Logical Reasoning Quotes

I have it in my mind that classification is a necessary condition of the working of the mental implement but that it is a departure from the objective truth of things, that classification is very serviceable for the practical purposes of life but a very doubtful preliminary to those fine penetrations the philosophical purpose, in its more arrogant moods, demands. All the peculiarities of my way of thinking derive from that.

I submit to you that syllogism is based on classification, that all hard logical reasoning tends to imply and is apt to imply a confidence in the objective reality of classification. Consequently in denying that I deny the absolute validity of logic. Classification and number, which in truth ignore the fine differences of objective realities, have in the past of human thought been imposed upon things. [...] The forceps of our minds are clumsy forceps, and crush the truth a little in taking hold of it.

It was about this difficulty that the mind of Plato played a little inconclusively all his life. For the most part he tended to regard the idea as the something behind reality, whereas it seems to me that the idea is the more proximate and less perfect thing, the thing by which the mind, by ignoring individual differences, attempts to comprehend an otherwise unmanageable number of unique realities. ~ H.G. Wells

The whole is more than the sum of its parts. ~ Aristotle.

Mathematics is not arithmetic. Though mathematics may have arisen from the practices of counting and measuring it really deals with logical reasoning in which theorems - general and specific statements - can be deduced from the starting assumptions. It is, perhaps, the purest and most rigorous of intellectual activities, and is often thought of as queen of the sciences. ~ Christopher Zeeman

If one's cause is supported by sound reasoning, there is no point in using violence. It is those who have no motive other than selfish desire and who cannot achieve their goal through logical reasoning who rely on force. ~ Dalai Lama

More by example than by word, my father taught me logical reasoning, compassion, love of others, honesty, and discipline applied with understanding. ~ Paul D. Boyer

When I'm drawing - and here drawing is very different from writing or reasoning - I have the impression at certain moments of participating in something like a visceral function, such as digestion or sweating, a function that is independent of the conscious will. This impression is exaggerated, but the practice or pursuit of drawing touches, or is touched by, something prototypical and anterior to logical reasoning. ~ John Berger

Theistic absolutism and realism are the basic ontological principles of Kashmir Shaivism. In this philosophy everything that exists is real, and yet is spiritual as well, because everything is the manifestation of an absolute reality, described as pure, eternal, and infinite Consciousness. According to the ancient authors of this philosophy, the essential features of Consciousness are Its infinite, divine, and joyful vitality, and the inclination to manifest Its powers of creation, preservation, dissolution, obscuration, and revelation. The vibrant, creative quality is the divine essence of God. Consciousness is also described as luminous. It illuminates Itself and is always aware of Itself and everything within It.

The ancient masters refer in various ways to this One creative force out of which everything emerges. It is known most commonly as the Ultimate, Absolute Reality, Consciousness, Paramasiva, and God. Yet, according to Kashmir Shaivism, Paramasiva cannot be fully described or clearly thought over because, being infinite in nature, He cannot be confined to any thinking or speaking ability. No words can fully describe Him, no mind can correctly think about Him, and no understanding can perfectly understand Him. This is His absoluteness, and Kashmir Shaivism considers this absoluteness to be one of His key attributes. Because the Absolute cannot be fathomed with the intellect or through ordinary logical reasoning and philosophical speculation, the ancient ma ~ Balajinnatha Pandita

If the world were a logical place, men would ride side-saddle. ~ Rita Mae Brown

On the Logical Reasoning, ask the speaker: Oh yeah, asshole? What evidence do you have for that position? ~ Nathan Fox

Play stimulates the parts of the brain involved in both careful, logical reasoning and carefree, unbound exploration. ~ Greg McKeown

My eyes narrowed. I didn't like his logical reasoning. ~ Jennifer L. Armentrout

The way that we think is dependent upon our flowering formal and informal education. How we think affects our behavior. How we conduct ourselves in the unscripted interactions with our family, friends, and lovers alters our emotional being. Our emotional being funnels our thought processes. Our community modulates our actions and establishes standards for behavior, and our logical reasoning and moral reasoning skills evolve as we mature. The didactical association between education, thinking, behaving, communal relationships, and the ongoing process of making logical and moral decisions continues to shape unions and disunions of our transforming character. ~ Kilroy J. Oldster

