Quotes on Reason

Suddenly for no earthly reason I felt immensely sorry for him and longed to say something real, something with wings and a heart, but the birds I wanted settled on my shoulders and head only later when I was alone and not in need of words.

And yet,to say the truth, reason and love keep little company together nowadays.

I don't think jealousy has much of a connection with real, objective conditions. Like if you're fortunate you're not jealous, but if life hasn't blessed you, you are jealous. Jealousy doesn't work that way. It's more like a tumor secretly growing inside us that gets bigger and bigger, beyond all reason. Even if you find out it's there, there's nothing you can do to stop it.

I once lay in a white hospital for the dying and the dying self, where some god pissed a rain of reason to make things grow only to die, where on my knees I prayed for LIGHT, I prayed for l*i*g*h*t, and praying crawled like a blind slug into the web where threads of wind stuck against my mind and I died of pity for Man, for myself, on a cross without nails, watching in fear as the pig belches in his sty, farts, blinks and eats.

I have had many successes and many failures in my life. My successes have always been for different reasons, but my failures have always been for the same reason: I said yes when I meant no.

Bush and bin Laden are really on the same side: the side of faith and violence against the side of reason and discussion. Both have implacable faith that they are right and the other is evil. Each believes that when he dies he is going to heaven. Each believes that if he could kill the other, his path to paradise in the next world would be even swifter. The delusional "next world" is welcome to both of them. This world would be a much better place without either of them.

He is not apprehended by reason, but by life.

People wonder why the novel is the most popular form of literature; people wonder why it is read more than books of science or books of metaphysics. The reason is very simple; it is merely that the novel is more true than they are.

We are usually convinced more easily by reasons we have found ourselves than by those which have occurred to others.

its no surprise to me that anyone hardly tells the truth about how they feel. The smart ones keep to themselves for good reason. Why would you want to tell anyone anything that's dear to you? Even when you like them and want nothing more than to be closer to them? It's so painful to be next to someone you feel so strongly about and know you can't say the things you want to.

I am an excitable person who only understands life lyrically, musically, in whom feelings are much stronger as reason. I am so thirsty for the marvelous that only the marvelous has power over me. Anything I can not transform into something marvelous, I let go. Reality doesn't impress me. I only believe in intoxication, in ecstasy, and when ordinary life shackles me, I escape, one way or another. No more walls.

Surrender to a logic more powerful than reason.

The absurd is lucid reason noting its limits.

If it can be verified, we don't need faith... Faith is for that which lies on the other side of reason. Faith is what makes life bearable, with all its tragedies and ambiguities and sudden, startling joys.

I object to being told that I am saving daylight when my reason tells me that I am doing nothing of the kind... At the back of the Daylight Saving scheme I detect the bony, blue-fingered hand of Puritanism, eager to push people into bed earlier, and get them up earlier, to make them healthy, wealthy and wise in spite of themselves.

Excellence, then, is a state concerned with choice, lying in a mean, relative to us, this being determined by reason and in the way in which the man of practical wisdom would determine it.

Every art and every inquiry, and similarly every action and choice, is thought to aim at some good; and for this reason the good has rightly been declared to be that at which all things aim.

He who can be, and therefore is, another's, and he who participates in reason enough to apprehend, but not to have, is a slave by nature.

The chief reason for going to school is to get the impression fixed for life that there is a book side for everything.

I think we have lost our groove as a country. One of the reasons was the attack on 9/11. We got knocked off our game. From a country that always exported hope we went into the business of exporting fear.

The law is reason, free from passion.