Reasoning Quotes

Memorization has gotten a bad rap recently. Lots of students, and even some educators, say that being able to reason is more important than knowing facts; and besides, why bother committing things to memory when you've got Google? My response to this - after I've finished inwardly groaning - is that of course reasoning is important, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't know facts as well. It's not like you have to choose between one or the other. Besides, facts give you a foundation on which to reason about things.

Stefanie Weisman

Mind your attention! Don’t just give it to any action and reaction at all!

Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

Of course all such conclusions about appropriate actions against the rich and powerful are based on a fundamental flaw: This is us, and that is them. This crucial principle, deeply embedded in Western culture, suffices to undermine even the most precise analogy and the most impeccable reasoning.

Noam Chomsky

when you have a reasonable reason to dare, dare swiftly and unrelentingly

Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

4.39 HUMANITY & DIVINITYWhen you lose reasoning you forget humanity,When you forget laughter you lose Divinity.[222]t– 4

Munindra Misra

4. Ditties of Life – 4.39 HUMANITY & DIVINITYWhen you lose reasoning you forget humanity,When you forget laughter you lose Divinity.[222]t– 4

Munindra Misra

Perhaps the most general and most important mental habit to instill is an appreciation of the folly of trying to draw conclusions from incomplete and unrepresentative evidence. An essential corollary of this appreciation should be an awareness of how often our everyday experience presents us with biased samples of information.

Thomas Gilovich

When we prefer to believe something, we may approach the relevant evidence by asking ourselves,"what evidence is there to support this belief?"...Note that this question is not unbiased: It directs our attention to supportive evidence and away from information that might contradict the desired conclusion. Because it is almost always possible to uncover some supportive evidence, the asymmetrical way we frame the question makes us overly likely to become convinced of what we hope to be true.

Thomas Gilovich

Because so much disagreement remains hidden, our beliefs are not properly shaped by healthy scrutiny and debate. The absence of such argument also leads us to exaggerate the extent to which other people believe the way we do.

Thomas Gilovich

We may be particularly inclined to acquire and retain beliefs that make us feel good.

Thomas Gilovich

A person's conclusions can only be as solid as the information on which they are based. Thus, a person who is exposed to almost nothing but inaccurate information on a given subject almost inevitably develops an erroneous belief, a belief that can seem to be "an irresistible product" of the individual's (secondhand) experience.

Thomas Gilovich

we believe certain things because they ought to be true.

Thomas Gilovich

1. God is (by definition) a being than which no greater being can be thought.2. Greatness includes greatness of virtue.3. Therefore, God is a being than which no being could be more virtuous.4. But virtue involves overcoming pains and dangers.5. Indeed, a being can only be properly said to be virtuous if it can suffer pain or be destroyed.6. A God that can suffer pain or is destructible is not one than which no greater being can be thought.7.For you can think of a greater being, that is, one that is nonsuffering and indestructible.8. Therefore, God does not exist.

Douglas N. Walton

Like Molière’s M. Jourdain, who spoke prose all his life without knowing it, mathematicians have been reasoning for at least two millennia without being aware of all the principles underlying what they were doing. The real nature of the tools of their craft has become evident only within recent times A renaissance of logical studies in modern times begins with the publication in 1847 of George Boole’s 'The Mathematical Analysis of Logic'.

Ernest Nagel

Mathematics is not arithmetic. Though mathematics may have arisen from the practices of counting and measuring it really deals with logical reasoning in which theorems—general and specific statements—can be deduced from the starting assumptions. It is, perhaps, the purest and most rigorous of intellectual activities, and is often thought of as queen of the sciences.

Christopher Zeeman

I would like to believe that logic is questioning your reasoning to reach a conclusion.

Unarine Ramaru

All people, whether Aspie or neuro-typical are predisposed by their society to make guesses, jump to conclusions and then seek to defend those conclusions, regardless of logic or changing circumstance. This is sloppy, illogical thinking which may not hinder your life too much, under normal circumstances. But if you want to be a great detective, then such thinking will absolutely ruin your chances.

Alexei Maxim Russell

Causality is a pointless superstition. These days it would take more than one book to persuade anyone of that.

