Reasoning Quotes - Page 29

• We think of Euclid as of fine ice; we admire Newton as we admire the peak of Teneriffe. Even the intensest labors, the most remote triumphs of the abstract intellect, seem to carry us into a region different from our own-to be in a terra incognita of pure reasoning, to cast a chill on human glory.

  Walter Bagehot

  Science, Thinking, Ice

  Walter Bagehot, Richard Holt Hutton (1891). “Literary studies ; Religious and metaphysical essays ; Letters on the French coup d'état”

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• Like all Holmes' reasoning, the thing seemed simplicity itself when it was once explained. Dr. Watson, speaking of Sherlock Holmes.

  Arthur Conan Doyle

  Simplicity, Drs, Holmes

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• What we take ourselves to be doing when we think about what is the case or how we should act is something that cannot be reconciled with a reductive naturalism, for reasons distinct from those that entail the irreducibility of consciousness. It is not merely the subjectivity of thought but its capacity to transcend subjectivity and to discover what is objectively the case that presents a problem....Thought and reasoning are correct or incorrect in virtue of something independent of the thinker's beliefs, and even independent of the community of thinkers to which he belongs. (p. 71)

  Thomas Nagel

  Independent, Thinking, Community

  Thomas Nagel (2012). “Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False”, p.72, Oxford University Press

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• How different the reasoning is that men adopt when they are discussing the cases of men and those of women.

  Emmeline Pankhurst

  Men, Different, Cases

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• God is love. His plan for creation can only be rooted in love. Does not that simple thought, rather than erudite reasoning, offer solace to the human heart?

  Paramahansa Yogananda

  God, Heart, Simple

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• I have not come to know atheism as a result of logical reasoning and still less as an event in my life: in me it is a matter of instinct.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Logical Reasoning, Religion, Atheism

  Friedrich Nietzsche (2016). “Ecce Homo: How One Becomes What”, p.19, Friedrich Nietzsche

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• Man is the Reasoning Animal. Such is the claim. I think it is open to dispute. Indeed, my experiments have proven to me that he is the Unreasoning Animal... In truth, man is incurably foolish. Simple things which the other animals easily learn, he is incapable of learning. Among my experiments was this. In an hour I taught a cat and a dog to be friends. I put them in a cage. In another hour I taught them to be friends with a rabbit. In the course of two days I was able to add a fox, a goose, a squirrel and some doves. Finally a monkey. They lived together in peace; even affectionately.

  Mark Twain

  Dog, Cat, Simple

  "Mark Twain’s Book of Animals".

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• Chélan had acted as imprudently for Julien as he had for himself. He had given him the habit of reasoning correctly, and of not being put off by empty words, but he had neglected to tell him that this habit was a crime in the person of no importance, since every piece of logical reasoning is offensive.

  Stendhal

  Logical Reasoning, Pieces, Offensive

  Stendhal (2016). “The Red and the Black”, p.191, Xist Publishing

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• NOUMENON, n. That which exists, as distinguished from that which merely seems to exist, the latter being a phenomenon. The noumenon is a bit difficult to locate; it can be apprehended only by a process of reasoning - which is a phenomenon.

  Ambrose Bierce

  Process, Latter, Existence

  Ambrose Bierce (2016). “The Devil's Dictionary: The Devil World”, p.151, 谷月社

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• I told him that I thought it was law logic - an artificial system of reasoning, exclusively used in Courts of justice, but good for nothing anywhere else.

  John Quincy Adams

  Law, Justice, Logic

  "Memoirs of John Quincy Adams: Comprising Portions of His Diary from 1795 to 1848". Book by John Quincy Adams, 1875.

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• But that the reasoning from these facts, the drawing from them correct conclusions, is a matter of great difficulty, may be inferred from the imperfect state in which the Science is now found after it has been so long and so intensely studied.

  Nassau William Senior

  Science, Drawing, Long

  Nassau William Senior (1858). “Political Economy”, p.4

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• One of the big misapprehensions about mathematics that we perpetrate in our classrooms is that the teacher always seems to know the answer to any problem that is discussed.

  Leon Henkin

  Teacher, Math, Answers

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• The quantity of meaning compressed into small space by algebraic signs, is another circumstance that facilitates the reasonings we are accustomed to carry on by their aid.

  Charles Babbage

  Space, Aids, Circumstances

  Charles Babbage (1826). “On the Influence of Signs in Mathematical Reasoning”, p.6

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• Your reasoning is excellent, it's only your basic assumptions that are wrong.

  Ashleigh Brilliant

  Assumption, Excellent

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• Man is the Reasoning Animal. Such is the claim. I think it is open to dispute.

  Mark Twain

  Animal, Men, Thinking

  Mark Twain (1973). “What Is Man? and Other Philosophical Writings”, p.85, Univ of California Press

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• To be a fully functioning moral agent, one cannot passively accept moral principles handed down by fiat. Moral principles require moral reasoning.

  Michael Shermer

  Agents, Principles, Moral

  Michael Shermer (2005). “The Science of Good and Evil: Why People Cheat, Gossip, Care, Share, and Follow the Golden Rule”, p.16, Macmillan

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• Our imagination and reasoning powers facilitate anxiety; the anxious feeling is precipitated not by an absolute impending threat-such as the worry about an examination, a speech, travel-but rather by the symbolic and often unconscious representations.

  Willard Gaylin

  Worry, Imagination, Anxiety

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• The influence of electricity in producing decompositions, although of inestimable value as an instrument of discovery in chemical inquiries, can hardly be said to have been applied to the practical purposes of life, until the same powerful genius [Davy] which detected the principle, applied it, by a singular felicity of reasoning, to arrest the corrosion of the copper-sheathing of vessels. ... this was regarded as by Laplace as the greatest of Sir Humphry's discoveries.

  Charles Babbage

  Powerful, Science, Discovery

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• For these two years I have been gravitating towards your doctrines, and since the publication of your primula paper with accelerated velocity. By about this time next year I expect to have shot past you, and to find you pitching into me for being more Darwinian than yourself. However, you have set me going, and must just take the consequences, for I warn you I will stop at no point so long as clear reasoning will take me further.

  Thomas Huxley

  Science, Past, Years

  Thomas Henry Huxley (1908). “Life and Letters of Thomas Huxley, by His Son, Leonard Huxley”

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• Our reasonings are grounded upon two great principles, that of contradiction, in virtue of which we judge false that which involves a contradiction, and true that which is opposed or contradictory to the false.

  Gottfried Leibniz

  Science, Two, Judging

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• Infinity is a fathomless gulf, into which all things vanish.

  Marcus Aurelius

  Ontology, Infinity, Logic

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• Apologys for self-evident Truths can never have any effect on those who have so little Sense as to deny them. They are the Foundation of all Reasoning, and the only just Bottom on which Men can proceed in convincing one another of the Truth: and by consequence whoever is capable of denying them, is not in a condition to be informed.

  Anthony Collins

  Men, Self, Atheism

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• ... an inaccurate use of words produces such a strange confusion in all reasoning, that in the heat of debate, the combatants, unable to distinguish their friends from their foes, fall promiscuously on both.

  Maria Edgeworth

  Fall, Confusion, Use

  Maria Edgeworth, Richard Lovell Edgeworth (1824). “Works of Maria Edgeworth: Letters to literary ladies. Castle Rackrent. Leonora. Essay on Irish bulls. 1824”, p.40

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• Wherever the human mind is healthy and vigorous in all its proportions, great in imagination and emotion no less than in intellect, and not overborne by an undue or hardened pre-eminence of the mere reasoning faculties, there the grotesque will exist in full energy.

  John Ruskin

  Imagination, Healthy, Mind

  John Ruskin, John D. Rosenberg (1964). “The Genius of John Ruskin: Selections from His Writings”, p.214, University of Virginia Press

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• It is, indeed, right that we should look for, and hasten, so far as in us lies, the coming of the day of God; but not that we should check any human effort by anticipations of its approach. We shall hasten it best by endeavoring to work out the tasks that are appointed for us here; and, therefore, reasoning as if the world were to continue under its existing dispensation, and the powers which have just been granted to us were to be continued through myriads of future ages.

  John Ruskin

  Lying, Work Out, Effort

  John Ruskin (1867). “The Stones of Venice”, p.167

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