Philosophical Reasoning Quotes

There is no chain of philosophical reasoning or method of philosophical enquiry through which we can arrive at the truths of faith as conclusions. But once by faith we have acknowledged those truths we are able to understand why there is good reason to acknowledge them. This, as he was to argue a little later, is because of the effects of sin on the human mind. It is "because human minds are obscured by familiarity with darkness, which covers them in a night of sins and bad habits, and are unable to perceive with the clarity and purity proper to reason" that authority has been provided to bring "the faltering eye into the light of truth" (De moribus ecclesiae catholicae 31.2.31). ~ Alasdair MacIntyre

American politics are normally a result of pragmatic and not philosophical reasoning. No one in Washington has said we now prefer multilateralism. ~ Henry A. Kissinger

They say that childhood forms us, that those early influences are the key to everything. Is the peace of the soul so easily won? Simply the inevitable result of a happy childhood. What makes childhood happy? Parental harmony? Good health? Security? Might not a happy childhood be the worst possible preparation for life? Like leading a lamb to the slaughter. ~ Josephine Hart

If you find from your own experience that something is a fact and it contradicts what some authority has written down, then you must abandon the authority and base your reasoning on your own findings. ~ Leonardo Da Vinci

Buddhism is a hundred times as realistic as Christianity it is part of its living heritage that it is able to face problems objectively and coolly; it is the product of long centuries of philosophical speculation. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

The intelligentsia ... was kept busy embroidering white stitches on the philosophical and ecclesiastical vestments of the bourgeoisie - that old and filthy fabric besmeared with the blood of toiling masses. ~ Maxim Gorky

Their reliance on biblical quotations does not augur well for their for their openness to moral reasoning ... ~ Peter Singer

Live. If you live, God will live with you. If you refuse to run his risks, he'll retreat to that distant heaven and be merely a subject for philosophical speculation. Everyone knows this, but no one takes the first step, perhaps for fear of being called insane. ~ Paulo Coelho

Who am I? I am the spine that the mountains hang upon! I am the tears that the rivers cry! I am the lungs that breathe the wind! I am the wolf that kills the stag, the hawk that kills the mouse, the spider that kills the fly! I am the stag, the mouse and the fly that are eaten! I am the snake of the world devouring its tail! I am everything untamed and untameable! ~ Patrick Ness

When a good man lends himself to the advocacy of slavery, he must, at least for a time, feel himself to be any where but at home, amongst his new thoughts, doctrines, and modes of reasoning. ~ Gerrit Smith

Poetry should make you feel good, life's already full of possibilities that make you feel bad. But, there's always the needed philosophical poem that puts you back into a reality that might not be so pleasant. ~ K.R. Royal

Young children are naturally so philosophical. They ask: 'What is real? What is truth?' They have to learn it; they don't automatically know it. To them, it's a game. You can study this for years in college, and yet you probably asked it when you were four or five years old. ~ Sharon Creech

Robin Williams is one more example, that genius people are genius for a reason, and that reason is feeling without reasoning. Depression is for sensitive people. Sensitive people sense the world as it is, and they can't cope with it. Sensitive people need a better, more tender world to live in. Matter of fact, we all do. ~ Aleksandra Ninkovic

So how do you find out what God thinks? The Christian says, you look in the Bible. And the Bible tells us that God forbids homosexual acts. Therefore, they are wrong.
So basically the reasoning goes like this:
(1) We are all obligated to do God's will.
(2) God's will is expressed in the Bible.
(3) The Bible forbids homosexual behavior.
(4) Therefore, homosexual behavior is against God's will, or is wrong. ~ William Lane Craig

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

A good lie does not exist. ~ Duop Chak Wuol

No sort of activity is likely to be lasting if it is not founded on self-interest, that's a universal principle, a philosophical principle ~ Leo Tolstoy

Good habits formed at youth make all the difference. ~ Aristotle.

Look at the Paris Commune. That was the Dictatorship of the Proletariat. ~ Friedrich Engels

Mrs Beaumont shrugged. 'Dougie travelled light in life,' she said. 'He knew it was people who were important. ~ Sara Sheridan

Is it so hard to offer your help and sympathy to somebody in grief? It takes a little to make one step, but, in an inexplicable manner, it stretches into thousands of kilometers. All of us are full of empathy and consolation but always prefer to express it from a distance. ~ Igor Eliseev

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

In true love, one has no reservations.True love is unquestionable,indisputable and totally recognizable. ~ I. Alan Appt

In the Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, there appears a remarkable
quotation attributed to Michael Welfare, one of the founders of a
religious sect known as the Dunkers and a longtime acquaintance of
Franklin. the statement had its origins in Welfare's complaint to
Franklin that zealots of other religious persuasions were spreading lies
about the Dunkers, accusing them of abominable principles to which, in
fact, they were utter strangers. Franklin suggested that such abuse
might be diminished if the Dunkers published the articles of their
belief and the rules of their discipline. Welfare replied that this
course of action had been discussed among his co-religionists but had
been rejected. He then explained their reasoning in the following
words:
When we were first drawn together as a society, it had pleased God to
enlighten our minds so far as to see that some doctrines, which we once
esteemed truths, were errors, and that others, which we had esteemed
errors, were real truths. From time to time He has been pleased to
afford us farther light, and our principles have been improving, and our
errors diminishing. Now we are not sure that we are arrived at the end
of this progression, and at the perfection of spiritual or theological
knowledge; and we fear that, if we should feel ourselves as if bound and
confined by it, and perhaps be unwilling to receive further improvement,
Neil Postman