Logical reasoning may be a most convenient means of mental communication for covering short distances, but the curvature of the earth, alas, is reflected even in logic: an ideally rational progression of thought will finally bring you back to the point of departure where you return aware of the simplicity of genius, with a delightful sensation that you have embraced truth, while actually you have merely embraced your own self ... anything you might term a deduction already exposes the flaw: logical development inexorably becomes an envelopment. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

In Architecture there is a part that is the result of Logical Reasoning and a part that is created through the Senses. There is always a point where they Clash. I don't think Architecture can be created without that Collision. ~ Tadao Ando

God cannot be understood by logical reasoning but only by submission. ~ Leo Tolstoy

A man who sets out to become an artist at the mile is something like a man who sets out to discover the most graceful method of being hanged. No matter how logical his plans, he can not carry them out without physical suffering. ~ Neal Bascomb

Psychology as a science has its limitations, and, as the logical consequence of theology is mysticism, so the ultimate consequence of psychology is love. ~ Erich Fromm

Though he avoided outright endorsement of the view, fifth-century Church Father Saint Augustine was clearly familiar with the theory of the spherical earth: "They [those who believe that "there are men on the other side of the earth"] fail to observe that even if the world is held to be global or rounded in shape, or if some process of reasoning should prove this to be the case, it would still not necessarily follow that the land on the opposite side is not covered by masses of water." ~ Saint Augustine

In every enterprise ... the mind is always reasoning, and, even when we seem to act without a motive, an instinctive logic still directs the mind. Only we are not aware of it, because we begin by reasoning before we know or say that we are reasoning, just as we begin by speaking before we observe that we are speaking, and just as we begin by seeing and hearing before we know what we see or what we hear. ~ Claude Bernard

Feminist "theory," as it is grandiloquently called, is simply whatever the women in the movement come up with in post facto justification of their attitudes and emotions. A heavy focus on feminist doctrine seems to me symptomatic of the rationalist fallacy: the assumption that people are motivated primarily by beliefs. If they were, the best way to combat an armed doctrine would indeed be to demonstrate that its beliefs are false. (…) A feminist in the strict and proper sense may be defined as a woman who envies the male role.

By the male role I mean, in the first place, providing, protecting, and guiding rather than nurturing and assisting. This in turn envolves relative independence, action, and competition in the larger impersonal society outside the family, the use of language for communication and analysis (rather than expressiveness or emotional manipulation), and deliberate behavior aiming at objective achievement (rather than the attainment of pleasant subjective states) and guided by practical reasoning (rather than emotional impulse).

Both feminist and nonfeminist women sense that these characteristically male attributes have a natural primacy over their own. I prefer to speak of"primacy" rather than superiority in this context since both sets of traits are necessary to propagate the race. One sign of male primacy is that envy of the female role by men is virtually nonexistent - even, so far as I know, among homosexuals. Normal women are att ~ F. Roger Devlin

Sometimes you characters give me a pain in the back of my lap," said Manuel abruptly. "I hang around with you and listen to simple-minded gobbledegook in yard-long language, if it's you talking, Dran, and pink-and-purple sissification from the brat here. Why I do it I'll never know. And it goes that way up to the last gasp. So you're going to leave. Dran has to make a speech, real logical. Vaughn has to blow out a sigh and get misty-eyed." He spat.
"How would you handle it?" Dran asked, amused. Vaughn stared at Manuel whitely.
"Me? You really want to know?"
"This I want to hear," said Vaughn between her teeth.
"I'd wait a while - a long while - until neither of you was talking. Then I'd say, 'I joined the Marines yesterday.' And you'd both look at me a little sad. There's supposed to be something wrong with coming right out and saying something. Let's see. Suppose I do it the way Vaughn would want me to." He tugged at an imaginary braid and thrust out his lower lip in a lampoon of Vaughn's full mouth. He sighed gustily. "I have felt …" He paused to flutter his eyelashes. "I have felt the call to arms," he said in a histrionic whisper. He gazed off into the middle distance. "I have heard the sound of trumpets. The drums stir in my blood." He pounded his temples with his fists. "I can't stand it - I can't! Glory beckons. I will away to foreign strands."
Vaughn turned on her heel, though she made no effort to walk away. Dran roared with laughter.
"A ~ Theodore Sturgeon

