Top 100 But Reasonable Quotes
#1. I like to think I set aspirational but reasonable goals and encourage my team to achieve them.
Sheri McCoy
#2. Feminine traits are called weaknesses. People joke about them; fools ridicule them; but reasonable persons see very well that those traits are just the tools for the management of men, and for the use of men for female designs.
Immanuel Kant
#3. We're always trotting out some story of a ninety-seven-year-old who runs marathons, as if such cases were not miracles of biological luck but reasonable expectations for all. Then, when our bodies fail to live up to this fantasy, we feel as if we somehow have something to apologize for.
Atul Gawande
#4. Believe in yourself! Have faith in your abilities! Without a humble but reasonable confidence in your own powers you cannot be successful or happy.
Norman Vincent Peale
#5. You know what they say, 'You have to work at wisdom; you have to take pains to be reasonable, but to be foolish, just let yourself go.
Louise Colet
#6. Man, being reasonable, must get drunk; the best of life is but intoxication.
George Gordon Byron
#7. Reasonable readers would have accepted my book about ghouls as a work of fiction, but such readers are rare, and most condemned it as a hoax. Even worse, totally unreasonable readers took it for a scientific treatise.
H.P. Lovecraft
#8. I looked up and she said, "You have to believe I did everything a reasonable person would do. Maybe I didn't reach my hands into toilet water, but I did everything else I could.
Charlie Close
#9. That someone would want another human being to suffer, or would even tolerate the idea, for committing no crime at all but being reasonable, is truly frightening. A religion that breeds such people is a genuine plague upon the earth.
Richard Carrier
#10. With reasonable men, I will reason; with humane men I will plead; but to tyrants I will give no quarter, nor waste arguments where they will certainly be lost.
William Lloyd Garrison
#11. Someday I'd like to be a father, not of a human child, but something more reasonable.
Dov Davidoff
#12. If he had a reason for preferring Liberalism to the Conservatism of many in his set, it was not that he considered Liberalism more reasonable, but because it suited his manner of life better.
Leo Tolstoy
#13. Would men but generously snap our chains, and be content with rational fellowship instead of slavish obedience, they would find us more observant daughters, more affectionate sisters, more faithful wives, more reasonable mothers - in a word, better citizens
Mary Wollstonecraft
#14. Is it not reasonable to suspect that if existence were pointless and the universe devoid of meaning, we would never have achieved not only the ability to imagine otherwise, but even the ability to entertain this very thought - to wit, that existence is pointless and the universe devoid of meaning.
Leszek Kolakowski
#15. The only reasonable goal in life is maximizing your total lifetime experience of something called happiness. That might sound selfish, but it's not. Only a sociopath or a hermit can find happiness through extreme selfishness. A normal person needs to treat others well in order to enjoy life.
Scott Adams
#16. A just and reasonable modesty does not only recommend eloquence, but sets off every great talent which a man can be possessed of.
Joseph Addison
#17. To a reasonable creature, that alone is insupportable which is unreasonable; but everything reasonable may be supported.
Epictetus
#18. No one should expect the value of their house to appreciate quickly - counting on your home to be a significant part of your retirement saving isn't a winning strategy - but it is reasonable to expect that prices generally will rise with at least the rate of inflation for some time to come.
Mark Zandi
#19. It is closer to the truth to say that God is crazy than that God is reasonable. I suspect God merely smiles when someone calls him crazy, but shakes His head and frowns when someone calls Him reasonable.
Peter Kreeft
#20. We got ratings. It isn't that they won't quarrel with you, or say you're always right. But as long as you stay strong and the ratings are good and you're reasonable - I don't think we fought unreasonably. We basically won that right.
Norman Lear
#21. But how can a series of reasonable intermediate forms be constructed? Of what value could the first tiny step toward an eye be to its possessor? The dung-mimicking insect is well protected, but can there be any edge in looking only 5 percent like a turd?
Stephen Jay Gould
#22. Kind, reasonable, thoughtful. It wasn't 'love' or an admission of wild, passionate feelings, but he realized he liked her three words more. 'Love' would have been easy, another easy lie in a long line of lies. 'Love' would be easy to dismiss.
Amy Tintera
#23. The three main extra-rational activities in modern life are religion, war, and love. all these are extra-rational, but love is not anti-rational, that is to say, a reasonable man may reasonably rejoice in its existence
Bertrand Russell
#24. So I drank every night after work, alone, up at my place and I had enough left for a day at the track on Saturday, and life was simple and without too much pain. Maybe without too much reason, but getting away from pain was reasonable enough.
Charles Bukowski
#25. We do the right thing not to please people but because it's the only logically reasonable thing to do, as long as we are being honest with ourselves - even if we are the only ones.
Wangari Maathai
#26. Man is a rational animal. But that does not mean that he is a reasonable animal. It means only that he has reason, and therefore can misuse it. If he had not reason, he could not be unreasonable. But he has, and is.
