Davis - Mesner - Treasury of Religious and Spiritual Quotations - Words to Live by

The Stonesong Press, Inc., 1994. – 640 p.

ISBN 978-0895775498

 

REASON

What the good man ought to do he does; for reason in each of its possessors chooses what is best for itself, and the good man obeys his reason.

—Aristotle (384–322 B.C.),Politics

 

The Almighty does nothing without reason, though the frail mind of man cannot explain the reason.

—St. Augustine, City of God, 426

 

We must hold that reason and the works of reason have their source in God: that from Him they draw their inspiration: and that if they repudiate their origins by this very act they proclaim their own insufficiency.

—A. J. Balfour, Theism and Humanism, 1915

 

Our Reason is capable of nothing but the creation of a universal confusion and universal doubt.

—Pierre Bayle, Dictionary, 1697

 

… there is the notion that reason can’t provide values. So there is a turn to religion. I’m not suggesting religion is unnecessary, but there is a widespread belief that religion can decide values and reason can’t.

—Allan Bloom, in U.S. News & World Report, May 11, 1987

 

Reason will find God, but reason will find, too, the need to transcend reason, the promise of more than reason can offer.

—George Brantl, Catholicism, 1962

 

No man serves God with a good conscience, who serves him against his reason.

—Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Aids to Reflection, 1825

 

We should rather marvel greatly if at any time the process by which the eternal counsels are fulfilled is so manifest as to be discerned by our reason.

—Dante, Conivivio, c. 1310

 

The revolters against reason have asserted that … when human reason conceives of the deity to be worshipped and rules that the evidence is favorable to the worshipping of such a deity, man is creating his own God.

—L. Harold De Wolf, Religious Revolt Against Reason, 1949

 

Those whom God wishes to destroy, he first deprives of their senses.

—Euripides, Fragment, 5th century B.C.

 

I am immortal, imperishable, eternal, as soon as I form the resolution to obey the laws of reason.

—J.G. Fichte (1762–1814), The Vocation of Man

 

I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.

—Galileo, Letter to Grand Duchess of Tuscany, 1615

 

Reason inspired by love of truth is the only eye with which man can see the spiritual heavens above us.

—Charles E. Garman, Letters, Lectures, Addresses, 1909

 

I do not believe man possesses an avenue to truth which is superior to his reason.

—Roland B. Gittelsohn, Man’s Best Hope, 1961

 

A free activity of the mind, reaching conclusions under no compulsion save that of evidence.

—C.E.M. Joad, Return to Philosophy, 1936

 

Reason cannot injure true Religion, for true Religion is reason.

—M. Joseph, The Ideal in Judaism, 1893

 

My question is, what can we hope to achieve with reason, when all the material and assistance of experience are taken away?

—Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 1781

 

Is it really too much to ask and hope for a religion whose content is perennial but not archaic, which provides ethical guidance, teaches the lost art of contemplation, and restores contact with the supernatural without requiring reason to abdicate?

—Arthur Koestler, The Trial of the Dinosaur and Other Essays, 1951

 

Reason retains its dignity only if it does not yield to the temptation of competing with religious imagination—if it does not transgress its own limitations.

—Richard Kroner, Perspectives on a Troubled Decade, 1950

 

Reason is a faculty far larger than mere objective thought. When either the political or the scientific discourse announces itself as the voice of reason, it is playing God, and should be spanked and stood in the corner.

—Ursula K. Le Guin, address, Bryn Mawr commencement, 1986, Dancing at the Edge of the World

 

The existence of one God is according to reason; the existence of more than one God, contrary to reason; the resurrection of the dead, above reason.

—John Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 1690

 

If each man relies on his individual reason for his religious beliefs, the result will be anarchy of belief or the annihilation of religious sovereignty.

—Joseph de Maistre (1753–1821), Étude sur la Souveraineté

 

We light the chalice of intuition with the flame of reason.

—Robert Upton Nelson, letter to the editor, Religious Humanism, Winter 1992

 

The only true revolt is creation—the revolt against nothingness. Lucifer is the patron saint of mere negativistic revolt.

—Jose Ortega y Gasset, Mission of the University, 1930

 

If we submit everything to reason, our religion will have nothing in it mysterious or supernatural. If we violate the principles of reason, our religion will be absurd and ridiculous.

—Blaise Pascal, Pensées, 1670

 

The fact that religions can be so shamelessly dishonest, so contemptuous of the intelligence of their adherents, and still flourish does not speak very well for the tough-mindedness of the believers. But it does indicate, if a demonstration were needed, that near the core of the religious experience is something remarkably resistant to rational inquiry.

—Carl Sagan, Broca’s Brain, 1979

 

The life of reason is no fair reproduction of the universe, but the expression of man alone.

—George Santayana, The Life of Reason, 1905

 

It is doubtful if a truly good world, a better and a fuller life for man, can ever be established through reason alone.

—Edmund W. Sinnott, Two Roads to Truth, 1953

 

If the determinist is right, reasoning can prove nothing: it is merely an ingenious method for providing us with apparently rational excuses for believing what in any case we cannot help believing.

—Burnett H. Streeter, Reality, 1926

 

Human reason is the norm of the human will, according to which its goodness is measured, because reason derives from the eternal law which is the divine reason itself.

—St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, 1272

 

If there is no higher reason—and there is not—then my own reason must be the supreme judge of my life.

—Leo Tolstoy, My Confession, 1879

 

The enthronement of reason means the enthronement of man who becomes his own lawgiver.

—W.A. Visser ‘t Hooft, The Kingship of Christ, 1948

 

Passion and prejudice govern the world; only under the name of reason.

—John Wesley, letter, October 5, 1770

 

In life as in art the mood of rebellion closes up the channels of the soul, and shuts out the airs of heaven.

—Oscar Wilde, De Profundis, 1909

 

—Gerald Vann, The Water and the Fire, 1954