I guess it was hard for him to look at the logic behind the draft lotteries, because that same logic had taken away his father. And, anyway, what's so logical about the day you were born deciding when you might die? That's just a cruel joke, as I see it. ~ A.S. King

It is the task of the scenarist to invent little pieces of business that are so characteristic and give so deep an insight into his creatures, that their personalities clearly and organically unfold before the eyes of the audience so that the latter feel that the actions of these people are contingent upon their characters, that there exists some kind of a logical fate, and that nothing is left to mere accident or coincidence. ~ Ernst Lubitsch

For a while, I decided to worship God. It was a God I arrived at through a method of logical deduction. If there is a God, what would he be like? I asked. He would be a real person in my life, I reasoned, adhering to a literally anthropomorphic view of the sacred. He would be beautiful and I would desire him. Since a friend of mine named Trevor had all those attributes, I concluded that Trev was God. Having settled on him, I then further deduced God's other characteristics from Trevor's behaviour. He was narcissistic, perplexed, rather dispassionate, flawed in various ways, etc. So was God. At night I prayed to him by name. My entreaties seemed about as effective as other people's prayers to their Gods. And with Trevor there was the added advantage that if my prayers failed to reach him, I could always phone. ~ Stan Persky

I start with an image, then I go from the image toward exploring the situation. Then I write a scene, and from the scene I find the character, from the character I find the larger plot. It's like deductive reasoning - I start with the smaller stuff and work backward. ~ Dan Chaon

That was the reasoning behind learning to play bass, and then after that it was more like it was neat to play songs together - for me to play bass and for him to play guitar. ~ Tom Araya

Maybe that wasn't logical, but maybe the thing we call logic is overrated. ~ Benjamin Alire Saenz

I believe there's a hand that guides us. It just isn't always a gentle one. Or one that seems fair at the time. But I dunno, I try to trust in it now. When I freak, I just try to ... shit, I guess trust in it. Because at the end of the day, what else can you do? Choice only gets you so far. Reasoning and planning too. The rest ... it's up to someone else. Where we end up, who we know, what happens to the people we love ... we don't have a lot of control over any of it. ~ J.R. Ward

When we dream, we feel we are experiencing reality. What separates our waking feelings from our dream feelings?"
"When I consider this carefully, I find not a single property which with certainty separates the waking state from the dream," writes Descartes. And he goes on: "How can you be certain that your whole life is not a dream? ~ Jostein Gaarder

When gratitude has become a matter of reasoning there are many ways of escaping from its bonds. ~ George Eliot

[Kepler] had to realize clearly that logical-mathematical theoretizing, no matter how lucid, could not guarantee truth by itself; that the most beautiful logical theory means nothing in natural science without comparison with the exactest experience. Without this philosophic attitude, his work would not have been possible. ~ Albert Einstein

Science is not a system of certain, or -established, statements; nor is it a system which steadily advances towards a state of finality ... And our guesses are guided by the unscientific, the metaphysical (though biologically explicable) faith in laws, in regularities which we can uncover-discover. Like Bacon, we might describe our own contemporary science-'the method of reasoning which men now ordinarily apply to nature'-as consisting of 'anticipations, rash and premature' and as 'prejudices'. ~ Karl Popper

Nothing seems real anymore. Even the flames from the fire seem to beckon to me, drawing me into some great past life buried somewhere deep in my subconscious, if only I could find the key..if only..if only. Ever since my illness, my condition, I've been trying to find some logical way of passing my time, of justifying a means to an end. ~ Ian Curtis

