Reasoning Quotes - Page 31

• My opinion of mankind is founded upon the mournful fact that, so far as I can see, they find within themselves the means of believing in a thousand times as much as there is to believe in.

  Augustus De Morgan

  Believe, Mean, Ontology

  Augustus De Morgan (1872). “A Budget of Paradoxes Reprinted, with the Author's Additions, from the Athenaeum Augustus De Morgan”, p.70

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• You can't. Do you hear me? You think you've figured something out? You run over here so pleased with yourself because you changed your mind. Now you're certain. You're so... sloppy. You don't know anything. The book, the math, the dates, the writing, all that stuff you decided with your buddies, it's just evidence. It doesn't finish the job. It doesn't prove anything.

  David Auburn

  Running, Jobs, Book

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• After all, I quite naturally want to live in order to fulfill my whole capacity for living, and not in order to fulfill my reasoning capacity alone, which is no more than some one-twentieth of my capacity for living. What does reason know? It knows only what it has managed to learn (and it may never learn anything else; that isn't very reassuring, but why not admit it?), while human nature acts as a complete entity, with all that is in it, consciously or unconsciously; and though it may be wrong, it's nevertheless alive.

  Fyodor Dostoevsky

  Life, Order, Alive

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• They proved to me by convincing reasons that God does not exist; Afterwards I saw God, for he came and embraced me. And now what am I to believe- the reasoning of others or my own experience? Truth is what the soul has seen and experienced; the rest is appearance, prejudice and opinion.

  Sri Aurobindo

  God, Believe, Soul

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• Philebus was saying that enjoyment and pleasure and delight, and the class of feelings akin to them, are a good to every living being, whereas I contend, that not these, but wisdom and intelligence and memory, and their kindred, right opinion and true reasoning, are better and more desirable than pleasure

  Socrates

  Memories, Class, Feelings

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• All reasoning ends in an appeal to self-evidence.

  Coventry Patmore

  Self, Reason, Ends

  "The Rod, the Root, and the Flower". Book by Coventry Patmore, 1895.

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• Money corrupts the process of reasoning.

  Lawrence Lessig

  Process

  "ETech: Lessig Calls for Geeks to Code Money Out of Politics" by Ryan Singel, www.wired.com. March 05, 2008.

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• Too much reasoning has spoiled the contemporary mind. People have lost their hearts and faith.

  Mata Amritanandamayi

  Spiritual, Heart, People

  Twitter post from Apr 27, 2014

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• This view [of the infinite], which I consider to be the sole correct one, is held by only a few. While possibly I am the very first in history to take this position so explicitly, with all of its logical consequences, I know for sure that I shall not be the last!

  Georg Cantor

  Views, Ontology, Lasts

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

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• Although my knowledge grows more and more, nevertheless I do not for that reason believe that it can ever be actually infinite, since it can never reach a point so high that it will be unable to attain any greater increase.

  Rene Descartes

  Believe, Ontology, Logic

  Rene Descartes, Elizabeth Sanderson Haldane, G. R. T. Ross (2003). “Discourse on Method and Meditations”, p.89, Courier Corporation

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• Many persons entertain a prejudice against mathematical language, arising out of a confusion between the ideas of a mathematical science and an exact science. ...in reality, there is no such thing as an exact science.

  William Stanley Jevons

  Reality, Ideas, Confusion

  William Stanley Jevons (1879). “Political Economy”

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• ALGEBRA is a general Method of Computation by certain Signs and Symbols which have been contrived for this Purpose, and found convenient.

  Colin Maclaurin

  Purpose, Ontology, Logic

  Colin MacLaurin (1756). “A Treatise of Algebra, in Three Parts: Containing I. The Fundamental Rules and Operations; II. The Composition and Resolution of Equations of All Degrees, and the Different Affections of Their Roots; III. The Application of Algebra and Geometry to Each Other. To which is Added an Appendix Concerning the General Properties of Geometrical Lines”, p.1

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• Secondly, figures, the symbols of numerical magnitude, are frequently also the symbols of operations, as when they are the indices of powers. Wherever terms have a shifting meaning, independent sets of considerations are liable to become complicated together, and reasoning and results are frequently falsified.

  Ada Lovelace

  Independent, Together, Shifting

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• Common sense is merely unaided intuition, and unaided intuition is reasoning performed in the absense of instruments and the tested knowledge of science. Common sense tells us that massive satellites cannot hang suspended 36,000 kilometers above the one point on the earth's surface, but they do.

  E. O. Wilson

  Common Sense, Intuition, Earth

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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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• 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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• Nobody is made anything by hearing of rules, or laying them up in his memory; practice must settle the habit of doing, without reflecting on the rule; and you may as well hope to make a good painter, or musician, extempore, by a lecture and instruction in the arts of music and painting, as a coherent thinker, or a strict reasoner, by a set of rules, showing him wherein right reasoning consists.

  John Locke

  Art, Memories, Practice

  John Locke, James Augustus St. John (1872). “Philosophical Works: Preliminary discourse by the editor. On the conduct of the understanding. An essay concerning human understanding”, p.37

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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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• 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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• There is no sphere in which a human being can be supposed to act where one mode of reasoning will not, in every given instance, be more reasonable than any other mode. That mode the being is bound by every principle of justice to pursue.

  William Godwin

  Justice, Atheism, Spheres

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• I am most heartened when I'm talking to a team when they're reasoning to each other.

  Reid Hoffman

  Team, Talking

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• The world of conceptualized ideas is quite wonderful, even when it's - like Aristotle's Physics - an outmoded book. The physics is not true. But the reasoning is dazzling.

  William H. Gass

  Book, Ideas, World

  Interview with Stephen Schenkenberg, www.believermag.com. November, 2005.

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• Languages proclaim that woman is half of man, and by parity of reasoning, man is half of woman.

  Mahatma Gandhi

  Women, Half, Language

  Mahatma Gandhi (1964). “The Role of Women”

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• American politics are normally a result of pragmatic and not philosophical reasoning. No one in Washington has said we now prefer multilateralism.

  Henry A. Kissinger

  Philosophical, Results, Said

  Source: www.spiegel.de

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