R Quotes
Browse famous quotes beginning with R. This page is a child index of the full Popular Quotes A-Z directory.
“Reason should be destroyed in all Christians.”
“Reason should direct, and appetite obey.”
Source: Cicero's Three books of offices, or moral duties: also his Cato Major, an essay on old age; Lælius, an essay on friendship; Paradoxes; Scipio's dream; and Letter to Quintus on the duties of a magistrate
“Reason should investigate its own parameters before declaring its omniscience.”
“Reason shows itself in all occurrences of life; whereas the brute makes no discovery of such a talent, but in what immediately regards his own preservation or the continuance of his species.”
Source: Selections from the Spectator: Embracing the Most Interesting Papers by Addison, Steel, and Others
“Reason shows us our duty; he who can make us love our duty is more powerful than reason itself.”
“Reason shows us there is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so.”
Source: Letters from a Stoic
“Reason sits firm and holds the reins, and she will not let the feelings burst away and hurry her to wild chasms. The passions may rage furiously, like true heathens, as they are; and the desires may imagine all sorts of vain things: but judgment shall still have the last word in every argument, and the casting vote in every decision. Strong wind, earthquake-shock, and fire may pass by: but I shall follow the guiding of that still small voice which interprets the dictates of conscience.”
Source: Annotated Jane Eyre: An Autobiography with English Grammar Exercises: by Charlotte Bronte (Author), Robert Powell (Editor)
“Reason speaks and feeling bites”
“Reason speaks in words alone, but love has a song.”
“Reason… suasion. Thought! As always, the answer is in an appeal to rationality!”
Source: In Limbo
“Reason teaches us that what is good is good for something, and that what is good for nothing is not good at all.”
Source: Ethical Studies
“Reason tells us that we should always be able to work things out with words. But the absurdly profound truth is that in many crucial moments of conflict, when sanity and safety hang in the balance, choosing not to engage verbally can be by far the most powerful form of speech.”
Source: Get Out of Here Alive: Inner Alchemy & Immortality
“Reason tends to check selfish impulses and to grant the satisfaction of legitimate impulses in others.”
Source: Reinhold Niebuhr: Major Works on Religion and Politics: (Library of America #263)
“Reason. The point where man begins to find that he exists.”
“Reason thus with life:
If I do lose thee, I do lose a thing
That none but fools would keep.”
“Reason to live, they repeat like a pop song,
The bones of a beloved emperor, and I, the
motionless chariot
trying to drag them home with forced hope.”
Source: Letters to My Lover From Behind Asylum Walls
“Reason to rule, mercy to forgive: The first is law, the last prerogative.”
“Reason to rule, mercy to forgive: The first is law, the last prerogative. Life is an adventure in forgiveness.”
“Reason transformed into prejudice is the worst form of prejudice, because reason is the only instrument for liberation from prejudice.”
Source: Closing of the American Mind
“Reason unites us, not only with our contemporaries, but with men who lived two thousand years before us, and with those who will live after us.”
Source: Lift Up Your Eyes: The Religious Writings of Leo Tolstoy
“Reason was for suckers and Presbyterians.”
“Reason was nowhere, time was an immovable object nailed high on the wall, except where the world kept shop.”
“Reason we call that faculty innate in us of discovering laws and applying them with thought.”
Source: Science and Culture: Popular and Philosophical Essays
“Reason well from the beginning and then there will never be any need to look back with confusion and doubt.”
Source: The Path to Enlightenment
“Reason, when understood ontologically, takes on an entirely different meaning from the one conventionally assigned to it. It takes on the extra “dimensions” of emotion, perception, intuition, desire and will. All of these are involved in the intricate nexus for providing sufficient reasons for actions. People who don’t understand our work keep reducing reason to one dimension, which means that our central point that reason is ontological and explains everything – including love, human error, insanity, and everything else that, according to the conventional treatment of reason, has nothing to do with reason – has completely escaped them. Reason, in our system, is both syntactic (structural) and semantic (meaningful). Its semantic aspect is what gives it the capacity to generate all the weird and wonderful things that average people do not associate with reason. They regard reason in strictly syntactic, machinelike terms. That is only one aspect of reason. It has many others.”
Source: Base Reality: Ultimate Existence
“Reason will always be logical,
Logic not always reasonable,
For truth from reason derivable,
And logic falsehood multipliable.”