Arif Ahmed

Was it probably true that reasoning beings were equal? It seemed more like a belief than a fact, even if I agreed with it. If you followed logic all the way back to its origin, did you inevitably end up at point of illogic, an article of faith?

Rachel Hartman

Don't make the effort to appeal to logic and reasoning all the time; very few people can relate to that. Appeal to emotions instead; everyone, at least, can relate to that.

Ufuoma Apoki

Holmes,” I cried, “this is impossible.” “Admirable!” he said. “A most illuminating remark. It IS impossible as I state it, and therefore I must in some respect have stated it wrong. Yet you saw for yourself. Can you suggest any fallacy?

Arthur Conan Doyle

Quinns always come at half price, about half the time, and half-naked, even during the colder half of winter. A Quinn is like a queen, but draggier, and cheaper to buy and use for personal gain, unless you’re suspicious that you’re poor and illiterate like Jarod Kintz, in which case Quinns could be the spirits of your dead relatives, come to haunt you until you gather a massive fortune through selling books on the internet, to send some back in time through a portal you bought from the NSA, so they would have lived better lives without having to move a finger for their fortune. Oh, yah, and since they aren’t - they’re blue, like smurfs, yet they turn purple whenever tickled on the belly, which is something they seem to rather dislike, since they start biting and scratching when it happens, for no good reason, I might add.

Will Advise

If one does not have the basic conscientious capacity to refute the primitive textual verses of the scriptures that demand one to kill or torture another being for holding a different belief system than one's own, then that entity is no being of the civilized human society, it is merely a pest from the stone-age.

Abhijit Naskar

Searching for truth without skepticism, is like having sex without a genital.

Abhijit Naskar

Real atheist is not the one that does not believe in an imaginary big monkey, but the one that gives the imagination more importance than the reality.

Abhijit Naskar

How much truth is contained in something can be best determined by making it thoroughly laughable and then watching to see how much joking around it can take. For truth is a matter that can withstand mockery, that is freshened by any ironic gesture directed at it. Whatever cannot withstand satire is false.

Peter Sloterdijk

Great achievers are great thinkers and great thinkers, are great achievers.

Auliq-Ice

The more you read, the harder it is to condemn.

Glen Duncan

Patriotism or Nationalism without reasoning is what I call “Nationalist Fundamentalism”, which is as dangerous as “Religious Fundamentalism”.

Abhijit Naskar

A religion that demands absolutely irrefutable obedience, is anything but religion.

Abhijit Naskar

In thinking about ethics, we should not hesitate to question ethical views that are almost universally accepted if we have reasons for thinking that they may not be as securely grounded as they appear to be.

Peter Singer

Theologians, and religionists in general, start with a fantasy premise and then proceed to apply rigorous formal logic to tease out its implications. Stark himself points out that “theology consists of formal reasoning about God.” This is admirably exact. Theologians, beginning with a wished-for creation of their own minds, analyze that creation’s characteristics by rigorous application of the principles of formal—that is, deductive—logic.

Andrew Bernstein

Success shouldn't be revenge or a way to overwhelm the naysayers. If that is your reason, you are far from being content.

Unarine Ramaru

Consistent with the liberal views of the Enlightenment, Leibniz was an optimist with respect to human reasoning and scientific progress. Although he was a great reader and admirer of Spinoza, Leibniz, being a confirmed deist, rejected emphatically Spinoza's pantheism.

Shelby D. Hunt

The far we can see, we are! It is time we lifted our eyes beyond the horizon of our present boundaries and see goodies ahead of us.

Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

hapIf you're brighter than a lightning bug, don't show your ass

Stanley Victor Paskavci

If you're brighter than a lightning bug, don't show your ass

Stanley Victor Paskavich

The most important and uniquely glorious element of Buddha’s character was that, he did not compel his pupils to be slaves either to his teachings or to himself, but like a conscientious human, demanded from his followers to accept his words not merely out of regard for him but after subjecting them to a thorough examination. And this is where Buddha stands out from the crowd of self-proclaimed prophets.

Abhijit Naskar

What if it tempt you toward the flood, my lord?Or to the dreadful summit of the cliffThat beetles o'er his base into the sea,And there assume some other horrible formWhich might deprive your sovereignty of reasonAnd draw you into madness? Think of it.[The very place puts toys of desperation,Without more motive, into every brainThat looks so many fathoms to the seaAnd hears it roar beneath.]