Dear friends & fellow characters, you all know the importance we attach to the power of collective prayer in this our desperate struggle for survival. Some of us have more existence than others, at various times according to fashion. But even this is becoming extremely shadowy & precarious, for we are not read, & when read , we are read badly, we are not lived as we used to be, we are not identified with & fantasized, we are rapidly forgotten. Those of us who have the good fortune to be read by teachers, scholars, & students are not read as we used to be read, but analyzed as schemata, structures, functions within structures, logical & mathematical formulae, aporia, psychic movements, social significances & so forth. ~ Christine Brooke-Rose

Reasoning at every step he treads, Man yet mistakes his way, Whilst meaner things, whom instinct leads, Are rarely known to stray. ~ William Cowper

There is no reasoning with imagination. ~ Maria Edgeworth

I was not dressed crazily - I was dressed as a horse. And for a very logical and sane reason. ~ Diane Messidoro

It's only in the mysterious equations of love that any logical reasons can be found. ~ John Forbes Nash Jr.

Under the dark evening sky, the skyscrapers seemed to become gigantic natural monoliths, and all the super-sized structures that so dominated the city, that so marked Coruscant as a monument to the ingenuity of the reasoning species, seemed somehow the mark of folly, of futile pride striving against the vastness and majesty beyond the grasp of any mortal. ~ R.A. Salvatore

Memorization has gotten a bad rap recently. Lots of students, and even some educators, say that being able to reason is more important than knowing facts; and besides, why bother committing things to memory when you've got Google? My response to this - after I've finished inwardly groaning - is that of course reasoning is important, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't know facts as well. It's not like you have to choose between one or the other. Besides, facts give you a foundation on which to reason about things. ~ Stefanie Weisman

In the "Republic," Plato vigorously attacked the oral, poetized form as a vehicle for communicating knowledge. He pleaded for a more precise method of communication and classification ("The Ideas"), one which would favor the investigation of facts, principles of reality, human nature, and conduct. What the Greeks meant by "poetry" was radically different from what we mean by poetry. Their "poetic" expression was a product of a collective psyche and mind. The mimetic form, a technique that exploited rhythm, meter and music, achieved the desired psychological response in the listener. Listeners could memorize with greater ease what was sung than what was said. Plato attacked this method because it discouraged disputation and argument. It was in his opinion the chief obstacle to abstract, speculative reasoning - he called it "a poison, and an enemy of the people. ~ Marshall McLuhan

There are three people one can never reason with: a drunk, a crazy person, and a fool. ~ R. Alan Woods

Reasoning with a two-year-old is about as productive as changing seats on the Titanic. ~ Robert Scotellaro

(The error in reasoning is a bit from wishful thinking, because education is considered "good"; I wonder why people don't make the epiphenomenal association between the wealth of a country and something "bad," say, decadence, and infer that decadence, or some other disease of wealth like a high suicide rate, also generates wealth.) ~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Another book gives the illusion of scientific precision by working out this reasoning in a mathematical formula using a "Mental Performance Ratio (MPR), ~ Kenneth L. Higbee

One of the biggest mistakes people make is to think that what you need to write a novel is imagination, creativity and a facility with words. Yes, you need all those things, but a novel is a highly complex organism that needs to be dealt with in quite a logical manner. ~ Kate Forsyth

The emotional qualities are antagonistic to clear reasoning. ~ Arthur Conan Doyle

At one o'clock, the ever-logical Right-Eye Grand Steward woke up to discover that during his sleep his left-eyed counterpart had executed three of his advisors for treason, ordered the creation of a new carp pool and banned limericks. Worse still, no progress had been made in tracking down the Kleptomancer, and of the two people believed to be his accomplices, both had been released from prison and one had been appointed food taster. Right-Eye was not amused. He had known for centuries that he could trust nobody but himself. Now he was seriously starting to wonder about himself. ~ Frances Hardinge

The fighting was horrendous. Bloodshed and death lie everywhere around us. It was not exciting, Vindhya. It is fearsome, and we were all scared out of our wits. There is no honour in battle but to protect you, my love. We have won the gates of Grilsom and lost the fortress of Loare...but we've gained allies from the Knights of Scrivehrim, and enemies of the dark elves of Scryire. There is no winning in War, my sweet...only loss. People die on
every side. How can any battle be won with such consequence and loss? I do not understand war. It's so unfair, so...unjustified.

