Quotes & Sayings About Reasoning And Logic

Bad reasoning as well as good reasoning is possible; and this fact is the foundation of the practical side of logic. — Charles Sanders Peirce

Passion has helped us; but can do so no more. It will in future be our enemy. Reason, cold, calculating, unimpassioned reason, must furnish all the materials for our future support and defence. — Abraham Lincoln

Theologians, and religionists in general, start with a fantasy premise and then proceed to apply rigorous formal logic to tease out its implications. Stark himself points out that "theology consists of formal reasoning about God." This is admirably exact. Theologians, beginning with a wished-for creation of their own minds, analyze that creation's characteristics by rigorous application of the principles of formal - that is, deductive - logic. — Andrew Bernstein

Logic, n. The art of thinking and reasoning in strict accordance with the limitations and incapacities of the human misunderstanding. The basic of logic is the syllogism, consisting of a major and a minor premise and a conclusion - thus:
Major Premise: Sixty men can do a piece of work sixty times as quickly as one man.
Minor Premise: One man can dig a post-hole in sixty seconds; Therefore-
Conclusion: Sixty men can dig a post-hole in one second.
This may be called syllogism arithmetical, in which, by combining logic and mathematics, we obtain a double certainty and are twice blessed. — Ambrose Bierce

Trying to understand the way nature works involves a most terrible test of human reasoning ability. It involves subtle trickery, beautiful tightropes of logic on which one has to walk in order not to make a mistake in predicting what will happen. The quantum mechanical and the relativity ideas are examples of this. — Richard P. Feynman

TEF is predicated on logic, a simple wager that every human faces:
If a reasoning human being loves and values life, they will want to live as long as possible-the desire to be immortal. Nevertheless, it's impossible to know if they're going to be immortal once they die. To do nothing doesn't help the odds of attaining immortality-since it seems evident that everyone will die someday and possibly cease to exist. To try to do something scientifically constructive towards ensuring immortality beforehand is the most logical conclusion. — Zoltan Istvan

Disputes with men, pertinaciously obstinate in their principles, are, of all others, the most irksome; except, perhaps, those with persons, entirely disingenuous, who really do not believe the opinions they defend, but engage in the controversy, from affectation, from a spirit of opposition, or from a desire of showing wit and ingenuity, superior to the rest of mankind. The same blind adherence to their own arguments is to be expected in both; the same contempt of their antagonists; and the same passionate vehemence, in enforcing sophistry and falsehood. And as reasoning is not the source, whence either disputant derives his tenets; it is in vain to expect, that any logic, which speaks not to the affections, will ever engage him to embrace sounder principles. — David Hume

The world is ruled by such dreams, dreams of impassioned hearts, and improvisations of warm lips, not by cold words linked in chains of iron sequence,
not by logic. The heart with its passions, not the understanding with its reasoning, sways, in the long run, the actions of mankind. — William Kirby

I think Chinese leadership is trying to tell the world they have another set of logic or reasoning or values which are different from yours. Of course, I don't think they believe that. It's just an argument that's made when you can't confront the truth and facts. They really want to maintain power. — Ai Weiwei

My first Kickstarter project created a book called 'Clear and Present Thinking', a college-level textbook on logic and critical reasoning, which was made available to the world for free. As a professor myself, I observed that the price of textbooks was too high for some of my students. — Brendan Myers

No discussion of logic is complete without a refresher course in the difference between inductive and deductive reasoning. By its strictest definition, inductive reasoning proves a general principle - your idea worth spreading - by highlighting a group of specific events, trends, or observations. In contrast, deductive reasoning builds up to a specific principle - again, your idea worth spreading - through a chain of increasingly narrow statements. — Jeremey Donovan

Mathematics is not arithmetic. Though mathematics may have arisen from the practices of counting and measuring it really deals with logical reasoning in which theorems - general and specific statements - can be deduced from the starting assumptions. It is, perhaps, the purest and most rigorous of intellectual activities, and is often thought of as queen of the sciences. — Christopher Zeeman

