Reasoning Quotes - Page 30

• I was at first but I mean I thought at first that I wanted a little bit of that in there but the reasoning behind what they cut and what they kept really makes sense and it really played for me when I saw it yesterday, it all worked and was understood.

  Brandon Routh

  Mean, Cutting, Yesterday

  "Brandon Routh for 'Superman Returns'". Interview with Paul Fischer, www.darkhorizons.com. June 16, 2006.

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• The reasoning isn't crazy. It's technically correct. If you're being true to the idea that government must not take positions on religious questions, then the Ninth Circuit opinion is quite persuasive.

  Jack Balkin

  Religious, Crazy, Ideas

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• He who lets the world, or his own portion of it, choose his plan of life for him, has no need of any other faculty than the ape-like one of imitation. He who chooses his plan for himself, employs all his faculties. He must use observation to see, reasoning and judgment to foresee, activity to gather materials for decision, discrimination to decide, and when he has decided, firmness and self-control to hold to his deliberate decision.

  John Stuart Mill

  Self, Decision, Apes

  John Stuart Mill (1865). “On Liberty”, p.34

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• All physical and nonphysical things have another side, a side that is not visible to the senses or accessible to the reasoning mind, a side that can only be known and experienced intuitively by emptying one's own mind of thoughts.

  Frederick Lenz

  Mind, Sides, Visible

  Frederick Lenz (1994). “Surfing the Himalayas: conversations and travels with Master Fwap”, Interglobal Seminars

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• Apologys for self-evident Truths can never have any effect on those who have so little Sense as to deny them. They are the Foundation of all Reasoning, and the only just Bottom on which Men can proceed in convincing one another of the Truth: and by consequence whoever is capable of denying them, is not in a condition to be informed.

  Anthony Collins

  Men, Self, Atheism

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• It is, indeed, right that we should look for, and hasten, so far as in us lies, the coming of the day of God; but not that we should check any human effort by anticipations of its approach. We shall hasten it best by endeavoring to work out the tasks that are appointed for us here; and, therefore, reasoning as if the world were to continue under its existing dispensation, and the powers which have just been granted to us were to be continued through myriads of future ages.

  John Ruskin

  Lying, Work Out, Effort

  John Ruskin (1867). “The Stones of Venice”, p.167

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• Wherever the human mind is healthy and vigorous in all its proportions, great in imagination and emotion no less than in intellect, and not overborne by an undue or hardened pre-eminence of the mere reasoning faculties, there the grotesque will exist in full energy.

  John Ruskin

  Imagination, Healthy, Mind

  John Ruskin, John D. Rosenberg (1964). “The Genius of John Ruskin: Selections from His Writings”, p.214, University of Virginia Press

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• The influence of electricity in producing decompositions, although of inestimable value as an instrument of discovery in chemical inquiries, can hardly be said to have been applied to the practical purposes of life, until the same powerful genius [Davy] which detected the principle, applied it, by a singular felicity of reasoning, to arrest the corrosion of the copper-sheathing of vessels. ... this was regarded as by Laplace as the greatest of Sir Humphry's discoveries.

  Charles Babbage

  Powerful, Science, Discovery

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• ... an inaccurate use of words produces such a strange confusion in all reasoning, that in the heat of debate, the combatants, unable to distinguish their friends from their foes, fall promiscuously on both.

  Maria Edgeworth

  Fall, Confusion, Use

  Maria Edgeworth, Richard Lovell Edgeworth (1824). “Works of Maria Edgeworth: Letters to literary ladies. Castle Rackrent. Leonora. Essay on Irish bulls. 1824”, p.40

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• For these two years I have been gravitating towards your doctrines, and since the publication of your primula paper with accelerated velocity. By about this time next year I expect to have shot past you, and to find you pitching into me for being more Darwinian than yourself. However, you have set me going, and must just take the consequences, for I warn you I will stop at no point so long as clear reasoning will take me further.

  Thomas Huxley

  Science, Past, Years

  Thomas Henry Huxley (1908). “Life and Letters of Thomas Huxley, by His Son, Leonard Huxley”

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• Our reasonings are grounded upon two great principles, that of contradiction, in virtue of which we judge false that which involves a contradiction, and true that which is opposed or contradictory to the false.

