

The finger of the atheists' own divinity, Reason, wrote on the wall the appalling judgments that there is no God; that the universe is only matter in spontaneous motion; and, most grievous word of all, that what men call their souls die with the death of the body, as music dies when the strings are broken.

Pity me that the heart is slow to learn
What the swift mind beholds at every turn.

As a poet and as a mathematician, he would reason well; as a mere mathematician, he could not have reasoned at all.

Old age doth in sharp pains abound;
We are belabored by the gout,
Our blindness is a dark profound,
Our deafness each one laughs about.
Then reason's light with falling ray
Doth but a trembling flicker cast.
Honor to age, ye children pay!
Alas! my fifty years are past!

I mean, you could claim that anything's real if the only basis for believing in it is that nobody's proved it doesn't exist!

All our knowledge begins with the senses, proceeds then to the understanding, and ends with reason. There is nothing higher than reason.