William Shakespeare

... insanity is never reasonable.

E.A. Bucchianeri

Reason and Faith are not antithetical, but rather synergistic".

R. Alan Woods

The idea that reason and rationality is somehow separate from and antithetical to ones ' heart' is one of the most absurd theologies I have ever in my life heard." ~R. Alan Woods ("Just Keeping It Real", Copyright 2012)

R. Alan Woods

Being that 'reason is not antithetical to faith' (Woods) and that Pentecost established the Reality of super-nature (Lewis) and that 'theology matters' (Wimber), then 'empowered evangelicalism' (Nathan) is the natural expression of discipleship."~R. Alan Woods [2013]

R. Alan Woods

There are three people one can never reason with: a drunk, a crazy person, and a fool.

R. Alan Woods

Somewhere Chesterton writes--I think it is Chesterton--that you cannot reason a man from a position that reason didn’t deliver him to.

Alec Wilkinson

The sensible man,' Crow had said (to Sherlock Holmes), 'don't look to confirm what he already knows -- he looks to deny it. Finding evidence that backs up your theories ain't useful, but finding evidence that your theories are wrong is priceless. Never try to prove yourself right -- always try to prove yourself wrong instead.

Andy Lane

Reasoning with a drunkard is likeGoing under water with a torch to seek for a drowning man.

Thiruvalluvar

The first questions naturally raised by a person emerging from the fog of childhood are the same questions that led Aristotle and other great philosophers to think and write deeply on the subjects of first philosophy and ethics.

Alan E. Johnson

Passion has helped us; but can do so no more. It will in future be our enemy. Reason, cold, calculating, unimpassioned reason, must furnish all the materials for our future support and defence.

Abraham Lincoln

It is always more easy to discover and proclaim general principles than to apply them.

Winston S. Churchill

Do you know, I sometimes, catch myself wishing that I too were blind to the facts of life and only knew its fancies and illusions. They're wrong, all wrong, of course, and contrary to reason; but in the face of them my reason tells me, wrong and most wrong, that to dream and live illusions gives greater delight. And after all, delight is the wage for living. Without delight living is a worthless act. To labor at living and be unpaid is worse than to be dead. He who delights the most lives the most, and your dreams and unrealities are less disturbing to you and more gratifying than are my facts to me. I often doubt, I often doubt, the worthwhileness of reason. Dreams must be more substantial and satisfying. Emotional delight is more filling and lasting than intellectual delight by having the blues. Emotional delight is followed by no more than jaded senses which speedily recuperate. I envy you, I envy you

Jack London

Intuitions are like migratory birds, they come without a map without a reason.

Amit Ray

Moral philosophers say things like, ‘What is actually wrong with cannibalism?’ There are two ways of responding to that: one is to shrink back in horror and say, ‘Cannibalism! Cannibalism! We can’t talk about cannibalism!’ The other is to say, ‘Well, actually, what is wrong with cannibalism?’ Then you work it out and you tease it out and you decide yes, actually, cannibalism is wrong, but for the following reasons. So I’d like to think that my moral values at least partly come from reasoning. Trying to suppress the gut reaction as much as possible. ["Is Richard Dawkins destroying his reputation?", The Guardian, 9 June 2015]

Richard Dawkins

Reason is not always reasonable

Bangambiki Habyarimana

Play with reason and doubt will close all the gates

Bangambiki Habyarimana

The light obtained by setting straw men on fire is not what we mean by illumination.

Adam Gopnik

In the world of primitive savages, religion and bigotry go hand in hand. But, in the world of civilized humans, religion and reason must go hand in hand.

Abhijit Naskar

She was aware that reason had left the room. She was not sorry to see it go.

Libby Creelman

Sometimes all you need is one person with a guilty conscience to come forward and do the right thing. Often, the miracle you need resides inside of yourself, when you humbly ask for forgiveness.

Shannon L. Alder

If Jarod Kintz was a cat, he'd stalk people silently and deadly. Right now, all he does is bark at them for no good reason, like all the good people do.

Will Advise

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Reasoning Quotes

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