Reasoning Quotes - Page 6

• Of course, when a poem is being born, the reasoning part of the brain throbs away at full throttle, but all the other areas are overlapping and interacting as well, the emotional, intuitive, animal areas.

  Michael Longley

  Animal, Emotional, Brain

  Source: www.poetrymagazines.org.uk

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• We are used to discounting the river-gods and dryads of the Greeks as poetical fancies, and even the chief figures in the classical Pantheon-Venus, Minerva, Mars, and the rest-as allegories. But, forgetting that they once carried as much sanctity as our saints and divinities, we refrain from applying the same reasoning to our own objects of worship.

  Julian Huxley

  God, Religious, Rivers

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• And another thing about German symphonic development. I tell you, our cold kvass soup is a horror to the Germans, and yet we eat it with pleasure. And their cold cherry soup is a horror to us, and yet it sends a German into ecstacy. In short, symphonic development is just like German philosophy and soup-all worked out and systematized. When a German thinks, he reasons his way to a conclusion. Our Russian brother, on the other hand, starts with a conclusion and then might amuse himself with some reasoning.

  Modest Petrovich Mussorgsky

  Brother, Philosophy, Thinking

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• It is not therefore the business of philosophy, in our present situation in the universe, to attempt to take in at once, in one view, the whole scheme of nature; but to extend, with great care and circumspection, our knowledge, by just steps, from sensible things, as far as our observations or reasonings from them will carry us, in our enquiries concerning either the greater motions and operations of nature, or her more subtile and hidden works. In this way Sir Isaac Newton proceeded in his discoveries.

  Colin Maclaurin

  Philosophy, Knowledge, Science

  Colin Maclaurin (1750). “An Account of Sir Isaac Newton's Philosophical Discoveries. 2. Ed”, p.20

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• Insomnia is an indication, not a chaos. Its like ache. Youre not going to provide a patient ache medicine without figuring out whats reasoning the pain.

  Judith Owen

  Pain, Insomnia, Medicine

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• Most of our so-called reasoning consists in finding arguments for going on believing as we already do.

  James Harvey Robinson

  Wisdom, Believe, Intellectual

  James Harvey Robinson (1939). “The Mind in the Making”

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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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• For most problems found in mathematics textbooks, mathematical reasoning is quite useful. But how often do people find textbook problems in real life? At work or in daily life, factors other than strict reasoning are often more important. Sometimes intuition and instinct provide better guides; sometimes computer simulations are more convenient or more reliable; sometimes rules of thumb or back-of-the-envelope estimates are all that is needed.

  Lynn Steen

  Real, People, Intuition

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• Intellectual freedom means the right to re-examine much that has been long taken for granted. A free man must be a reasoning man, and he must dare doubt what a legislative or electoral majority may most passionately assert.

  Robert H. Jackson

  Taken, Mean, Men

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• What could me more plausible than a line of reasoning which argues that the explanation of the origin of a system was to achieve an end that has in fact been achieved?

  Immanuel Wallerstein

  Lines, Facts, Arguing

  Immanuel Maurice Wallerstein (1995). “Capistalist Civilisation”, p.41, Verso

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• 95 percent of economics is common sense made complicated, and even for the remaining 5 percent, the essential reasoning, if not all the technical details, can be explained in plain terms.

  Ha-Joon Chang

  Common Sense, Essentials, Details

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• Science has long been in the value business. Despite a widespread belief to the contrary, scientific validity is not the result of scientists abstaining from making value judgments; rather, scientific validity is the result of scientists making their best efforts to value principles of reasoning that link their beliefs to reality, through reliable chains of evidence and argument.

  Sam Harris

  Reality, Objectivity, Best Effort

  "The Moral Landscape". Book by Sam Harris, 2010.

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• I acknowledge myself a unitarian - Believing that the Father alone, is the supreme God, and that Jesus Christ derived his Being, and all his powers and honors from the Father. ... There is not any reasoning which can convince me, contrary to my senses, that three is one, and one three.

  Abigail Adams

  Jesus, Father, Believe

  Abigail Adams, John P. Kaminski (2009). “The Quotable Abigail Adams”, p.316, Harvard University Press

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• The knowledge of God, the belief in God, is what I call an a-rational process. It's not rational - it doesn't proceed by scientific investigation - but it's not irrational because it doesn't contradict my reasoning process. It goes beyond it.

  George Coyne

  Knowledge Of God, Belief, Process

  Source: www.pbs.org

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• God doesn't help. I think that's a knockdown argument. I think that it really shows that whatever moral knowledge we have and whatever moral progress we make in our knowledge or whatever progress we make in our moral knowledge is not coming really from religion. It's coming from the very hard work really of moral philosophy, of trying to ground our moral reasonings.

  Rebecca Goldstein

  Philosophy, Hard Work, Thinking

  Source: bigthink.com

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• We need science. We need empirical evidence. We can't just use mathematical reasoning to deduce the nature of the world.

  Rebecca Goldstein

  Needs, Use, World

  Source: bigthink.com

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• In all the disputes which have excited Christians against each other, Rome has invariably decided in favor of that opinion which tended most towards the suppression of the human intellect and the annihilation of the reasoning powers.

  Voltaire

  Christian, Rome, Religion

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• I can't describe it in words, but I can see it in my head, its color, its light, its shapes, and I've managed to synthesize my love for myself by way of many different reasonings and processes, and I've been able to really synthesize my own satisfaction and things that do it for me. They've usually been self-taught, self-instructed, self-refined. So to be with anybody else has to somewhat lie in that comfort zone I've created with myself so well.

  John Mayer

  Lying, Light, Self

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• The idea of reasoning with terrorists without force or with appeasement is naive, and I think it's dangerous

  George Allen

  Thinking, Ideas, Appeasement

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• Mathematical proofs, like diamonds, are hard and clear, and will be touched with nothing but strict reasoning.

  John Locke

  Math, Proof, Diamond

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• All correct reasoning is a grand system of tautologies, but only God can make direct use of that fact

  Herbert Simon

  Use, Facts, Tautology

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• Our moral reasoning is plagued by two illusions. The first illusion can be called the wag-the-dog illusion: We believe that our own moral judgment (the dog) is driven by our own moral reasoning (the tail). The second illusion can be called the wag-theother-dog's-tail illusion: In a moral argument, we expect the successful rebuttal of an opponent's arguments to change the opponent's mind. Such a belief is like thinking that forcing a dog's tail to wag by moving it with your hand will make the dog happy.

  Sam Harris

  Dog, Atheist, Moving

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• Unless we take care to clear the first principles of knowledge from the incumbrance and delusion of words, we may make infinite reasonings upon them to no purpose. We may deduce consequences, and never be the wiser.

  David Berman

  Principles, Purpose, Care

  David Berman (1997). “Berkeley”

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