Reasoning Quotes - page 3

There is an inconvenience which attends all abstruse reasoning. That it may silence, without convincing an antagonist, and requires the same intense study to make us sensible of its force, that was at first requisite for its invention. When we leave our closet, and engage in the common affairs of life, its conclusions seem to vanish, like the phantoms of the night on the appearance of the morning; and 'tis difficult for us to retain even that conviction, which we had attain'd with difficulty. (David Hume)
Though experience be our only guide in reasoning concerning matters of fact; it must be acknowledged, that this guide is not altogether infallible, but in some cases is apt to lead us into errors. View quote
David Hume
The source of every Crime, is some defect of the Understanding; or some error in Reasoning, or some sudden force of the Passions. Defect in the Understanding, is Ignorance; in Reasoning, Erroneous Opinion. View quote
Thomas Hobbes
We must trust to nothing but facts: These are presented to us by Nature, and cannot deceive. We ought, in every instance, to submit our reasoning to the test of experiment, and never to search for truth but by the natural road of experiment and observation. View quote
Antoine Lavoisier
Reasoning will never make a man correct an ill opinion, which by reasoning he never acquired... View quote
Jonathan Swift
I consider that in dialectics I am the equal of Socrates. As to women, I agree that each has three or four souls, but none of them a reasoning one. View quote
Henryk Sienkiewicz
Acts themselves alone are history, and these are neither the exclusive property of Hume, Gibbon nor Voltaire, Echard, Rapin, Plutarch, nor Herodotus. Tell me the Acts, O historian, and leave me to reason upon them as I please; away with your reasoning and your rubbish. All that is not action is not worth reading. View quote
William Blake
If your little savage were left to himself and be allowed to retain all his ignorance, he would in time join the infant's reasoning to the grown man's passion, he would strangle his father and sleep with his mother. View quote
Denis Diderot
A reasoning, self-sufficing thing, An intellectual all-in-all. View quote
William Wordsworth
Our garden was debated territory between five local cats, and we'd heard that the best way to keep other cats out of the garden was to have one yourself. A moment's rational thought here will spot the slight flaw in this reasoning. View quote
Terry Pratchett
The errors which arise from the absence of facts are far more numerous and more durable than those which result from unsound reasoning respecting true data. (Charles Babbage)
Since reasoning, or inference, the principal subject of logic, is an operation which usually takes place by means of words, and in complicated cases can take place in no other way: those who have not a thorough insight into both the signification and purpose of words, will be under chances, amounting almost to certainty, of reasoning or inferring incorrectly. View quote
John Stuart Mill
Special qualities are required of the essayist. A poem or a novel may spring from the inner consciousness of an author.. reasoning powers must be brought to reinforce imagination. View quote
Flora Thompson
Self-taught poverty is a help toward philosophy, for the things which philosophy attempts to teach by reasoning, poverty forces us to practice. View quote
Diogenes of Sinope
Rationalization may be defined as self-deception by reasoning. View quote
Karen Horney
The very reason we need logic at all is because most reasoning is not conscious at all. View quote
Julian Jaynes
Mathematical reasoning may be regarded rather schematically as the exercise of a combination of two facilities, which we may call intuition and ingenuity. View quote
Alan Turing
Graphology is another in a long list of quack substitutes for hard work. It is appealing to those who are impatient with such troublesome matters as research, evidence analysis, reasoning, logic, and hypothesis testing. View quote
Robert Todd Carroll
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. View quote
Elbert Hubbard
The most superficial fact regarding the Discourses, the fact that the number of its chapters equals the number of books of Livy's History, compelled us to start a chain of tentative reasoning which brings us suddenly face to face with the only New Testament quotation that ever appears in Machiavelli's two books and with an enormous blasphemy. View quote
Leo Strauss
Mathematical Reasoning is not only exact; it has its own criteria of reality. (Paul Karl Feyerabend)
... treatises on mechanics do not clearly distinguish between what is experiment, what is mathematical reasoning, what is convention, and what is hypothesis. View quote
Henri Poincaré
The man who comes back through the Door in the Wall will never be quite the same as the man who went out. He will be wiser but less sure, happier but less self-satisfied, humbler in acknowledging his ignorance yet better equipped to understand the relationship of words to things, of systematic reasoning to the unfathomable mystery which it tries, forever vainly, to comprehend. View quote
Aldous Huxley
Assembled in a crowd, people lose their powers of reasoning and their capacity for moral choice. View quote
Aldous Huxley
Today, the theory of evolution is an accepted fact for everyone but a fundamentalist minority, whose objections are based not on reasoning but on doctrinaire adherence to religious principles. View quote
James D. Watson