Holmes," I cried, "this is impossible." "Admirable!" he said. "A most illuminating remark. It IS impossible as I state it, and therefore I must in some respect have stated it wrong. Yet you saw for yourself. Can you suggest any fallacy? — Arthur Conan Doyle

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. — Robert Todd Carroll

But men love abstract reasoning and neat systematization so much that they think nothing of distorting the truth, closing their eyes and ears to contrary evidence to preserve their logical constructions. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Don't make the effort to appeal to logic and reasoning all the time; very few people can relate to that. Appeal to emotions instead; everyone, at least, can relate to that. — Ufuoma Apoki

Gion had tried to use logic on Cross and it had been like reasoning with a cement wall on meth. — Cassandra Gannon

Crack had a social logic to it, a specific kind of reasoning that drew from a vast well of common experience for its symbolic resonance. Crack stood for pain and power, chaos and order, the truth behind the lie. Crack was a sociolegal logic grounded in blood. — Dimitri A. Bogazianos

I learned early that you'd better know what you're talking about. You'd better realize that certain issues are going to be so hot - no matter what reason, what logic you apply to it - you're going to be met with an opposition just because their viewpoint is different, and there's no way they're going to accept your reasoning. Furthermore, they're going to attack you because you will be portrayed as not being credible: "You're an actor. What do you know?" — Robert Redford

1. God is (by definition) a being than which no greater being can be thought.
2. Greatness includes greatness of virtue.
3. Therefore, God is a being than which no being could be more virtuous.
4. But virtue involves overcoming pains and dangers.
5. Indeed, a being can only be properly said to be virtuous if it can suffer pain or be destroyed.
6. A God that can suffer pain or is destructible is not one than which no greater being can be thought.
7.For you can think of a greater being, that is, one that is nonsuffering and indestructible.
8. Therefore, God does not exist. — Douglas N. Walton

While love shuts down areas of the brain associated with judgment and reasoning by contrast those consumed with hate have very active reasoning facilities. It takes logic to figure out how to attack your enemy. — Randall Parker

Our schools display an enormous bias in educating the mind rather than the whole person. We place major emphasis on reasoning, logic and math, with almost no concern for emotions, intuition and creativity. Our students become memorizing mimics and dull conformists, rather than exciting and feeling creators. — John Bradshaw

In 1995, when Steve Jobs was trying to convince us that we should go public, one of his key arguments was that we would eventually make a film that failed at the box office, and we needed to be prepared, financially, for that day. Going public would give us the capital to fund our own projects and, thus, to have more say about where we were headed, but it would also give us a buffer that could sustain us through failure. Steve's feeling was that Pixar's survival could not depend solely on the performance of each and every movie. The underlying logic of his reasoning shook me: We were going to screw up, it was inevitable. And we didn't know when or how. We had to prepare, then, for an unknown problem - a hidden problem. From that day on, I resolved to bring as many hidden problems as possible to light, a process that would require what might seem like an uncommon commitment to self-assessment. — Ed Catmull

It is unwise to equate scientific activity with what we call reason, poetic activity with what we call imagination. Without the imaginative leap from facts to generalisation, no theoretic discovery in science is made. The poet, on the other hand, must not imagine but reason
that is to say, he must exercise a great deal of consciously directed thought in the selection and rejection of his data: there is a technical logic, a poetic reasoning in his choice of the words, rhythms and images by which a poem's coherence is achieved. — Cecil Day-Lewis

All reasoning presumes premises or intuitions or ultimate convictions that cannot be proved by any foundations or facts more basic than themselves, and hence there are irreducible convictions present wherever one attempts to apply logic to experience. One always operates within boundaries established by one's first principles, and asks only the questions that those principles permit. — David Bentley Hart

It turned out I was pretty good in science. But again, because of the small budget, in science class we couldn't afford to do experiments in order to prove theories. We just believed everything. Actually, I think that class was called Religion. Religion class was always an easy class. All you had to do was suspend the logic and reasoning you were being taught in all the other classes. — George Carlin