Frank Sheed
#27. It was reasonable enough, of course, for people to wish to speak to a man, if that is what they wanted, but that did not mean that a man would be better.
Alexander McCall Smith
#28. It is reasonable to ask who or what created the universe, but if the answer is God, then the question has merely been deflected to that of who created God.
Stephen Hawking
#29. I'll do anything reasonable, but I won't be intimidated and I won't grovel.
Lynne Graham
#30. I've done a reasonable amount of travelling, which I enjoyed, but not for too long at a time.
Dennis Ritchie
#31. The free expression of opinion, as experience has taught us, is the safety-valve of passion. The noise of the rushing steam, when it escapes, alarms the timid; but it is the sign that we are safe. The concession of reasonable privilege anticipates the growth of furious-appetite.
Herbert Gladstone, 1st Viscount Gladstone
#32. Love alone is the only reasonable activity or pursuit of humankind ... Fo r Love not only annihilates our fear of meaninglessness but empowers us to seek the happiness of others. And this indeed is our greatest happiness.
Leo Tolstoy
#33. - But, if life is just that, just being reasonable, then there is nothing in it - nothing worthwhile. So, the yearning that we have to keep dead things living - or to make unreasonable things reasonable. That is why a person should live.
Jesse Ball
#34. A timely, interesting, educational approach to today's wine picture. Wine still makes a feast out of a meal, but in times of not so plenty we will enjoy a bottle that is more reasonable. This tome is a must-read for wine lovers as well as the trade.
Margrit Mondavi
#35. Was it a form of madness, no longer to be able to trust your sense of things? To be betrayed by decisions apparently arrived at carefully and through reason, but really no more than marauding appetites cunningly tricked out as reasonable choices?
Paul Russell
#36. Under a tyranny, most friends are a liability. One quarter of them turn "reasonable" and become your enemies, one quarter are afraid to speak, and one quarter are killed and you die with them. But the blessed final quarter keep you alive.
Sinclair Lewis
#37. Most men either compromise or drop their greatest talents and start running after, what they perceive to be, a more reasonable success, and somewhere in between they end up with a discontented settlement. Safety is indeed stability, but it is not progression.
Criss Jami
#38. That's how they manage to live together, a billion of them, in reasonable peace. They are not perfect, of course. They know how to fight and lie and cheat each other, and all the things that all of us do. But more than any other people in the world, the Indians know how to love one another.
Gregory David Roberts
#39. There is no reason to feel any shame in hiring someone to pick stocks or mutual funds for you. But there's one responsibility that you must never delegate. You, and no one but you, must investigate whether an adviser is trustworthy and charges reasonable fees.
Benjamin Graham
#40. War may represent the failure of diplomacy, but even the best diplomats operate on credit. Sooner or later someone who's less reasonable than you are is going to call you, and if your military can't cover your I.O.U.s, you lose.
David Weber
#41. They will never outlaw all of your guns at once. But every 'reasonable' control they can impose without your resistance gives them one more bit of leverage to make gun ownership for you and your children and your grandchildren as difficult as possible.
Dave Kopel
#42. Who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God's image, but thee who destroys a good book, kills reason its self.
John Milton
#43. Beauty is only skin deep, but that's deep enough to satisfy any reasonable man.
George Horace Lorimer
#44. You can find a lot of reasonable buys at Wal-Mart. But one key to making it on a budget is by donating your time and labor to the project. Do-it-yourself projects will always help you save.
Nate Berkus
#45. You're meant to think somehow that literature, in espousing eternal values, is kind of normal and balanced and reasonable. When it fact it's anything but.
Errol Morris
#46. The nature of the new world system was not so different from the old. It was for the moment more stable, but a reasonable forecast would be that Africa in particular had a century of border wars ahead of it.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan
#47. We all have weaknesses. But I have figured that others have put up with mine so tolerably that I would be much less than fair not to make a reasonable discount for theirs.
William Allen White
#48. What are you wearing?" She'd never done this before, but a mutual exchange of information seemed reasonable. "Santa suit.
Samanthe Beck
#49. But though it cannot be reasonable not to gain happiness for fear of losing it, yet it must be confessed, that in proportion to the pleasure of possession, will be for some time our sorrow for the loss.
Samuel Johnson
#50. The world is hard because you may wake up today but not tomorrow. And yet no one will accept "fear of death and a futile existence" as a reasonable excuse to miss work.
The world is hard because you will have to fight for the things you love or worse, fight the things you love.
Iain Thomas
#51. In temperate countries, where man had succeeded in putting most forms of nature save his own under a reasonable degree of restraint, the status of the triffid was thus made quite clear. But in the tropics, particularly in the dense forest areas, they quickly became a scourge.
