Selected reasoning quotes

1. Reason well from the beginning and then there will never be any need to look back with confusion and doubt.

2. If there are sound reasons or bases for the points you demand, then there is no need for violence. On the other hand, when there is no sound reason that concessions should be made to you but mainly your own desire, then reason cannot work and you have to rely on force. Thus using force is not a sign of strength but rather a sign of weakness.

3. Do not imagine that mathematics is hard and crabbed, and repulsive to common sense. It is merely the etherealization of common sense.

4. The important thing isn't the soundness or otherwise of the argument, but for it to make you think.

5. The whole of science is nothing more than a refinement of everyday thinking.

6. It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.

7. Reason is a harmonising, controlling force rather than a creative one.

8. When the intensity of emotional conviction subsides, a man who is in the habit of reasoning will search for logical grounds in favour of the belief which he finds in himself.

9. Observation: I can't see a thing. Conclusion: Dinosaurs.

10. The well-meaning contention that all ideas have equal merit seems to me little different from the disastrous contention that no ideas have any merit.

11. Take nothing on its looks; take everything on evidence. There's no better rule.

12. In order to shake a hypothesis, it is sometimes not necessary to do anything more than push it as far as it will go.

13. No passion so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear.

14. 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.

15. Metaphysics is the finding of bad reasons for what we believe upon instinct; but to find these reasons is no less an instinct.

16. Aristotle... a mere bond-servant to his logic, thereby rendering it contentious and well nigh useless.

17. The human understanding is of its own nature prone to suppose the existence of more order and regularity in the world than it finds. And though there be many things in nature which are singular and unmatched, yet it devises for them parallels and conjugates and relatives which do not exist. Hence the fiction that all celestial bodies move in perfect circles, spirals and dragons being (except in name) utterly rejected.

18. The human understanding when it has once adopted an opinion (either as being the received opinion or as being agreeable to itself) draws all things else to support and agree with it. And though there be a greater number and weight of instances to be found on the other side, yet these it either neglects and despises, or else by some distinction sets aside and rejects, in order that by this great and pernicious predetermination the authority of its former conclusions may remain inviolate.

19. The human understanding is moved by those things most which strike and enter the mind simultaneously and suddenly, and so fill the imagination; and then it feigns and supposes all other things to be somehow, though it cannot see how, similar to those few things by which it is surrounded.

20. But by far the greatest hindrance and aberration of the human understanding proceeds from the dullness, incompetency, and deceptions of the senses; in that things which strike the sense outweigh things which do not immediately strike it, though they be more important. Hence it is that speculation commonly ceases where sight ceases; insomuch that of things invisible there is little or no observation.

21. The heart is the chief feature of a functioning mind.

22. It is only the inferior thinker who hastens to explain the singular and the complex by the primitive shortcut of supernaturalism.

23. I told him that I thought it was law logic - an artificial system of reasoning, exclusively used in Courts of justice, but good for nothing anywhere else.

24. Which is ideology? Which not? You shall know them by their assertion of truth, their contempt for considered reflection, and their fear of debate.

25. I had learnt from experience that many false opinions may be exchanged for true ones, without in the least altering the habits of mind of which false opinions are made.

26. It is useless to attempt to reason a man out of a thing he was never reasoned into.

27. The man who reacts to the universe with a cry of impotent anguish is acceptable as an artist only if he can persuade us that he has sanely considered the other possible reactions and found them inadequate.

28. I never got good at predicting what millions of people will suddenly decide is rational.

29. I have hardly ever known a mathematician who was capable of reasoning.

30. I call on you not to hate, because hate does not leave space for a person to be fair and it makes you blind and closes all doors of thinking.

31. Guessing right for the wrong reason does not merit scientific immortality.

32. Creatures inveterately wrong in their inductions have a pathetic but praise-worthy tendency to die before reproducing their kind.

33. Our argument is not flatly circular, but something like it. It has the form, figuratively speaking, of a closed curve in space.

34. Common sense often makes good law.

35. Much reading is an oppression of the mind, and extinguishes the natural candle, which is the reason of so many senseless scholars in the world.

36. Mathematical reasoning may be regarded rather schematically as the exercise of a combination of two facilities, which we may call intuition and ingenuity. The activity of the intuition consists in making spontaneous judgements which are not the result of conscious trains of reasoning... The exercise of ingenuity in mathematics consists in aiding the intuition through suitable arrangements of propositions, and perhaps geometrical figures or drawings.

37. Your reasoning is excellent - it's only your basic assumptions that are wrong.

38. You can't convince a believer of anything; for their belief is not based on evidence, it's based on a deep seated need to believe.

39. What is the good of drawing conclusions from experience? I don't deny we sometimes draw the right conclusions, but don't we just as often draw the wrong ones?

40. The real trouble with this world of ours is not that it is an unreasonable world, nor even that it is a reasonable one. The commonest kind of trouble is that it is nearly reasonable, but not quite. Life is not an illogicality; yet it is a trap for logicians. It looks just a little more mathematical and regular than it is; its exactitude is obvious, but its inexactitude is hidden; its wildness lies in wait.