[She wasn't] a logically reasoning woman, but God is good, and hearts may count in heaven as high as heads. — Charles Dickens

Intuition is a combination of insight and imagination that was once attributed to spiritual communication. Mathematicians call it 'fuzzy logic,' drawing conclusions from vague or subjective input. The mind becomes aware without the direct intervention of reasoning. Once you can imagine something you can begin the process of creating it. Executives use intuition to make many product, investment, and hiring decisions, even if they deny it. Success in business may depend on an accurate gut. — Jennifer James

All people, whether Aspie or neuro-typical are predisposed by their society to make guesses, jump to conclusions and then seek to defend those conclusions, regardless of logic or changing circumstance. This is sloppy, illogical thinking which may not hinder your life too much, under normal circumstances. But if you want to be a great detective, then such thinking will absolutely ruin your chances. — Alexei Maxim Russell

Religion is a subject which, if the believers used the same "reasoning" to address problems at work as they use to defend their beliefs, they'd soon find themselves unemployed. And if they found their child applying that kind of "reasoning" on a homework assignment they'd wonder what the hell was the wrong with their child. — Dave Champion

why moral and political arguments are so frustrating: because moral reasons are the tail wagged by the intuitive dog. A dog's tail wags to communicate. You can't make a dog happy by forcibly wagging its tail. And you can't change people's minds by utterly refuting their arguments. Hume diagnosed the problem long ago: And as reasoning is not the source, whence either disputant derives his tenets; it is in vain to expect, that any logic, which speaks not to the affections, will ever engage him to embrace sounder principles.49 — Jonathan Haidt

Logic and reasoning, which might show the absurdity of such dreams of bliss and revenge, are to be thrust aside. — Ludwig Von Mises

The theory of conceptual semantics, which proposes that word senses are mentally represented as expressions in a richer and more abstract language of thought, stands at the center of this circle, compatible with all of the complications. Word meanings can vary across languages because children assemble and fine-tune them from more elementary concepts. They can be precise because the concepts zero in on some aspects of reality and slough off the rest. And they can support our reasoning because they represent lawful aspects of reality-space, time, causality, objects, intentions, and logic-rather than the system of noises that developed in a community to allow them to communicate. Conceptual semantics fits, too, with our commonsense notion that words are not the same as thoughts, and indeed, that much of human wisdom consists of not mistaking one for the other. — Steven Pinker

It is not at all coincidental that Darwinian psychology has the same difficulty explaining the unity and integration of human reasoning as Darwinian biology has explaining the unity and integration of irreducibly complex functions. Practical and theoretical reasoning is often irreducibly complex. A given argument has several well-matched, interacting reasons, and the removal of any one of them makes the argument break down. — Angus J.L. Menuge

Reason is up to these demands because it is an open-ended combinatorial system, an engine for generating an unlimited number of new ideas. Once it is programmed with a basic self-interest and an ability to communicate with others, its own logic will impel it, in the fullness of time, to respect the interests of ever-increasing numbers of others. It is reason too that can always take note of the shortcomings of previous exercises of reasoning, and update and improve itself in response. And if you detect a flaw in this argument, it is reason that allows you to point it out and defend an alternative. — Steven Pinker

It was a good answer that was made by one who when they showed him hanging in a temple a picture of those who had paid their vows as having escaped shipwreck, and would have him say whether he did not now acknowledge the power of the gods, - 'Aye,' asked he again, 'but where are they painted that were drowned after their vows?' And such is the way of all superstition, whether in astrology, dreams, omens, divine judgments, or the like; wherein men, having a delight in such vanities, mark the events where they are fulfilled, but where they fail, though this happens much oftener, neglect and pass them by. — Francis Bacon

Our society's almost doctrinal emphasis upon deductive reasoning, convergent thinking and selective retention perversely excludes divergent thinking, approximation and, importantly, guessing. If we are truly to understand the adolescent mind and develop effective ways to minimize the effects of risk-taking behaviour, we really need to understand these processes and engage with them. There is no logic involved with drug-taking and gambling. Adults can learn, too; understanding these mechanisms will also allow us to encourage creativity and value the spontaneity so characteristic of the adolescent mind. — Tony Little