John Wyndham
#52. I believe [ ... ] that while all human life is sacred there's nothing wrong with the death penalty if you can trust the legal system implicitly, and that no one but a moron would ever trust the legal system.
Neil Gaiman
#53. Celebrities in general are pretty democratic, just being in the theater. Plus, I'm from Chicago. But Obama's sensible ... he's just a reasonable, sensible human being.
James Belushi
#54. But in the absence of eye-witness there's always a doubt, sometimes only the shadow of a doubt. The law says 'reasonable doubt', but I think a defendant's entitled to the shadow of doubt. There's always the possibility, no matter how improbable, that he's innocent.
Harper Lee
#55. We're not going to spend taxpayers' money on abortion. This is an issue that divides America. But certainly reasonable people can agree on how to reduce abortions in America.
George W. Bush
#56. Hope reliably triumphs over experience. It's always very tempting to console ourselves with an apparently very reasonable thought: the reason it didn't work out this time was not that the expectations were too high, but that we directed them onto the wrong person. We
The School Of Life
#57. It is natural for men to want power. But to seek power actively takes a temperament baffling to both the simple and the wise. The simple cannot fathom how any man would dare presume to prevail, while the wise are amazed that any reasonable man would want the world, assuming he could get it.
Gore Vidal
#58. The driver thought I was crazy - but then his religion thinks stoning a woman to death for adultery is reasonable, so I figured we were about even.
Terry Hayes
#59. But before he left, Matthew drew his wife aside and whispered, "Why do they have holes in their dresses?"
"I'm sure there's a perfectly reasonable explanation," she whispered back, and pressed a fleeting kiss on his jaw.
Lisa Kleypas
#60. But if there is hope, it lies in ordinary working people. When you put it in words it sounds reasonable: it is when you look at the human beings passing you on the pavement that it becomes an act of faith.
Tony Benn
#61. Children must be rendered reasonable, but not reasoners. The first thing to teach them is that it is reasonable for them to obey, and unreasonable for them to dispute.
Joseph Joubert
#62. Ah, but life is like that! It does not permit you to arrange and order it as you will. It will not permit you to escape emotion, to live by the intellect and by reason! You cannot say, 'I will feel so much and no more.' Life, Mr. Welman, whatever else it is, is not reasonable. [Hercule Poirot]
Agatha Christie
#63. But hey, she works in a video rental store and since it's such a demanding high-powered profession her bitchy behavior is completely reasonable, right? The
Bret Easton Ellis
#64. The imagination never forgets; it is a re-membering. It is not foundationless, but most reasonable, and it alone uses all the knowledge of the intellect.
Henry David Thoreau
#65. But only when it was too late did they realize the price they must pay for escaping their destiny. Every Happy Ever After was tainted. Fate, at first so amenable, so reasonable, so open to negotiation, ends up by exacting a cruel revenge for happiness.
Diane Setterfield
#66. Our national debt after all is an internal debt owed not only by the Nation but to the Nation. If our children have to pay interest on it they will pay that interest to themselves. A reasonable internal debt will not impoverish our children or put the Nation into bankruptcy.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
#68. Maneker says the AAMD's guidelines are reasonable under normal circumstances, but not if a museum is in dire straits.
Anonymous
#69. But to be hanged - is that not unendurable? Even so, when a man feels that it is reasonable, he goes off and hangs himself.
Epictetus
#70. Yet, when we must put aside our wrath, quench our envy, soften our anger, offer our prayers, and show a disposition which is reasonable, mild, kindly, and loving, how could poverty stand in our way? For we accomplish these things not by spending money but by making the correct choice.
Saint John Chrysostom
#71. Pierre Bordieu was right: "The all powerful is he who does not wait but makes others wait. Absolute power is the power to make oneself unpredictable and deny other people any reasonable anticipation, to place them in total uncertainty by offering no scope for their capacity to predict."
Michael Jackson
#72. If you look at the world's top 50 drugs being sold today, they are being marketed and sold by companies that did not invent them. I respect patents. I'll pay a royalty. But I shouldn't be denied the right to produce drugs for poor people at reasonable prices.
Yusuf Hamied
#73. The importance of insomnia is so colossal that I am tempted to define man as the animal who cannot sleep. Why call him a rational animal when other animals are equally reasonable? But there is not another animal in the entire creation that wants to sleep yet cannot.
Emile M. Cioran
#74. Obama seems like he tries to talk everyone into what he believes - and that's part of why we elected him, because he's a calm, reasonable guy - but behind that, there has to be some fight. You have to be able to take a few punches and throw a few punches.
Dee Dee Myers
#75. Whenever a reasonable explanation comes to sight as to why a thing appears to be but is not true, this makes for greater trust in the truth.
Aristotle.
