quotations about reason
Mental or spiritual health, which is rationality, makes for progress, and the future demands greater and greater mental or spiritual health, greater and greater rationality. The brain must dominate and direct both the individual and society in the time to come, not the belly and the heart.
JACK LONDON
The Kempton-Wace Letters
Who builds on Reason builds upon the sand
A fabric mortal as the human brain.
FRANCIS HOWARD WILLIAMS
"Sic Itur Ad Astra"
Reason is not measured by size or height, but by principle.
EPICTETUS
Discourses
The total loss of reason is less deplorable than the total deprivation of it.
ABRAHAM COWLEY
Essays and Selected Verse
Beasts act by sense, man should by reason; else he is a greater beast than ever God made: And the proverb is verified, the corruption of the best things is the worst and most offensive.
WILLIAM PENN
Some Fruits of Solitude
Pure Reason left to herself
relieth on axioms and essential premises
which she can neither question nor resolve.
ROBERT BRIDGES
The Testament of Beauty
Whenever he was required to use his reason he felt like someone who had always used his right hand but was now required to do something with his left.
GEORG CHRISTOPH LICHTENBERG
"Notebook B", The Waste Books
Beware gentle knight. There is no greater monster than reason.
CORMAC MCCARTHY
All the Pretty Horses
There is a revelation of God to man in the light of reason.
JOHN GRIER HIBBEN
The Problems of Philosophy
Reason is the first victim of strong emotion.
FRANK HERBERT
Dune Messiah
Changing from the ghosts of faith to the spectres of reason is just changing cells.
FERNANDO PESSOA
The Book of Disquiet
My reason is the universe's voice.
ALPHONSE DE LAMARTINE
"Prayer", Poetical Meditations
People are content to live in contradictory worlds, so long as they know the reason for each.
ALAN LIGHTMAN
Einstein's Dreams
Water cannot rise higher than its source, neither can human reason. Now, all reasoning respecting transcendent truths must have its source where the truths or ideas themselves originate.
SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE
notes appended to the third edition of Southey's Life of Wesley
When God is contriving misfortunes for man, He first deprives him of his reason.
EURIPIDES
attributed, Day's Collacon
It is to no manner of purpose that we have reason on our side, when the laugh is against us.
ROBERT BOLTON
attributed, Day's Collacon
There is nothing without reason.
GOTTFRIED WILHELM LEIBNIZ
Studies in Physics and the Nature of the Body
He that gives Reason for what he saith, has done what is fit to be done; and the most that can be done: He, that gives not Reason, speaks nothing, though he saith never so much.
BENJAMIN WHICHCOTE
Moral and Religious Aphorisms
Man cannot survive except by gaining knowledge, and reason is his only means to gain it.
AYN RAND
Atlas Shrugged
Human reason needs only to will more strongly than fate, and she is fate.
THOMAS MANN
The Magic Mountain