Quotes Tagged "reason"

Humanity is a cage, and our puritanical sensibilities comprise the bars. We are confined by our own reason and intellect, and yet most of us don't even know it.

There's sometimes a tugging feeling you get to push further when you aren't being challenged enough or when things get too comfortable.

The ultimate story of success: When a nobody, who has never once in his entire life known the feeling of being remembered or respected, suddenly snaps and becomes a world dictator. On one hand it sounds just, but on the other, it illustrates the reason why a prosperity message has and needs its limitations.

The best way of handling astrological transits is to go with the flow. If the Universe is leading you to a certain place by hook or by crook, there’s probably a reason.

S'il n y a pas de rapport sexuel c'est que l'Autre est d'une autre race.

We must listen to love before we reason for love is the reason. The reason of being, the purpose of life, it is love, simply love. Anything else stands at risk of getting lost in translation.

Here we are, trapped in the amber of the moment. There is no why.

There is no logical necessity for the existence of a unique direction of total time; whether there is only one time direction, or whether time directions alternate, depends on the shape of the entropy curve plotted by the universe.

I feel a strange connection to something infinite. In the depths of my heart, somewhere reason cannot reach, I keep wondering: why does it seem like there is something beyond time and space, waiting for me to discover it, to experience it? As if it needs me to.

I mean, you could claim that anything's real if the only basis for believing in it is that nobody's proved it doesn't exist!

I do not pretend to be able to prove that there is no God. I equally cannot prove that Satan is a fiction. The Christian god may exist; so may the gods of Olympus, or of ancient Egypt, or of Babylon. But no one of these hypotheses is more probable than any other: they lie outside the region of even probable knowledge, and therefore there is no reason to consider any of them.

All our knowledge begins with the senses, proceeds then to the understanding, and ends with reason. There is nothing higher than reason.

But maybe that isn't possible. Maybe the mind of the majority is always the healthy mind, simply by virtue of its numbers. Maybe it's the definition of madness to believe I'm right and everyone else if wrong, to find my thoughts rational and reasonable when almost the entire world finds them damaged and flawed.

I admit that reason is a small and feeble flame, a flickering torch by stumblers carried in the star-less night, -- blown and flared by passion's storm, -- and yet, it is the only light. Extinguish that, and nought remains.

The offer of certainty, the offer of complete security, the offer of an impermeable faith that can’t give way, is an offer of something not worth having. I want to live my life taking the risk all the time that I don’t know anything like enough yet; that I haven’t understood enough; that I can’t know enough; that I’m always hungrily operating on the margins of a potentially great harvest of future knowledge and wisdom. I wouldn’t have it any other way.

The Search for reason ends at the known; on the immense expanse beyond it only the sense of the ineffable can glide. It alone knows the route to that which is remote from experience and understanding. Neither of them is amphibious: reason cannot go beyond the shore, and the sense of the ineffable is out of place where we measure, where we weigh. We do not leave the shore of the known in search of adventure or suspense or because of the failure of reason to answer our questions. We sail because our mind is like a fantastic seashell, and when applying our ear to its lips we hear a perpetual murmur from the waves beyond the shore. Citizens of two realms, we all must sustain a dual allegiance: we sense the ineffable in one realm, we name and exploit reality in another. Between the two we set up a system of references, but we can never fill the gap. They are as far and as close to each other as time and calendar, as violin and melody, as life and what lies beyond the last breath.

The power of thought is the light of knowledge, the power of will is the energy of character, the power of heart is love. Reason, love and power of will are perfections of man.

I thought that to get to know a desert it was enough to have been there. I thought that to have seen the dogs dying along the Cholula road, or to have seen the eyes of the lepers at Chiengmai gave me the right to talk about it. To have seen! To have been there! Rubbish! The world is not a book, it proves nothing. The spaces one has crossed were dark corridors with closed doors. The faces of the women to whom one gave oneself up completely: did they speak for anyone but themselves? The cities of man are secret. One walks along their streets, one sees them shine under one's feet, but one is not there, one never enters them. The dusty fields inhabited by people who are hungry, who wait patiently, are paradises of luxury and nourishment; shining at a vast distance from intelligence, at a vast distance from reason. They are not to be subjugated.

One might have said that reason made him flee from reason.

We are slipping back from the age of reason into the mire of mystery, into a world of gods and devils, ghouls and angels. The difference this time is that we have chosen ignorance over knowledge, vapidity over insight, folly over realism. Consequently, we only have ourselves to blame when the rich and powerful take advantage of us.