#76. They questioned us but they were polite because we had passports and money. I do not think they believed a word of the story and I thought it was silly but it was like a law-court. You did not want something reasonable, you wanted something technical and then stuck to it without explanations.
Ernest Hemingway,
#77. Because scientists are reasonable men, one or another argument will ultimately persuade many of them. But there is no single argument that can or should persuade them all. Rather than a single group conversion, what occurs is an increasing shift in the distribution of professional allegiances.
Thomas S. Kuhn
#78. She hoped to be wise and reasonable in time; but alas! Alas! She must confess to herself that she was not wise yet.
Jane Austen
#79. I do not see, Sir, that it is reasonable for a man to be angry at another, whom a woman has preferred to him; but angry he is, no doubt; and he is loath to be angry at himself.
Samuel Johnson
#81. Although the patriarchal ego prides itself on being reasonable, the twentieth century has been anything but the Age of Reason. In our collective neurosis, we have raped the earth, disrupted the delicate balance of nature, and created phallic missiles of mass destruction.
Marion Woodman
#82. I'm sure that there are reasonable people that had some reasonable projections about the future of New Orleans, but none of those could include not trying to rebuild the city and make it better than it was before.
Harry Connick Jr.
#83. I wouldn't say in all situations, but a lot of times kids can be the most reasonable people around because they don't have the deal with all the drama that goes along with being an adult.
RJ Mitte
#84. One shouldn't despair over the fact that some of the developments one has hoped for were never produced but only became a beginning. Perhaps they will be revived some day in the future if necessary or reasonable, when the time is ripe
Finn Juhl
#85. It is unclear exactly how many law enforcement agencies are currently using this capability, but it is reasonable to say that while resource limitations used to discourage the government from tracking you without a good reason, these constraints have largely disappeared.
Ron Wyden
#86. God put enough into the world to make faith in Him a reasonable thing. But He left enough out to make it impossible to live by reason alone.
Ravi Zacharias
#87. Too often we seem to have the idea that submission to Scripture means that we first come to see it as reasonable and then submit to it, but submission means, in part, a willingness to bend the knee in faith to things that are not fully resolved in our mind.
James C. Wilhoit
#88. I am glad that at such a moment my young man turned out to be not so reasonable; the time will come for an intelligent man to be reasonable, but if at such an exceptional moment there is no love to be found in a young man's heart, then when will it come?
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#89. I was not an outstanding student. I did a reasonable amount of work. I got generally good - pretty good grades, but I was not that passionate about getting straight A's.
Steve Case
#90. The majority of unskilled investors stubbornly hold onto their losses when the losses are small and reasonable. They could get out cheaply, but being emotionally involved and human, they keep waiting and hoping until their loss gets much bigger and costs them dearly.
William O'Neil
#91. Abstinence is perfectly reasonable in theory," Gregory said, "It just doesn't work in practice. It's like dieting. You can go a day or two, maybe even a week. But eventually that pizza just smells too good.
Tom Perrotta
#92. It seems characteristic of the mind of man that the repression of what is natural to humans must be abhorred, but that what is natural to an infinitely more natural animal must be confined within the bounds of a reason peculiar only to men
more peculiar sometimes than seems reasonable at all.
Beryl Markham
#93. They won't accept reasonable things with their minds but the fantastic things they'll swallow whole when their emotions are brought into play. Because the emotions have no limits on belief. The emotions will swallow anything - and they do.
Richard Matheson
#94. Doubtless, by definition, God was Reason itself. But would he also be "reasonable" [ ... ]
C.S. Lewis
#95. Hopelessness is reasonable. But nothing of worth in my life came of reason. Not my love, not my art, not my heaven. So I am hopeful
Clive Barker
#96. There are men who prefer to keep trouble from a woman, but it seems to me that is neither reasonable nor wise. I've always respected the thinking of women, and also their ability to face up to trouble when it comes, and it shouldn't be allowed to come on them unexpected.
Louis L'Amour
#97. I believe in a reasonable amount of "right to bear arms". But private citizens of the United States are not allowed to own nuclear weapons. I always wanted a nuclear weapon, if I could have gotten one. I'm every other kind of power, but I'm not a nuclear power.
Ted Turner
#98. In strange and uncertain times such as those we are living in, sometimes a reasonable person might despair. But hope is unreasonable and love is greater even than this. May we trust the inexpressible benevolence of the creative impulse.
Robert Fripp
#99. I'm glad your self-righteousness has given you some exercise, but you forget: we are not such a tidy, reasonable, and humane race. Our thoughts don't stand in grammatical rows, our hearts don't draw equations, our consciences don't have the benefit of historians whispering the answers to us.
Josiah Bancroft
#100. He who is discontented with what he has, and with what has been granted to him by fortune, is one who is ignorant of the art of living, but he who bears that in a noble spirit, and makes reasonable use of all that comes from it, deserves to be regarded as a good man.
Epictetus
