Inspirational Quotes on Reason

“It is certainly true that reason is the most important and the highest rank among all things and, in comparison with other things of this life, the best and something divine. It is the inventor and mentor of all the arts, medicines, laws, and of whatever wisdom, power, virtue, and glory men possess in this life.”

“The knowledge of Christ which is produced by man's own cleverness and wisdom is not a rock that can stand firm.”

“It is the reason, alone, of the public, that ought to control and regulate the government. The passions ought to be controlled and regulated by the government.”

“Mary! Mary! My dear, let me reason with you. I hate reasoning, John,—especially reasoning on such subjects. There's a way you political folks have of coming round and round a plain right thing; and you don't believe in it yourselves, when it comes to practice. I know you well enough, John. You don't believe it's right any more than I do; and you wouldn't do it any sooner than I.”

“Though argument does not create conviction, the lack of it destroys belief.”

“God has put enough into the world to make faith in Him a most reasonable thing. But He has left enough out to make it impossible to live by sheer reason or observation alone.”

“When you are inquiring into any subject, maintain a due regard to the arguments and objections on both sides of a question; consider, compare, and balance them well, before you determine for one side. It is a frequent, but a very faulty practice, to hunt after arguments only to make good one side of a question, and entirely to neglect and refuse those which favour the others side. If we have not given a due weight to arguments on both sides, we do but willfully misguide our judgment, and abuse our reason by forbidding its search after truth.”

“The reader of these reflections of mine on the Trinity should bear in mind that my pen is on the watch against the sophistries of those who scorn the starting-point of faith, and allow themselves to be deceived through an unseasonable and misguided love of reason.”

“Finally, let them recognise that there are two kinds of people one can call reasonable; those who serve God with all their heart because they know Him, and those who seek Him with all their heart because they do not know Him.”

“I have great hopes that we shall learn in due time how to emotionalise and mythologise their science to such an extent that what is, in effect, a belief in us (though not under that name) will creep in while the human mind remains closed to belief in the Enemy.”

“The first question he had been concerned with—a long time now—was why most crimes were so easily discovered and solved, and why nearly every criminal left so clear a trail. He arrived by degrees at a variety of curious conclusions, and, in his opinion, the chief cause lay not so much in the material impossibility of concealing the crime as in the criminal himself; nearly every criminal, at the moment of the crime, was subject to a collapse of will-power and reason, exchanging them for an extraordinary childish heedlessness, and that just at the moment when judgment and caution were most indispensable.”

“Reason never wholly overcomes imagination, while the contrary is quite common.”

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

“Human logic may be rationally adequate, but it is also existentially deficient. Faith declares that there is more than this - not contradicting, but transcending reason.”

“If you will not hear reason, she'll rap your knuckles.”

“If we take reason strictly, the perceiving of spiritual beauty and excellence no more belongs to reason than it belongs to the sense of feeling to perceive colors or to the power of seeing to perceive the sweetness of food.”

“The highest function of humanity is belief, that activity of spirit that proceeds upon the pathway of reason, until it comes to some great promontory, and then spreads its wings, and upon the basis of its earlier journeying, takes eternity into its grasp.”

“You, my dear Rodion Romanovich (excuse an old man), are still a young man, in your first youth, so to speak, and therefore you esteem the human intellect above all things, like all young people. Abstract reasoning and the play of wit tempt you astray.”

“Shows itself in the notion that what may be objectively true may in the mouth of certain people become false.”

“Take all of this Book upon reason that you can, and the balance on faith, and you will live and die a happier man.”