Reason is the slave of passion. Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment
What does reason know? Reason only knows what it has succeeded in learning. Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground
It is useless to attempt to reason a man out of a thing he was never reasoned into. Jonathan Swift
Reason is in fact the path to faith, and faith takes over when reason can say no more. Thomas Merton
I believe that before all else I am a reasonable human being, just as you are – or, at all events, that I must try and become one. Henrik Ibsen, The Doll’s House: A Play
And here is the point, about myself and my co-thinkers. Our belief is not a belief. Our principles are not a faith. We do not rely solely upon science and reason, because these are necessary rather than sufficient factors, but we distrust anything that contradicts science or outrages reason. We may differ on many things, but what we respect is free inquiry, openmindedness, and the pursuit of ideas for their own sake. Christopher Hitchens, God is Not Great p5
So this is where all the vapid talk about the ‘soul’ of the universe is actually headed. Once the hard-won principles of reason and science have been discredited, the world will not pass into the hands of credulous herbivores who keep crystals by their sides and swoon over the poems of Khalil Gibran. The ‘vacuum’ will be invaded instead by determined fundamentalists of every stripe who already know the truth by means of revelation and who actually seek real and serious power in the here and now. One thinks of the painstaking, cloud-dispelling labor of British scientists from Isaac Newton to Joseph Priestley to Charles Darwin to Ernest Rutherford to Alan Turing and Francis Crick, much of it built upon the shoulders of Galileo and Copernicus, only to see it casually slandered by a moral and intellectual weakling from the usurping House of Hanover. An awful embarrassment awaits the British if they do not declare for a republic based on verifiable laws and principles, both political and scientific. ibid.
The search for Nirvana, like the search for Utopia or the end of history or the classless society, is ultimately a futile and dangerous one. It involves, if it does not necessitate, the sleep of reason. There is no escape from anxiety and struggle. Christopher Hitchens, Love Poverty and War: Journeys and Essays
Thinking only begins at the point where we have come to know that Reason, glorified for centuries, is the most obstinate adversary of thinking. Martin Heidegger
A man always has two reasons for what he does – a good one and a real one. J P Morgan
What truly is logic? Who decides reason? ... It is only in the mysterious equations of love that any logic or reason can be found. John Nash
One is tempted to define man as a rational animal who always loses his temper when he is called upon to act in accordance with the dictates of reason. Oscar Wilde
I can stand brute force, but brute reason is quite unbearable. There is something unfair about its use. It is hitting below the intellect. Oscar Wilde
The notion that faith in Christ is to be rewarded by an eternity of bliss, while a dependence upon reason, observation, and experience merits everlasting pain, is too absurd for refutation, and can be believed only by that unhappy mixture of insanity and ignorance, called faith. Robert G Ingersoll
‘Jane! will you hear reason?’ (he stooped and approached his lips to my ear) ‘because, if you won’t, I’ll try violence.’ Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre
I love man as my fellow; but his scepter, real, or usurped, extends not to me, unless the reason of an individual demands my homage; and even then the submission is to reason, and not to man. Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Women
He is not apprehended by reason, but by life. Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
Although the far territory of the extreme can exert an intoxicating pull on susceptible individuals of all bents, extremism seems to be especially prevalent among those inclined by temperament or upbringing toward religious pursuits. Faith is the very antithesis of reason, injudiciousness a crucial component of spiritual devotion. And when religious fanaticism supplants ratiocination, all bets are suddenly off. Jon Krakauer, Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith
People think of faith as being something that you don’t really believe, a device in helping you believe simply it. Of course that is quite wrong. As Pascal says, faith is a gift of God. It is different from the proof of it. It is the kind of faith God himself places in the heart, of which the proof is often the instrument ...
He says of it, too, that it is the heart which is aware of God, and not reason. That is what faith is: God perceived by the heart, not be reason. Malcolm Muggeridge, The End of Christendom
As a poet and as a mathematician, he would reason well; as a mere mathematician, he could not have reasoned at all. Edgar Allan Poe, The Purloined Letter
We are biological creatures. We are born, we live, we die. There is no transcendent purpose to existence. At best we are creatures of reason, and by using reason we can cure ourselves of emotional excess. Purged of both hope and fear, we find courage in the face of helplessness, insignificance and uncertainty. Jonathan Sacks
Fanatics are picturesque, mankind would rather see gestures than listen to reasons. Friedrich Nietzsche
Religion doesn't just cloud our minds. It asks us to deliberately deceive ourselves – to replace reason with its opposite, faith. And when men operate on faith, they can no longer be reasoned with, which makes them more dangerous than any sane man, good or evil. James L Sutter, Death’s Heretic
Without the voice of reason, every faith is its own curse. Sting, Nothing Like the Sun
Misuse of reason might yet return the world to pre-technological night; plenty of religious zealots hunger for just such a result, and are happy to use the latest technology to effect it. A C Grayling, The Heart of Things: Applying Philosophy to the 21st Century
Reasons aren’t really things that make you do other things. Reasons are things that you make up, much later, to reassure everyone that we are all logical and that the world makes sense. We do unreasonable things, because we want to, at the time. No reason. Much later we sit in the wreckage, building reasons out of little bits of wreckage, so we’ll have something to show the crash investigators. Look, this is what caused it. So the whole mess at least appears reasonable. So we can convince ourselves that at least there was a reason for the disaster, something we can prevent or avoid, so it’ll never happen again. But a lot of the time there’s no reason. We just flew it to the ground. Because we felt like it. And we’re still dangerous. And it could happen again anytime.
It’s easier to live with each other afterwards if we give each other reasons. Julian Gough, Juno & Juliet
[Doubt] is not a new idea; this is the idea of the age of reason. This is the philosophy that guided the men who made the democracy that we live under. The idea that no one really knew how to run a government led to the idea that we should arrange a system by which new ideas could be developed, tried out, and tossed out if necessary, with more new ideas bought in – a trial-and-error system. This method was a result of the fact that science was already showing itself to be a successful venture at the end of the eighteenth century. Even then it was clear to socially minded people that the openness of possibilities was an opportunity, and that doubt and discussion were essential to progress into the unknown. If we want to solve a problem that we have never solved before, we must leave the door to the unknown ajar ... doubt is not to be feared, but welcomed and discussed. Richard P Feynman
In a story you had to find a reason, but real life gets on very well without even Freudian motivations. Anthony Burgess, Earthly Powers
Religious belief is without reason and without dignity, and its record is near-universally dreadful. Martin Amis, The Second Plane: 14 Responses to September 11th
The indispensability of reason does not imply that individual people are always rational or are unswayed by passion and illusion. It only means that people are capable of reason, and that a community of people who choose to perfect this faculty and to exercise it openly and fairly can collectively reason their way to sounder conclusions in the long run. As Lincoln observed, you can fool all of the people some of the time, and you can fool some of the people all of the time, but you can’t fool all of the people all of the time. Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined
Humanists recognize that it is only when people feel free to think for themselves, using reason as their guide, that they are best capable of developing values that succeed in satisfying human needs and serving human interests. Isaac Asimov
What is reasonable is real; that which is real is reasonable. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right
We are not here concerned with hopes or fears, only with truth as far as our reason permits us to discover it. Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man