Quotes on Reason

Reason and calm judgment, the qualities specially belonging to a leader.

Either things happen for a reason, or they happen for no reason at all. Either one's life is a thread in a glorious tapestry or humanity is just a hopelessly tangled knot.

Memory is all we are. Moments and feelings, captured in amber, strung on filaments of reason. Take a man’s memories and you take all of him. Chip away a memory at a time and you destroy him as surely as if you hammered nail after nail through his skull.

I have every reason to believe that an individual man or woman fluent in several tongues seduces, possesses, remembers differently according to his or her use of the relevant language.

Reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can exist apart from religious principle.

I see no reason that a golf course cannot be played in 18 birdies. Just because no one has ever done that doesn't mean it can't be done.

I think the reason these readers come back to me is because I represent their points of view. It may not be my point of view, but that's OK. Everyone still deserves to have their say.

For instance, I never complained that my birthday was overlooked; people were even surprised, with a touch of admiration, by my discretion on this subject. But the reason for my disinterestedness was even more discreet: I longed to be forgotten in order to be able to complain to myself... Once my solitude was thoroughly proved, I could surrender to the charms of a virile self-pity.

It is time that scientists and other public intellectuals observed that the contest between faith and reason is zero-sum.

We don't love qualities; we love a person; sometimes by reason of their defects as well as their qualities.

Brick walls are there for a reason. They give us a chance to show how badly we want

When people exercise, we talk about endorphins, but endorphins are just short-term. The reason why exercise is valuable is it trains your brain to believe, 'My behavior matters,' which is optimism.

Some of the animals outsee man, outsmell him, outhear him, outrun him, outswim him, because their lives depend more upon these special powers than his does; but he can outwit them all because he has the resourcefulness of reason and is at home in many different fields.

You can find good reasons to scuttle your equities in every morning paper and on every broadcast of the nightly news.

Customers often value a good more when its price goes up. One reason may be its signaling value. An expensive handcrafted mechanical watch may tell time no more accurately than a cheap quartz model; but, because few people can afford one, buying it signals that the owner is rich.

The reason to preserve wilderness is that we need it. We need wilderness of all kinds, large and small, public and private. Wee need to go now and again into places where our work is disallowed, where our hopes and plans have no standing. We need to come into the presence of the unqualified and mysterious formality of Creation.

I think part of the reason I'm attracted to Foster is because he's such a mess. I mean, the people I have loved in my life have never been easy to love. I'm not used to normal. I'm used to disaster. I don't know, as messed up as he is, he's also sort of exciting, sort of a challenge. I'm accustomed to working for love.

After telling the hard facts to anyone from lover to friend, I have changed in their eyes. Often it is awe or admiration, sometimes it is repulsion, once or twice it has been fury hurled directly at me for reasons I remain unsure of.

In the 2013 Economists Program, we hired 51 percent women, 49 percent men. And the reason for that is that we have a draft from all over the world, and we've hired, for instance, in that group, a good number of Chinese economists - highly qualified, all Ph.D.s from the best universities of the world. And guess what? They're all women.

I believe in God the way I believe in quarks. People whose business it is to know about quantum physics or religion tell me they have good reason to believe that quarks and God exist. And they tell me that if I wanted to devote my life to learning what they've learned, I'd find quarks and God just like they did.

Natural death is independent of all reason and is really an irrational death, in which the pitiable substance of the shell determines how long the kernel is to exist or not; in which, accordingly, the stunted, diseased and dull witted jailer is lord, and indicates the moment at which his distinguished prisoner shall die.