reason

Instinct ensures animals to have society. Reason ensures society to have animals

Some men have thousands of reasons why they cannot do something, when all they need is one reason why they can.

Only human beings have come to a point where they no longer know why they exist.

Faith and reason are indeed complementary faculties that we use to think about the truth. When any winged creature (or mechanism) tries to fly on just one wing, it falls to the ground. In a similar way, when we human beings try to wing it with just one faculty, we crash.

In asking for a relic of Descartes, the chevalier de Terlon was standing at the crossroads of the ancient and modern. He was applying to a modern thinker - the inventor of analytic geometry, no less - a primitive tradition that extends back not only to the institutionalization of Christianity in the fourth century, when Christians first broke into the tombs of saints to gather relics, but farther still, beyond the horizon of recorded history. The request is all the stranger for the fact that the man whose remains were treated in this quasisaintlike way would go down in history as the progenitor of materialism, rationalism, and a whole tradition that looked on such veneration as nonsense.

Maybe it's not finding a reason, it's trusting that there is one.

Further, the same Arguments which explode the Notion of Luck, may, on the other side, be useful in some Cases to establish a due comparison between Chance and Design: We may imagine Chance and Design to be, as it were, in Competition with each other, for the production of some sorts of Events, and many calculate what Probability there is, that those Events should be rather be owing to the one than to the other.

The purpose of computation is insight, not numbers.

fear doesn't listen to reason it takes it own counsel

Reason is not some external power which dictates how we should behave, but an internal power, integral to who we are ... Reason does not command that we love anyone. Nonetheless, reason is vital in determining whom we love and why we love them.

Enlightenment is man's emergence from his self-imposed immaturity. Nothing is required for this enlightenment except freedom; and the freedom in question is the least harmful of all, namely, the freedom to use with and publicly in all matters.

Jesus' willingness to accommodate Thomas' unbelief is a reminder that God can handle our doubt. And that the rationalist doesn't need to see, touch, or run a lab test in order to believe in the resurrected Christ. Jesus told him, __ou believe because you have seen me. Blessed are those who believe without seeing me_ (Jn 20:29) This is not a plea to accept what goes against reason, but it is an invitation to discover a faith that goes beyond it. The example of Thomas is for the stubborn skeptic in us all.

In the average, want overcomes reason. In the magnificent, reason is the want.

I assure you, my good Lestrade, that I have an excellent reason for everything that I do.

In the woods, we return to reason and faith. There I feel that nothing can befall me in life, _ no disgrace, no calamity, (leaving me my eyes,) which nature cannot repair.

The first questions naturally raised by a person emerging from the fog of childhood are the same questions that led Aristotle and other great philosophers to think and write deeply on the subjects of first philosophy and ethics.

If man was a logical creature: his last suspect__amely, his mouth__as going to be the first; whenever he thinks that someone, or, something is smelly.

What am I but a little flesh, a little breath, and the thinking part that rules the whole?