Reasoning Quotes - Page 32

• Our reasonings grasp at straws for premises and float on gossamers for deductions.

  Alfred North Whitehead

  Premises, Straws, Floats

  Alfred North Whitehead (1967). “Adventures of Ideas”, p.72, Simon and Schuster

  9 Copy quote

  Show source

• The number of people that can reason well is much smaller than those that can reason badly. If reasoning were like hauling rocks, then several reasoners might be better than one. But reasoning isn't like hauling rocks, it's like, it's like racing, where a single, galloping Barbary steed easily outruns a hundred wagon-pulling horses.

  Galileo Galilei

  Horse, Rocks, Numbers

  28 Copy quote

• Man is much more than a 'rational being' and lives more by sympathies and impressions than by conclusions. It darkens his eyes and dries up the wells of his humanity to be forever in search of doctrine. We need wholesome, experiencing na­tures, I dare affirm, much more than we need sound reasoning.

  Woodrow Wilson

  Eye, Men, Forever

  Woodrow Wilson (2005). “On Being Human”, p.20, Cosimo, Inc.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Infinity is a dark illimitable ocean, without bound.

  John Milton

  Ocean, Dark, Infinity

  4 Copy quote

• Heaven is angered by my arrogance; my proof [of the four-color theorem] is also defective.

  Hermann Minkowski

  Color, Heaven, Arrogance

  9 Copy quote

• The moment of truth, the sudden emergence of a new insight, is an act of intuition. Such intuitions give the appearance of miraculous flushes, or short-circuits of reasoning. In fact they may be likened to an immersed chain, of which only the beginning and the end are visible above the surface of consciousness. The diver vanishes at one end of the chain and comes up at the other end, guided by invisible links.

  Arthur Koestler

  Giving, Intuition, Links

  Arthur Koestler (1969). “The Act of Creation”

  25 Copy quote

  Show source

• A man cannot understand the art he is studying if he only looks for the end result without taking the time to delve deeply into the reasoning of the study.

  Miyamoto Musashi

  Art, Men, Looks

  297 Copy quote

• I wouldn't say the anthropologists were making art, but they were definitely justifying their practices with very personal reasoning, passion, and they were also experimenting with form. There was a sense of trying to be as sincere as possible, whether you were investigating something far away from you or very close.

  Aleksandra Mir

  Art, Passion, Practice

  Interview with Christopher Bollen, believermag.com. January 1, 2004.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• To imagine secret societies and conspiracy is a way not to react to the social and political life. Because you say, "We don't know who they are. We cannot react without reasoning." So it is a way to keep people far from the political environment.

  Umberto Eco

  People, Political, Secret

  Interview with Chris Wallace, www.interviewmagazine.com. November 2, 2015.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• We must admit that today conformity is on the Left. To be sure, the Right is not brilliant. But the Left is in complete decadence, a prisoner of words, caught in its own vocabulary, capable merely of stereotyped replies, constantly at a loss when faced with truth, from which it nevertheless claimed to derive its laws. The Left is schizophrenic and needs doctoring through pitiless self-criticism, exercise of the heart, close reasoning, and a little modesty.

  Albert Camus

  Heart, Loss, Exercise

  19 Copy quote

• Human rationality depends critically on sophisticated emotionality. It is only because our emotional brain works so well that our reasoning can work at all.

  Jonathan Haidt

  Emotional, Brain, Sophisticated

  Jonathan Haidt (2006). “The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom”, p.13, Basic Books

  14 Copy quote

  Show source

• As it is, plain reasoning assures me I am not indispensable to the universe: but with this reasoning, somehow, does not travel my belief.

  James Branch Cabell

  Doe, Belief, Indispensable

  James Branch Cabell (2013). “The Essential James Branch Cabell Collection”, eBookIt.com

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• I don't think I would worry about an oversaturation of information if it was indeed information. It is the slovenly, hasty traffic in cliché and sensationalism and bad reasoning that bothers me. I love finding arcane primary texts on the web. The people who think to put them up are heroes of mine.

  Marilynne Robinson

  Hero, Thinking, People

  "One of Obama’s Favorite Writers Redefines Spirituality". Interview with Gregory Barber, www.motherjones.com. October 25, 2015.

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• Don’t just follow the trend. You may have heard me say that it’s good to think in terms of the physics approach of first principles. Which is, rather than reasoning by analogy, you boil things down to the most fundamental truths you can imagine and you reason up from there.

  Elon Musk

  Thinking, Principles, Fundamentals

  23 Copy quote

• If a person is A) poorly, B) receives treatment intended to make him better, and C) gets better, then no power of reasoning known to medical science can convince him that it may not have been the treatment that restored his health.

  Peter Medawar

  Get Better, Medical Science, May

  4 Copy quote

• Woman's inaptitude for reasoning has not prevented her from arriving at truth; nor has man's ability to reason prevented him from floundering in absurdity.

  Elbert Hubbard

  Men, Arriving, Reason

  Harry Persons Taber, Elbert Hubbard (1905). “The Philistine: A Periodical of Protest”

  13 Copy quote

  Show source

• If your little savage were left to himself and be allowed to retain all his ignorance, he would in time join the infant's reasoning to the grown man's passion, he would strangle his father and sleep with his mother.

  Denis Diderot

  Mother, Father, Passion

  "Rameau's Nephew". Book by Denis Diderot, 1805.

  5 Copy quote

  Show source

• All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event — in the living act, the undoubted deed — there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of
  its features from behind the unreasoning mask.

  Herman Melville

  Men, Events, Deeds

  1851 Captain Ahab. Moby Dick, ch.36.

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• Human reasoning can never answer the mysteries of our lives.

  Caroline Myss

  Answers, Mystery, Humans

  Caroline Myss (2013). “Anatomy of the Spirit: The Seven Stages of Power and Healing”, p.89, Harmony

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• It is always the individual who thinks. Society does not think any more than it eats or drinks. The evolution of human reasoning from the naive thinking of primitive man to the more subtle thinking of modern science took place within society. However, thinking itself is always an achievement of individuals.

  Ludwig von Mises

  Men, Thinking, Primitive Man

  Ludwig Von Mises (1963). “Human action: a treatise on economics”

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Reasoning will never make a man correct an ill opinion, which by reasoning he never acquired

  Jonathan Swift

  Men, Opinion, Ill

  Jonathan Swift (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Jonathan Swift (Illustrated)”, p.1227, Delphi Classics

  6 Copy quote

  Show source

• Whatever you can, count.

  Francis Bacon

  Math, Logic

  7 Copy quote

• It is in the nature of foolish reasonings to seem good to the foolish reasoner.

  George Eliot

  Foolish, Seems

  George Eliot (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of George Eliot (Illustrated)”, p.5502, Delphi Classics

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• The art of reasoning becomes of first importance. In this line antiquity has left us the finest models for imitation; I should consider the speeches of Livy, Sallust, and Tacitus, as pre-eminent specimens of logic, taste, and that sententious brevity which, using not a word to spare, leaves not a moment for inattention to the hearer. Amplification is the vice of modern oratory.

  Thomas Jefferson

  Art, Taste, Firsts

  "The Writings of Thomas Jefferson". Book by Thomas Jefferson, p. 30, 1904.

  6 Copy quote

  Show source

• To abandon the principle of simplicity would be to abandon all reasoning about the external world

  Jim Holt

  Simplicity, Principles, Would Be

  Jim Holt (2012). “Why Does the World Exist?: One Man's Quest for the Big Answer”, p.96, Profile Books

  5 Copy quote

  Show source