I know-that things exist beyond our reasoning. They DO exist. We may not understand them but that doesn't mean they can't BE. You find people so ready to-to scoff at anything they can't figure out, can't reason, and those same people will turn straight round and tell you that they believe in God. Is HE understandable? Is that belief backed up by reasoning, scientific logic? We live with mysteries all day long, all our lives, but because they're familiar mysteries, we accept them. Well, you'd have to-or go mad. Who understands LIFE? Yet we live it. We hang on to it. We accept it just as we accept the inevitability of death. Life and death: the only two absolute certainties we're aware of, but we can't even BEGIN to explain them. — Bernard Taylor

Adrenaline has a funny way of flooding into all the places where logic and reasoning usually reside. I — Kylie Logan

Every work of science great enough to be well remembered for a few generations affords some exemplification of the defective state of the art of reasoning of the time when it was written; and each chief step in science has been a lesson in logic. — Charles Sanders Peirce

McChrystal's defenders at the Pentagon were making the case Tuesday that the president and his men - (the McChrystal snipers spared Hillary) - must put aside their hurt feelings about being painted as weak sisters. Obama should not fire the serially insubordinate general, they reasoned, because that would undermine the mission in Afghanistan, and if that happens, then Obama would be further weakened.
So the commander in chief can be bad-mouthed as weak by the military but then he can't punish the military because that would make him weak? It's the same sort of pass-the-Advil vicious circle reasoning the military always uses. — Maureen Dowd

Humanism is a philosophy that is primarily focused on how we as individuals can be good human beings. We seek to be ethical, moral and compassionate people in all that we do. However, we also understand that good moral reasoning requires us to think clearly and rationally about the problems we face. So Humanists are as much concerned with how we think, as we are concerned with what we think about. To that end we practice the related skills of freethought, critical thinking and logic. — Jennifer Hancock

Now we've a real intellectual impasse. Our reason, which is supposed to make things more intelligible, seems to be making them less intelligible, and when reason thus defeats its own purpose something has to be changed in the structure of our reason itself. — Robert M. Pirsig

There are many lay people and scholars alike, both with and without the Muslim community, who feel that the pure orthodox Islam of the fundamentalists could never survive outside the context of its seventh-century Arabian origins. Apply twenty-first-century science, logic, or humanistic reasoning to it and it falls apart.
They believe this is why Islam has always relied so heavily on the threat of death. Question Islam, malign Islam, or leave Islam and you will be killed. It is a totalitarian modus operandi that silences all dissent and examination, thereby protecting the faith from ever having to defend itself. — Brad Thor

School was more than academics; an education prepared you for the humdrum of real life: working with others, tempering one's personality to assimilate with the group but without losing your individual identity, understading the factors of logic, reasoning, and debate. For a person - vampire or human - to succeed in the world, unlocking the mysteries of the universe was insufficient. One would also need to grasp the mysteries of human nature. — Melissa De La Cruz

The art of reasoning becomes of first importance. In this line antiquity has left us the finest models for imitation; I should consider the speeches of Livy, Sallust, and Tacitus, as pre-eminent specimens of logic, taste, and that sententious brevity which, using not a word to spare, leaves not a moment for inattention to the hearer. Amplification is the vice of modern oratory. — Thomas Jefferson

Reason like a sphere? What type of reasoning does a wooden sphere do?"
"The circular type, I should think. And, by coincidence, it is my favorite type as well. Perhaps that's why I'm so good at the game. — Brandon Sanderson

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. — John Stuart Mill

Inferences of Science and Common Sense differ from those of deductive logic and mathematics in a very important respect, namely, when the premises are true and the reasoning correct, the conclusion is only probable. — Bertrand Russell

The belief of God is not a matter of common sense, or logic, or argument, but of feeling. It is as impossible to prove the existence of God as to disprove it. I do not believe in God. I see no need of such an idea. It is incredible to me that there should be an after-life. I find the notion of future punishment outrageous and of future reward extravagant. I am convinced that when I die, I shall cease entirely to live; I shall return to the earth I came from. Yet I can imagine that at some future date I may believe in God; but it will be as now, when I don't believe in Him, not a matter of reasoning or of observation, but only of feeling. — W. Somerset Maugham

Nietzsche said we will never rid ourselves of God because we have too much faith in grammar/language.