Not evil. Moronic, which isn't quite the same thing. Evil presupposes a moral decision, intention, and some forethought. A moron or a lout, however, doesn't stop to think or reason. He acts on instinct, like a stable animal, convinced he's doing good, that he's always right, and sanctimoniously proud to go around f***ing up ... anyone he perceives to be different from himself, be it because of skin color, creed, language, nationality, or ... leisure habits. What the world needs is more thoroughly evil people and fewer borderline pigheads. ~ Carlos Ruiz Zafon

Why are we even here [on earth], what's our human nature? It's precipitating a real philosophical crisis that I find quite fascinating. ~ Douglas Coupland

What a paradox it is, the sane causes more problems than the insane! It is! The real problems of the world do not come from the insane but, the sane! ~ Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

Science and The Word of God There is a constant effort made to explain the work of creation as the result of natural causes; and human reasoning is accepted even by professed Christians, in opposition to plain Scripture facts. There are many who oppose the investigation of the prophecies, especially those of Daniel ~ Ellen G. White

But as the work proceeded I was continually reminded of the fable about the elephant and the tortoise. Having constructed an elephant upon which the mathematical world could rest, I found the elephant tottering, and proceeded to construct a tortoise to keep the elephant from falling. But the tortoise was not more secure than the elephant, and after some twenty years of very arduous toil, I came to the conclusion that there was nothing more that I could do in the way of making mathematical knowledge indubitable. ~ Bertrand Russell

Don't be scared by the word authority. Believing things on authority only means believing them because you've been told them by someone you think trustworthy. Ninety-nine per cent of the things you believe are believed on authority. I believe there is such a place as New York. I haven't seen it myself. I couldn't prove by abstract reasoning that there must be such a place. I believe it because reliable people have told me so. The ordinary man believes in the Solar System, atoms, evolution, and the circulation of the blood on authority -because the scientists say so. Every historical statement in the world is believed on authority. None of us has seen the Norman Conquest or the defeat of the Armada. None of us could prove them by pure logic as you prove a thing in mathematics. We believe them simply because people who did see them have left writings that tell us about them: in fact, on authority. A man who jibbed at authority in other things as some people do in religion would have to be content to know nothing all his life. ~ C.S. Lewis

The blues are important primarily because they contain the cultural expression and the cultural response to blacks in America and to the situation that they find themselves in. And contained in the blues is a philosophical system at work. And as part of the oral tradition, this is a way of passing along information. ~ August Wilson

the most certain sciences are like things lit up by the sun so that they may be seen. But it is God who gives the light. Reason is in our minds as sight in our eyes, and the eyes of the mind are the senses of the soul. Now, however pure it be, bodily sense cannot see any visible thing without the light of the sun. Hence, however perfect be the human mind, it cannot by reasoning know any truth without the light of God, which belongs to the aid of grace. ~ Keith A. Mathison

Intuition is the wisdom formed by feeling and instinct - a gift of knowing without reasoning ... Belief is ignited by hope and supported by facts and evidence - it builds alignment and creates confidence. Belief is what sets energy in motion and creates the success that breeds more success. ~ Angela Ahrendts

Whatever life throws at me, I'll take with a smile upon my face and Nirvana's 'Bleach' on the stereo. ~ Mark R. Faulkner

Science fiction is very well suited to asking philosophical questions; questions about the nature of reality, what it means to be human, how do we know the things that we think we know. ~ Ted Chiang

The total mental efficiency of a man is the resultant of the working together of all his faculties. He is too complex a being for any one of them to have the casting vote. If any one of them do have the casting vote, it is more likely to be the strength of his desire and passion, the strength of the interest he takes in what is proposed. Concentration, memory, reasoning power, inventiveness, excellence of the senses, all are subsidiary to this. ~ William James

Norman Mailer decocts matters of the first philosophical magnitude from an examination of his own ordure, and I am not talking about his books. ~ William F. Buckley, Jr.

A man of courage is also full of faith. ~ Marcus Tullius Cicero

All physics is rooted in the notion of law, the belief that we live in an ordered universe that can be understood by the application of rational reasoning. ~ Richard Feynman

Being is. Being is in-itself. Being is what it is. ~ Jean-Paul Sartre

...philosophy does not, like exact or empirical science, bring us to know things of which we were simply ignorant, but brings us to know in a different way things which we already knew in some way; and indeed it follows from our own hypothesis; for if the species of a philosophical genus overlap, the distinction between the known and the unknown, which in a non-philosophical subject-matter involves a difference be-tween two mutually exclusive classes of truths, in a philosophical subject-matter im- plies that we may both know and not know the same thing; a paradox which disappears in the light of the notion of a scale of forms of knowledge, where coming to know means coming to know in a different and better way. ~ R.G. Collingwood