Motivational Quotes

Reason

People are governed with the head; kindness of heart is little use in chess.

- Chamfort, Sebastien-Roch Nicolas De

Best Quotes about Reason

What is now reason was formerly impulse or instinct.

Ovid

Whenever a person strives, by the help of dialectic, to start in pursuit of every reality by a simple process of reason, independent of all sensuous information -- never flinching, until by an act of the pure intelligence he has grasped the real nature of good -- he arrives at the very end of the intellectual world.

Plato

Let reason govern desire.

Cicero, Marcus T.

To him who looks upon the world rationally, the world in its turn presents a rational aspect. The relation is mutual.

Hegel, Georg

Don't ever take a fence down until you know why it was put up.

Frost, Robert

Reason now gazes above the realm of the dark but warm feelings as the Alpine peaks do above the clouds. They behold the sun more clearly and distinctly, but they are cold and unfruitful.

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

If you can once engage people's pride, love, pity, ambition (or whatever is their prevailing passion) on your side, you need not fear what their reason can do against you.

Chesterfield, Lord

Reason itself is fallible, and this fallibility must find a place in our logic.

Abbagnano, Nicola

Reason is the historian, but passions are the actors.

Rivarol, Antoine

10.

A man always has two reasons for doing anything -- a good reason and the real reason.

Morgan, John Pierpont

11.

What is a man, If his chief good and market of his time Be but to sleep and feed? a beast, no more. Sure, he that made us with such large discourse, Looking before and after, gave us not That capability and god-like reason To fust in us unused.

Shakespeare, William

12.

Reasonable people adapt themselves to the world. Unreasonable people attempt to adapt the world to themselves. All progress, therefore, depends on unreasonable people.

Shaw, George Bernard

13.

Write on my gravestone: Infidel, Traitor.--infidel to every church that compromises with wrong; traitor to every government that oppresses the people.

Phillips, Wendell

14.

The person who is master of their passions is reason's slave.

Connolly, Cyril

15.

Is there not some chosen curse, some hidden thunder in the stores of heaven, red with uncommon wrath, to blast the man who owes his greatness to his country's ruin!

Addison, Joseph

16.

What is rational is actual, and what is actual is rational.

Hegel, Georg

17.

No one ever excused his way to success.

Dotto, Dave Del

18.

Reason is a crutch for age, but youth is strong enough to walk alone.

Dryden, John

19.

Our passion and principles are constantly in a frenzy, but begin to shift and waver, as we return to reason.

Sterne, Laurence

20.

Rationalists are admirable beings, rationalism is a hideous monster when it claims for itself omnipotence. Attribution of omnipotence to reason is as bad a piece of idolatry as is worship of stock and stone believing it to be God. I plead not for the suppression of reason, but for a due recognition of that in us which sanctifies reason.

Gandhi, Mahatma

21.

Just as love is an orientation which refers to all objects and is incompatible with the restriction to one object, so is reason a human faculty which must embrace the whole of the world with which man is confronted.

Fromm, Erich

22.

Most men seem to live according to sense rather than reason.

Aquinas, St. Thomas

23.

As if reasoning were any kind of writing or talking which tends to convince people that some doctrine or measure is true and right.

Beecher, Catharine Esther

24.

It was not reason that besieged Troy; it was not reason that sent forth the Saracen from the desert to conquer the world; that inspired the crusades; that instituted the monastic orders; it was not reason that produced the Jesuits; above all, it was not reason that created the French Revolution. Man is only great when he acts from the passions; never irresistible but when he appeals to the imagination.

Disraeli, Benjamin

25.

People are governed with the head; kindness of heart is little use in chess.

Chamfort, Sebastien-Roch Nicolas De

26.

The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. He is the man who has lost everything except his reason.

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

27.

A noble heart will always capitulate to reason.

Schiller, Johann Friedrich Von

28.

If you follow reason far enough it always leads to conclusions that are contrary to reason.

Butler, Samuel

29.

Reason is a supple nymph, and slippery as a fish by nature. She had as leave give her kiss to an absurdity any day, as to syllogistic truth. The absurdity may turn out truer.

Lawrence, D. H.

30.

Reason transformed into prejudice is the worst form of prejudice, because reason is the only instrument for liberation from prejudice.

Bloom, Allan

31.

Many are destined to reason wrongly; others, not to reason at all; and others, to persecute those who do reason.

Voltaire

32.

O reason, reason, abstract phantom of the waking state, I had already expelled you from my dreams, now I have reached a point where those dreams are about to become fused with apparent realities: now there is only room here for myself.

Aragon, Louis

33.

The trouble with Reason is that it becomes meaningless at the exact point where it refuses to act.

Devoto, Bernard

34.

The true triumph of reason is that it enables us to get along with those who do not possess it.

Voltaire

35.

To give a reason for anything is to breed a doubt of it.

Hazlitt, William

36.

I tried being reasonable, I didn't like it.

Eastwood, Clint

37.

The more you reason the less you create.

Chandler, Raymond

38.

Everyone has his reasons.

Renoir, Jean

39.

As reason is a rebel to faith, so passion is a rebel to reason.

Browne, Sir Thomas

40.

We are a rebellious nation. Our whole history is treason; our blood was attained before we were born; our creeds were infidelity to the mother church; our constitution treason to our fatherland.

Parker, Theodore

41.

Man is a reasoning rather than a reasonable animal.

Hamilton, Alexander

42.

It takes less time to do a thing right than to explain why you did it wrong.

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth

43.

Reason is a harmonizing, controlling force rather than a creative one.

Russell, Bertrand

44.

Reason is a very light rider, and easily shook off.