Source: Pt. Kanhaiya Lal Misra - My Father
“Reason will by degrees submit to absurdity, as the eye is in time accommodated to darkness.”
“Reason wishes that the judgement it gives be just; anger wishes that the judgement it has given seem to be just.”
“Reason without learning is like the untilled soil, or like the human body that lacks nourishment.”
“Reason works better when emotions are present; the person sees sharper and more accurately when his emotions are engaged.”
Source: The Courage to Create
“Reason! how many eyes hast thou to see evils, and how dim, nay, blind, thou art in preventing them.”
“Reason" in language - oh, what an old deceptive female she is! I am afraid we are not rid of God because we still have faith in grammar.”
Source: The Portable Nietzsche
“Reason's a thing we dimly see in sleep.”
Source: The Birds Fall Down
“Reason's biological function is to preserve and promote life and to postpone its extinction as long as possible. Thinking and acting are not contrary to nature; they are, rather, the foremost features of man's nature. The most appropriate description of man as differentiated from nonhuman beings is: a being purposively struggling against the forces adverse to his life.”
Source: Human action: a treatise on economics
“Reason's last step is to acknowledge that there are infinitely many things
beyond it.”
“Reason's voice and God's, Nature's and Duty's, never are at odds.”
Source: Poems of Nature, Poems Subjective and Reminiscent and Religious Poems, Complete Volume II., the Works of Whittier
“Reason's whole pleasure, all the joys of sense, Lie in three words,-health, peace, and competence.”
Source: The Works of Alexander Pope, Esq. In Verse and Prose: Containing the Principal Notes of Drs. Warburton and Warton: Illustrations, and Critical and Explanatory Remarks, by Johnson, Wakefield, A. Chalmers, F.S.A. and Others. To which are Added, Now First Published, Some Original Letters, with Additional Observations, and Memoirs of the Life of the Author
“Reason, alas, does not remove mountains. It only tries to walk around them, and see what is on the other side.”
“Reason, however able, cool at best, Cares not for service, or but serves when prest, Stays till we call, and then not often near.”
Source: Essay on Man
“Reason, I sacrifice you to the evening breeze.”
“Reason, if consulted with, would advise, that their children's time should be spent in acquiring what might be useful to them when they come to be men, rather than to have their heads stuff'd with a deal of trash, a great part whereof they usually never do ('tis certain they never need to) think on again as long as they live: and so much of it as does stick by them they are only the worse for.”
Source: Locke, Berkely and Hume
“Reason, in a strict sense, as meaning the judgment of truth and falsehood, can never, of itself, be any motive to the will, and can have no influence but so far as it touches some passion or affection. Abstract relations of ideas are the object of curiosity, not of volition. And matters of fact, where they are neither good nor evil, where they neither excite desire nor aversion, are totally indifferent, and whether known or unknown, whether mistaken or rightly apprehended, cannot be regarded as any motive to action.”
Source: A Dissertation on the Passions: The Natural History of Religion : a Critical Edition
“Reason, it is true, is DICTATOR in the Society of Mankind; from her there ought to lie no Appeal; But here we want a Pope in our Philosophy, to be the infallible Judge of what is or is not Reason.”
Source: The works of Daniel De Foe [ed.] by W. Hazlitt
“REASON, n. Propensitate of prejudice.”
Source: The Devil's Dictionary: The Devil World
“Reason, observation, and experience; the holy trinity of science.”
“Reason, on the contrary, assures us, that as in so great a number, a fit representative would be most likely to be found, so the choice would be less likely to be diverted from him, by the intrigues of the ambitious, or the bribes of the rich.”
Source: The Federalist Papers: A Collection of Essays Written in Favour of the New Constitution
“Reason, or the ratio of all we have already known, is not the same that it shall be when we know more.”
Source: The Early Illuminated Books
“Reason, too late perhaps, may convince you of the folly of misspending time.”
Source: The writings of George Washington from the original manuscript sources, 1745-1799
“REASON, v.i. To weight probabilities in the scales of desire.”
Source: The Devil's Dictionary: Easyread Large Bold Edition
“Reason, which is the glory of our nature, is destined eventually, in the progress of future ages, to overturn the empire of superstition.”
Source: Principles of Nature; or, a development of the moral causes of Happiness and Misery among the human species