Lacan said because of the religious tenets of language, religion will triumph.

Chomsky, master linguist, says 'there are no skeptics. You can discuss it in a philosophy seminar but no human being can - in fact - be a skeptic.'

These musings shed light on Soren K's leap to faith idea. This is more nuanced than the circular leap of faith argument he's been wrongly accused of...

Soren is saying that, as we use the logic of language to express existence and purpose, we will always leap TO faith in a superior, all encompassing, loving force that guides our lives.

This faith does not negate our reason. It simply implies that the reasoning of this superior force is superior to our own. Edwin Abbott crystalizes this in Flatland. — Chester Elijah Branch

In both jokes and dreams, Freud observed, meanings are condensed and displaced, things are represented indirectly or by their opposites, fallacious reasoning trumps logic. Jokes often arise involuntarily, like dreams, and tend to be swiftly forgotten. From these similarities Freud inferred that jokes and dreams share a common origin in the unconscious. Both are essentially means of outwitting our inner censor. — Jim Holt

But is Christian faith the place to turn for logic? Is not logic the domain of scholars and philosophers? The British philosopher John Locke condemns this common misconception: "God has not been so sparing to men to make them barely two-legged creatures, and left it to Aristotle to make them rational."[2] In other words, Locke recognized that logic existed and people reasoned and used the critical faculties of their minds before any philosopher came along to teach about it. God created logic and reasoning as he created man, and he created it for man, and therefore, we should find it reasonable that God's Word has something to say - if not a lot to say - about logic, rationality, and good judgment. — Joel McDurmon

It's like I am inside this ethereal sphere wherein exists no logic, no reasoning, no typicality, no explanations, no realism, no comparisons, nothing ordinary, and no normalcy. And then if you are to understand me, you have to step into my realm and leave all of those things behind. I'm not typical. I'm not ordinary. And I'm not normal. And I never will be . So I don't see the point of waking up in the morning and wishing to be so. — C. JoyBell C.

In a republican nation, whose citizens are to be led by reason and persuasion and not by force, the art of reasoning becomes of first importance — Thomas Jefferson

In every enterprise ... the mind is always reasoning, and, even when we seem to act without a motive, an instinctive logic still directs the mind. Only we are not aware of it, because we begin by reasoning before we know or say that we are reasoning, just as we begin by speaking before we observe that we are speaking, and just as we begin by seeing and hearing before we know what we see or what we hear. — Claude Bernard

Nothing is so deceptive as human reasoning, - nothing so slippery and reversible as what we have decided to call 'logic.' The truest compass of life is spiritual instinct. — Marie Corelli

The theories of the social sciences do not consist of "laws" in the sense of empirical rules about the behavior of objects definable in physical terms. All that the theory of the social sciences attempts is to provide a technique of reasoning which assists us in connecting individual facts, but which, like logic or mathematics, is not about the facts. It can, therefore, and this is the second point, never be verified or falsified by reference to facts. — Friedrich Hayek

Among all the liberal arts, the first is logic, and specifically that part of logic which gives initial instruction about words ... [T]he word "logic" has a broad meaning, and is not restricted exclusively to the science of argumentative reasoning. [It includes] Grammar [which] is "the science of speaking and writing correctly-the starting point of all liberal studies." — John Of Salisbury