We take innocent lives, yet we gain medals of highest honour and divine, sacred blessings. What is the sense of it? And even much less do I understand Andsar's concept of celibacy in soldiers, and that they choose to stay alone their entire lives. I might understand, were the reasoning that we would leave no one behind to suffer...but there is no reason for it. They tell us we are wrong to love one another, and so they justify our love by sending me to my assured death. If anyone were to find out about us, we'd both surely be killed. Love like this, though…I believe it is worth the cost of my life, if I could only be with you one moment. ~ Jennifer Megan Varnadore

I expected, as I approached the corporate world, to enter a brisk, logical, nonsense-free zone, almost like the military - or a disciplined, up-to-date military anyway - in its focus on concrete results. How else would companies survive fierce competition? But what I encountered was a culture riven with assumptions unrelated to those that underlie the fact- and logic-based worlds of, say science and journalism - a culture addicted to untested habits, paralyzed by conformity, and shot through with magical thinking. ~ Barbara Ehrenreich

Reasoning draws a conclusion, but does not make the conclusion certain, unless the mind discovers it by the path of experience. ~ Roger Bacon

I never know what my next move will be in Hollywood. It's such an unpredictable town. People get jaded and lost and I've been able to stay a float. I think the next logical step in my career would be to start my own filmmaking empire like (Harvey Weinstein) and (Bob Weinstein) did so many years ago. I think if only the unions weren't so strict in Boston, I'd set up shop there and make films of a certain quality you don't see represented these days. I'm full of ideas and dreams. ~ Ben Affleck

He had in his Bronx apartment a lodger less learned than himself, and much fiercer in piety. One day when we were studying the laws of repentance together, the lodger burst from his room. "What!" he said. "The atheists guzzles his whiskey and eats pork and wallows with women all his life long, and then repents the day before he dies and stands guiltless? While I spend a lifetime trying to please God?" My grandfather pointed to the book. "So it is written," he said gently. - "Written!" the lodger roared. "There are books and there are books." And he slammed back into his room.
The lodger's outrage seemed highly logical. My grandfather pointed out afterward that cancelling the past does not turn it into a record of achievement. It leaves it blank, a waste of spilled years. A man had better return, he said, while time remains to write a life worth scanning. And since no man knows his death day, the time to get a grip on his life is the first hour when the impulse strikes him. ~ Herman Wouk

Leroy's reasoning is dry as a razor, and Chantal agrees: love as an exaltation of two individuals, love as fidelity, passionate attachment to a single person - no, that doesn't exist. And if it does exist, it is only as self-punishment, willful blindness, escape into a monastery. She tells herself that even if it does exist, love ought not to exist, and the idea does not maker her bitter, on the contrary, it produces a bliss that spreads throughout her body. She thinks of the metaphor of the rose that moves through all men and tells herself that she has been living locked away by love and now she is ready to obey the myth of the rose and merge with its giddy fragrance. ~ Milan Kundera

It is only logical for the translator to become a part of the world of the author. ~ Ventseslav Konstantinov

Every generation must think several steps ahead of their previous generations. That's the way to progress and that's the way to become more and more civilized human beings. ~ Abhijit Naskar

It seems logical that he who supports total war in principle cannot complain of a war against civilians. ~ John Hersey

Human reasoning does not compass everything in all respects, just as vision does not reveal all things to sight. ~ Burhan Al-Din Al-Zarnuji

A long time ago he believed that he was above the men chasing him; capitulating to their secret desires and dark fears was what he did to survive, nothing more and nothing less. But now he understood that all that reasoning was nothing more than a self-assessing loop which he had used as a survival mechanism. It had run constantly but never actually went anywhere; like a rat on a flywheel, all action, no forward motion. ~ Brandon Shire

Courtney's emotions had always been controlled and steady, logical and levelheaded. But around Brett, it was like she was on a high-speed roller coaster with steep drops and corkscrew turns, and she never wanted to get off. ~ Michelle Madow