Reasoning Quotes - Page 5

• Each Act of Parliament intended to address harassment and discrimination has faced objections on the basis of 'you'll never be able to prove...' and 'there's too much legislation already...'. In no case has this line of reasoning ever been sustained.

  Tim Field

  Bullying, Addresses, Lines

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• Reasoning with a child is fine, if you can reach the child's reason without destroying your own.

  John Mason Brown

  Education, Children, Reason

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• Conclusions arrived at through reasoning have very little or no influence in altering the course of our lives.

  Carlos Castaneda

  Journey, Innovation, Intuition

  Carlos Castaneda (2013). “Fire from Within”, p.36, Simon and Schuster

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• I had no idea, however, that in Pennsylvania, the cradle of toleration and freedom of religion, it [fanaticism] could have arisen to the height you describe. This must be owing to the growth of Presbyterianism. The blasphemy of the five points of Calvin, and the impossibility of defending them, render their advocates impatient of reasoning, irritable, and prone to denunciation.

  Thomas Jefferson

  Religious, Ideas, Growth

  Thomas Jefferson (1829). “Memoir, Correspondence, and Miscellanies: From the Papers of Thomas Jefferson”, p.358

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• Science is not a system of certain, or -established, statements; nor is it a system which steadily advances towards a state of finality... And our guesses are guided by the unscientific, the metaphysical (though biologically explicable) faith in laws, in regularities which we can uncover-discover. Like Bacon, we might describe our own contemporary science-'the method of reasoning which men now ordinarily apply to nature'-as consisting of 'anticipations, rash and premature' and as 'prejudices'.

  Karl Popper

  Nature, Science, Men

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• Placed on this isthmus of a middle state,
  A being darkly wise and rudely great...
  He hangs between; in doubt to act or rest;
  In doubt to deem himself a god, or beast;
  In doubt his mind or body to prefer;
  Born to die, and reasoning but to err.

  Alexander Pope

  Wise, Fear, Doubt

  Alexander Pope (1867). “An Essay on Man: In Four Epistles, to H.St.John, Lord Bolingbroke”, p.18

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• Necessity, especially in politics, often occasions false hopes, false reasonings, and a system of measures, correspondingly erroneous.

  Alexander Hamilton

  Human Nature, False Hope, Occasions

  Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, John Jay (2007). “The Federalist Papers”, p.257, Filiquarian Publishing, LLC.

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• The soul enjoys silence and peace, not by many reasonings, but by simply contemplating the truth.

  Peter of Alcantara

  Silence, Soul, Enjoy

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• Beware of reasoning about God's Word - obey It.

  Oswald Chambers

  Christianity

  Oswald Chambers (2011). “The Quotable Oswald Chambers”, p.30, Discovery House

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• I have found power in the mysteries of thought, exaltation in the changing of the Muses; I have been versed in the reasonings of men; but Fate is stronger than anything I have known.

  Euripides

  Fate, Men, Stronger

  "Alcestis". Play by Euripides, 438 BCE.

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• The knowledge of Natural-History, being Observation of Matters of Fact, is more certain than most others, and in my slender Opinion, less subject to Mistakes than Reasonings, Hypotheses, and Deductions are; ... These are things we are sure of, so far as our Senses are not fallible; and which, in probability, have been ever since the Creation, and will remain to the End of the World, in the same Condition we now find them.

  Hans Sloane

  Mistake, Knowledge, Science

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• We must trust to nothing but facts: These are presented to us by Nature, and cannot deceive. We ought, in every instance, to submit our reasoning to the test of experiment, and never to search for truth but by the natural road of experiment and observation.

  Antoine Lavoisier

  Nature, Science, Deception

  1789 Traiteele mentaire de la chimie ('Elements of Chemistr y', translated by Robert Kerr).

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• In the final, the positive, state, the mind has given over the vain search after absolute notions, the origin and destination of the universe, and the causes of phenomena, and applies itself to the study of their laws - that is, their invariable relations of succession and resemblance. Reasoning and observation, duly combined, are the means of this knowledge. What is now understood when we speak of an explanation of facts is simply the establishment of a connection between single phenomena and some general facts.

  Auguste Comte

  Knowledge, Mean, Science

  "Auguste Comte and Positivism: The Essential Writings".

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• The basis of the discovery is imagination, careful reasoning and experimentation where the use of knowledge created by those who came before is an important component.

  Bengt I. Samuelsson

  Knowledge, Science, Discovery

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• The theoretical side of physical chemistry is and will probably remain the dominant one; it is by this peculiarity that it has exerted such a great influence upon the neighboring sciences, pure and applied, and on this ground physical chemistry may be regarded as an excellent school of exact reasoning for all students of the natural sciences.

  Svante Arrhenius

  School, Science, Excellence

  Svante Arrhenius (1912). “Theories of Solutions”

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• Philosophy would long ago have reached a high level if our predecessors and fathers had put this into practice; and we would not waste time on the primary difficulties, which appear now as severe as in the first centuries which noticed them. We would have the experience of assured phenomena, which would serve as principles for a solid reasoning; truth would not be so deeply sunken; nature would have taken off most of her envelopes; one would see the marvels she contains in all her individuals.

  Marin Mersenne

  Nature, Truth, Father

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• Facts are certainly the solid and true foundation of all sectors of nature study ... Reasoning must never find itself contradicting definite facts; but reasoning must allow us to distinguish, among facts that have been reported, those that we can fully believe, those that are questionable, and those that are false. It will not allow us to lend faith to those that are directly contrary to others whose certainty is known to us; it will not allow us to accept as true those that fly in the face of unquestionable principles.

  Rene Antoine Ferchault de Reaumur

  Faith, Nature, Believe

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• Man is made for science; he reasons from effects to causes, and from causes to effects; but he does not always reason without error. In reasoning, therefore, from appearances which are particular, care must be taken how we generalize; we should be cautious not to attribute to nature, laws which may perhaps be only of our own invention.

  James Hutton

  Taken, Science, Men

  James Hutton (1788*). “Theory of the earth; or an investigation of the laws observable in the composition, dissolution and restoration of land upon the globe. (From. the Trans., Roy. soc. of Edinb.).”, p.65

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• At first view it might seem not to square with the republican theory, to suppose either that a majority have not the right, or that a minority will have the force to subvert a government . . . . But theoretic reasoning in this, as in most other cases, must be qualified by the lessons of practice.

  James Madison

  Squares, Government, Views

  Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, John Jay (2015). “The Federalist Papers: A Collection of Essays Written in Favour of the New Constitution”, p.216, Coventry House Publishing

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• Controlling the position of one's body and keeping a straight back are not contemplation, but can in fact become an obstacle to contemplation. ...when leaving the body 'uncontrolled' is spoken of, what is meant is simply allowing the body to remain in an authentic, uncorrected condition, in which it is not necessary to modify or improve anything. This is because, since all our attempts at correcting the body come from the reasoning mind, they are all false and artificial.

  Namkhai Norbu

  Leaving, Mind, Body

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• I could not accept that organizational interpretations, based on shifting human reasoning, could ever be made equal in authority to the actual statements found in God's unchangeable Word.

  Raymond Franz

  Shifting, Authority, Accepting

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• In a republican nation whose citizens are to be led by reason and persuasion and not by force, the art of reasoning becomes of first importance.

  Thomas Jefferson

  Art, Liberty, Citizens

  Thomas Jefferson, Jerry Holmes (2002). “Thomas Jefferson: A Chronology of His Thoughts”, p.299, Rowman & Littlefield

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• For chemistry is no science form'd à priori; 'tis no production of the human mind, framed by reasoning and deduction: it took its rise from a number of experiments casually made, without any expectation of what follow'd; and was only reduced into an art or system, by collecting and comparing the effects of such unpremeditated experiments, and observing the uniform tendency thereof. So far, then, as a number of experimenters agree to establish any undoubted truth; so far they may be consider'd as constituting the theory of chemistry.

  Herman Boerhaave

  Art, Science, Numbers

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• [My Book] will endeavour to establish the principle[s] of reasoning in ... [geology]; and all my geology will come in as illustration of my views of those principles, and as evidence strengthening the system necessarily arising out of the admission of such principles, which... are neither more nor less than that no causes whatever have from the earliest time to which we can look back, to the present, ever acted, but those now acting; and that they never acted with different degrees of energy from that which they now exert.

  Charles Lyell

  Book, Science, Views

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• Where faith commences, science ends. Both these arts of the human mind must be strictly kept apart from each other. Faith has its origin in the poetic imagination; knowledge, on the other hand, originates in the reasoning intelligence of man. Science has to pluck the blessed fruits from the tree of knowledge, unconcerned whether these conquests trench upon the poetical imaginings of faith or not.

  Ernst Haeckel

  Faith, Art, Blessed

  Ernst Haeckel (1887). “The History of Creation, Or, The Development of the Earth and Its Inhabitants by the Action of Natural Causes: A Popular Exposition of the Doctrine of Evolution in General, and of that of Darwin, Goethe, and Lamarck in Particular”

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