41. Logician: A cat has four paws. Old Gentleman: My dog had four paws. Logician: Then it's a cat. Old Gentleman: So my dog is a cat? Logician: And the contrary is also true.

42. And as well as I dream, I reason if I want, for that's just another kind of dream.

43. Whereas the man of action binds his life to reason and its concepts so that he will not be swept away and lost, the scientific investigator builds his hut right next to the tower of science so that he will be able to work on it and to find shelter for himself beneath those bulwarks which presently exist. And he requires shelter, for there are frightful powers which continuously break in upon him, powers which oppose scientific 'truth' with completely different kinds of 'truths' which bear on their shields the most varied sorts of emblems.

44. In questions of science the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual.

45. When a person's nose itches, it is a sign that it should be scratched.

46. To be absolutely certain about something, one must know everything or nothing about it.

47. Fallacious and misleading arguments are most easily detected if set out in correct syllogistic form.

48. When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?

49. 253. At the core of all well-founded belief, lies belief that is unfounded.

50. To convince someone of the truth, it is not enough to state it, but rather one must find the path from error to truth. (p. 119)

51. Every explanation is after all an hypothesis. (p. 123)

52. I prefer the company of peasants because they have not been educated sufficiently to reason incorrectly.

53. Ambition never is in a greater hurry than I; it merely keeps pace with circumstances and with my general way of thinking.

54. I find you want me to furnish you with argument and intellects too.

55. His conduct still right, with his argument wrong.

56. Crazy people do not apply the principle of scientific parsimony... they shoot for the baroque.

57. The long chains of simple and easy reasonings by means of which geometers are accustomed to reach the conclusions of their most difficult demonstrations, had led me to imagine that all things, to the knowledge of which man is competent, are mutually connected in the same way, and that there is nothing so far removed from us as to be beyond our reach, or so hidden that we cannot discover it, provided only we abstain from accepting the false for the true, and always preserve in our thoughts the order necessary for the deduction of one truth from another.

58. Omnia apud me mathematica fiunt.

59. The long concatenations of simple and easy reasoning which geometricians use in achieving their most difficult demonstrations gave me occasion to imagine that all matters which may enter the human mind were interrelated in the same fashion.

60. The two operations of our understanding, intuition and deduction, on which alone we have said we must rely in the acquisition of knowledge.

61. Never say, and never take seriously anyone who says, 'I cannot believe that so-and-so could have evolved by gradual selection'. I have dubbed this kind of fallacy 'the Argument from Personal Incredulity'. Time and again, it has proven the prelude to an intellectual banana-skin experience.

62. It really comes down to parsimony, economy of explanation. It is possible that your car engine is driven by psychokinetic energy, but if it looks like a petrol engine, smells like a petrol engine and performs exactly as well as a petrol engine, the sensible working hypothesis is that it is a petrol engine.

63. It is often said, mainly by the 'no-contests', that although there is no positive evidence for the existence of God, nor is there evidence against his existence. So it is best to keep an open mind and be agnostic. At first sight that seems an unassailable position, at least in the weak sense of Pascal's wager. But on second thoughts it seems a cop-out, because the same could be said of Father Christmas and tooth fairies. There may be fairies at the bottom of the garden. There is no evidence for it, but you can't prove that there aren't any, so shouldn't we be agnostic with respect to fairies?

64. If the Supreme Court says that you have the right to consensual [gay] sex within your home, then you have the right to bigamy, you have the right to polygamy, you have the right to incest, you have the right to adultery. You have the right to anything.

65. The whole principle is wrong. It's like demanding that grown men live on skim milk because the baby can't have steak.

66. What are the facts? Again and again and again - what are the facts? Shun wishful thinking, ignore divine revelation, forget what 'the stars foretell,' avoid opinion, care not what the neighbors think, never mind the unguessable 'verdict of history' - what are the facts, and to how many decimal places? You pilot always into an unknown future; facts are your single clue. Get the facts!

67. Volumes might be written upon the follies and imbecilities of great men. A full rounded man - a man of sterling sense and natural logic - is just as rare as a great painter, poet, or sculptor. If you tell your friend that he is not a painter, that he has no genius for poetry, he will probably admit the truth of what you say, without feeling that he has been insulted in the least. But if you tell him that he is not a logician, that he has but little idea of the value of a fact, that he has no real conception of what evidence is, and that he never had an original thought in his life, he will cut your acquaintance.

68. Facts need no pedigree; logic has no heraldry, and the living should not be awed by the mistakes of the dead.

69. Pirsig's Postulate: The number of hypotheses available to explain any given phenomenon is infinite.

70. Surely, God could have caused birds to fly with their bones made of solid gold, with their veins full of quicksilver, with their flesh heavier than lead, and with their wings exceedingly small. He did not, and that ought to show something. It is only in order to shield your ignorance that you put the Lord at every turn to the refuge of a miracle. Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems