Reason The Only Oracle Quotes & Sayings

Alexander once made himself supremely ridiculous. Coming across Epicurus's Principal Doctrines, the most admirable of his books, as you know, with its terse presentment of his wise conclusions, he brought it into the middle of the marketplace, there burned it on a figwood fire for the sins of its author, and cast its ashes into the sea. He issued an oracle on the occasion:
"The dotard's doctrines to the flames be given."
The fellow had no conception of the blessings conferred by that book upon its readers, of the peace, tranquility, and independence of mind it produces, of the protection it gives against terrors, phantoms, and marvels, vain hopes and insubordinate desires, of the judgment and candor that it fosters, or of its true purging of the spirit, not with torches and squills and such rubbish, but with right reason, truth, and frankness. — Lucian Of Samosata

Neither believe nor reject any thing because any other person, or description of persons have rejected or believed it. Your own reason is the only oracle given you by heaven ... — Thomas Jefferson

Your own reason is the only oracle given to you by God. — Thomas Jefferson

I love fairy tale retellings and mash-ups. — Sarah J. Maas

My wife who is non-Jewish regrets it all the time that I can say these terrible things about fellow Jews and she can't. — Joseph Epstein

I am killed them quick, but they are killing me slow. [Jim Browner in 'The Adventure of the Cardboard Box'] — Arthur Conan Doyle

Philosophy, like medicine, has plenty of drugs, few good remedies, and hardly any specific cures. — Nicolas Chamfort

The deal is in the details. — Michelle Moore

That was probably the reason that history was more of an oracle than a science. Perhaps later, muck later, it would be taught by means of tables of statistics, supplemented by anatomical sections. The teacher would draw on the blackboard an algebraic formula representing the conditions of life of the masses of a particular nation at a particular period: 'Here, citizens, you see the objective factors which conditioned this historical process. — Arthur Koestler

Verte was the kingdom's head sorceress, oracle, palace grump, and the only reason I hadn't died of sheer boredom.... One time, I blew up her caudron trying to make soup. In retaliation, she sent me a billy goat that ate my entire closet's contents. — Betsy Schow

This is the result of six billion years of evolution. Tonight, we have given the lie to gravity.We have reached for the stars. — Ray Bradbury

Sometimes you have to find the sunny side of the street in a weird neighborhood. — Kim Stagliano

The art of making love, muffled up in furs, in the open air, with the thermometer at Zero, is a Yankee invention. — John Quincy Adams

What does the radicalism of radical writers nowadays amount to? Most of it is hand-me-down bohemianism, sentimental populism, D. H. Lawrence-and-water, or imitation Sartre. For American writers radicalism is a question of honor. They must be radicals for the sake of their dignity. They see it as their function, and a noble function, to say Nay, and to bite not only the hand that feeds them (and feeds them with comic abundance, I might add) but almost any other hand held out to them. Their radicalism, however, is contentless. A genuine radicalism, which truly challenges authority, we need desperately. But a radicalism of posture is easy and banal. Radical criticism requires knowledge, not posture, not slogans, not rant. People who maintain their dignity as artists, in a small way, by being mischievous on television, simply delight the networks and the public. True radicalism requires homework - thought. Of the cleans, on the other hand, there isn't much to say. They seem faded. — Saul Bellow

Shake off all the fears and servile prejudices, under which weak minds are servilely crouched. Fix reason firmly in the seat, and call to her tribunal every fact, every opinion. Question with boldness even the existence of God, because if there be one, he must approve of the homage of reason rather than that of blindfolded fear ... Your own reason is the only oracle given you by heaven, and you are answerable not for the rightness, but the uprightness of the decision. — Thomas Jefferson