Inspirational Quotes on Reason

“In so far as religion is gone, reason is going. For they are both of the same primary and authoritative kind. They are both methods of proof which cannot themselves be proved.”

“Reason may win truths; without Faith she will retain them just so long as Satan pleases.”

“...his mind moves in a perfect but narrow circle. A small circle is quite as infinite as a large circle; but, though it is quite as infinite, it is not so large.”

“Because our approvals and disapprovals are thus recognitions of objective value or responses to an objective order, therefore emotional states can be in harmony with reason (when we feel liking for what ought to be approved) or out of harmony with reason (when we perceive that liking is due but we cannot feel it). No emotion is, in itself, a judgment: in that sense all emotions and sentiments are alogical. But they can be reasonable or unreasonable as they conform to Reason or fail to conform. The heart never takes the place of the head: but it can, and should, obey it.”

“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.”

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

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

“Yet I must tell you, that all these graces which are expressed by passions of sorrow, fear, joy, hope, love, are not so certainly to be tried by the passion that is in them, as by the will that is either contained in them, or supposed in them; not as acts of the sensitive, but of the rational appetite (358).”