  Gottfried Leibniz

  Science, Two, Judging

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• Infinity is a fathomless gulf, into which all things vanish.

  Marcus Aurelius

  Ontology, Infinity, Logic

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• One of the big misapprehensions about mathematics that we perpetrate in our classrooms is that the teacher always seems to know the answer to any problem that is discussed.

  Leon Henkin

  Teacher, Math, Answers

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• In every enterprise ... the mind is always reasoning, and, even when we seem to act without a motive, an instinctive logic still directs the mind. Only we are not aware of it, because we begin by reasoning before we know or say that we are reasoning, just as we begin by speaking before we observe that we are speaking, and just as we begin by seeing and hearing before we know what we see or what we hear.

  Claude Bernard

  Science, Mind, Hearing

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• The increased abstraction in mathematics that took place during the early part of this century was paralleled by a similar trend in the arts. In both cases, the increased level of abstraction demands greater effort on the part of anyone who wants to understand the work.

  Keith Devlin

  Art, Effort, Levels

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• We call infinite that thing whose limits we have not perceived, and so by that word we do not signify what we understand about a thing, but rather what we do not understand.

  Rene Descartes

  Ontology, Limits, Logic

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• A saving knowledge of Christ crucified and risen is not the mere result of right reasoning about historical facts. It is the result of spiritual illumination to see those facts for what they really are: a revelation of the truth and glory of God in the face of Christ-who is the same yesterday today and forever.

  John Piper

  Spiritual, Yesterday, Illumination

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• The actual infinite arises in three contexts: first when it is realized in the most complete form, in a fully independent otherworldly being, in Deo, where I call it the Absolute Infinite or simply Absolute; second when it occurs in the contingent, created world; third when the mind grasps it in abstracto as a mathematical magnitude, number or order type.

  Georg Cantor

  Independent, Order, Numbers

  "Mind Tools: The Five Levels of Mathematical Reality". Book by Rudy Rucker, 1987.

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• The anceints devoted a lifetime to the study of arithmetic; it required days to extract a square root or to multiply two numbers together. Is there any harm in skipping all that, in letting the school boy learn multiplication sums, and in starting his more abstract reasoning at a more advanced point. Where would be the harm in letting the boy assume the truth of many propositions of the first four books of Euclid, letting him assume their truth partly by faith, partly by trial?

  John Perry

  Book, School, Boys

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• No man can tame a tiger into a kitten by stroking it. There can be no appeasement with ruthlessness. There can be no reasoning with an incendiary bomb.

  Franklin D. Roosevelt

  Men, Bombs, Ruthlessness

  The Great Arsenal of Democracy, delivered 29 December 1940

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• Imagination is more robust in proportion as reasoning power is weak.

  Giambattista Vico

  Imagination, Weak, Robust

  Giambattista Vico (2015). “The New Science of Giambattista Vico”, p.142, Cornell University Press

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• He knows very little of mankind who expects, by any facts or reasoning, to convince a determined party man.

  Johann Kaspar Lavater

  Party, Men, Society

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• Neither the true nor the false roots are always real; sometimes they are imaginary; that is, while we can always imagine as many roots for each equation as I have assigned, yet there is not always a definite quantity corresponding to each root we have imagined.

  Rene Descartes

  Real, Roots, Ontology

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• The cause of the six-sided shape of a snowflake is none other than that of the ordered shapes of plants and of numerical constants; and since in them nothing occurs without supreme reason-not, to be sure, such as discursive reasoning discovers, but such as existed from the first in the Creators's design and is preserved from that origin to this day in the wonderful nature of animal faculties, I do not believe that even in a snowflake this ordered pattern exists at random.

  Johannes Kepler

  Believe, Animal, Design

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• My theory stands as firm as a rock; every arrow directed against it will return quickly to its archer. How do I know this? Because I have studied it from all sides for many years; because I have examined all objections which have ever been made against the infinite numbers; and above all because I have followed its roots, so to speak, to the first infallible cause of all created things.

  Georg Cantor

  Archer, Years, Roots

  "Journey Through Genius". Book by William Dunham, 1990.

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