Like any pseudo scientific thinking, denialism begins with a desired conclusion. Rather than supporting a controversial or rejected claim, like many pseudo sciences, denialists maintain that a generally accepted scientific or historical claim is not true, usually for ideological reasons. Denialists then engage in what is called motivated reasoning, rationalizing why the undesired claim is not true or at least not proven. They therefore are working backwards from their desired conclusion, filling in justifications for what they believe, rather than following logic and evidence wherever it leads. — Steven Novella

Most of us, in our civilized society, rely too heavily on reasoning capacity to make things happen. We've been raised to believe that logic will prevail. Logic, in and of itself, will rarely influence people. Most often logic doesn't work. — Herb Cohen

Many aspects of life cannot be explained through logic or reason. The reasoning part of the mind simply doesn't have the capacity to understand the many whys and how's of being and non-being. — Frederick Lenz

Thundering, roaring, are the storms of life. Momentary hardships that, unveiled, reveal a purpose beyond carnal reasoning. The pain can get intense, the hurt can be severe, but one must look beyond themselves for conclusive answers. One must not examine their situations using finite logic to try to discover the deeper meaning behind the circumstance or its outcome. One must look beyond the surface of their own intellect, and see through the walls of their own understanding. The blueprint of life has been masterfully designed in such a way, that all things - no matter how they may seem - have a purpose; and that purpose will ultimately bring
about a greater good overall. The spiritual realm is truly realities base; and it is from there that truth derives. The mystery of the storm is revealed - cause and effect - the past, the present, and the future. — Calvin W. Allison

As a science, logic institutes an analysis of the process of the mind in reasoning, and investigating the principles on which argumentation is conducted; as an art, it furnishes such rules as may be derived from those principles, for guarding against erroneous deductions. — Richard Whately

Faith should be tempered with logic and reasoning. — J. Bartell

Ought not a Minister to have, First, a good understanding, a clear apprehension, a sound judgment, and a capacity of reasoning with some closeness ... Is not some acquaintance with what has been termed the second part of logic, (metaphysics), if not so necessary as [logic itself], yet highly expedient? Should not a Minister be acquainted with at least the general grounds of natural philosophy? JOHN WESLEY, ADDRESS TO THE CLERGY — J.P. Moreland

With life the truth is not what is right or wrong, but with life the truth is the process, where life unfolds in every individual, and takes him to the whole. — Roshan Sharma

Cursed luck! - said he, biting his lip as he shut the door, - for man to be master of one of the finest chains of reasoning in nature, - and have a wife at the same time with such a head-piece, that he cannot hang up a single inference within side of it, to save his soul from destruction. — Laurence Sterne

What feminists refer to as microaggressions, the rest of us sane adults call life....The concept of microaggressions encourages women to think that every single thing in the world is, or should be, about them. It encourages breathless levels of narcissism, solipsism and just plain delusion....Feminism encourages women to believe that they have the same reasoning and coping abilities as toddlers. No thanks. — Janet Bloomfield

To engage the written word means to follow a line of thought, which requires considerable powers of classifying, inference-making and reasoning. It means to uncover lies, confusions, and overgeneralizations, to detect abuses of logic and common sense. It also means to weigh ideas, to compare and contrast assertions, to connect one generalization to another. To accomplish this, one must achieve a certain distance from the words themselves, which is, in fact, encouraged by the isolated and impersonal text. That is why a good reader does not cheer an apt sentence or pause to applaud even an inspired paragraph. Analytic thought is too busy for that, and too detached. — Neil Postman

He had a better mind and a more rigorous temperament than me; he thought logically, and then acted on the conclusion of logical thought. Whereas most of us, I suspect, do the opposite: we make an instinctive decision, then build up an infrastructure of reasoning to justify it. And call the result common sense. — Julian Barnes

Logic: The art of thinking and reasoning in strict accordance with the limitations and incapacities of the human misunderstanding. — Ambrose Bierce

Geometry is beautifully logical, and it teaches you how to think and prove that things are so, step by step by step. Proofs are excellent lessons in reasoning. Without logic and reasoning, you are dependent on jumping to conclusions or - worse - having empty opinions. — Marilyn Vos Savant