Top 100 Human Reason Quotes
#1. Human reason can neither predict nor deliberately shape its own future. Its advances consist in finding out where it has been wrong.
Friedrich August Von Hayek
#2. And of all illumination which human reason can give, none is comparable to the discovery of what we are, our nature, our obligations, what happiness we are capable of, and what are the means of attaining it.
Adam Weishaupt
#3. Most specifically, irrationality means that rational systems are unreasonable systems. By that I mean that they deny the basic humanity, the human reason, of the people who work within or are served by them.
George Ritzer
#4. Human reason has discovered many amazing things in nature and will discover still more, and will thereby increase its power over nature.
Vladimir Lenin
#5. So it is with human reason, which strives not against faith, when enlightened, but rather furthers and advances it.
Martin Luther
#6. He developed his revolutionary philosophy, with its grounding not in the Bible or ancient writers but in human reason, and became famous and infamous for it.
Russell Shorto
#7. The weakness of human reason appears more evidently in those who know it not than in those who know it.
Blaise Pascal
#8. Human reason goes forth inexorably to such questions as cannot be answered by any experiential use of reason or principles based on it.
Immanuel Kant
#9. If it be true that there can be no metaphysics transcending human reason, it is no less true that there can be no empirical knowledge that is not already caught and limited by the a priori structure of cognition.
C. G. Jung
#10. Since historical reconstruction is a rational process, only justified and indeed possible if it involves the human reason, what we call history is the mess we call life reduced to some order. pattern and possibly purpose.
Geoffrey Elton
#11. Poor human reason, when it trusts in itself, substitutes the strangest absurdities for the highest divine concepts.
John Chrysostom
#12. Juries must, of necessity, be governed, in reaching many results through inferences from other facts, by certain laws of nature and human reason. They are often obliged to infer one thing from another, and this, whether that other be a fact direct or circumstantial.
Levi Woodbury
#13. The whole object of the Prophets and the Sages was to declare that a limit is set to human reason where it must halt.
Maimonides
#14. Law in general is human reason, inasmuch as it governs all the inhabitants of the earth: the political and civil laws of each nation ought to be only the particular cases in which human reason is applied.
Charles De Secondat
#15. Human reason is like a drunken man on horseback; set it up on one side, and it tumbles over on the other
Martin Luther
#16. The smiles of infants are said to be the first fruits of human reason.
Henry Norman Hudson
#17. Human reason can excuse any evil; that is why it's so important that we don't rely on it.
Veronica Roth
#18. Human reason has the peculiar fate ... that it is burdened with questions that it cannot dismiss ... but which it also cannot answer.
Immanuel Kant
#19. All human thought, including scientific thought, rests on premises which cannot be validated by human reason and which came from historical epoch to historical epoch.
Leo Strauss
#20. The thought of immortality is as well founded as any other well authenticated postulate of the human reason.
John Haynes Holmes
#21. The argument for liberty is not an argument against organization, which is one of the most powerful tools human reason can employ, but an argument against all exclusive, privileged, monopolistic organization, against the use of coercion to prevent others from doing better.
Friedrich Hayek
#22. He who wholly renounces himself, and relies not on mere human reason, will make good progress in the Scriptures; but the world comprehends them not, from ignorance of that mortification which is the gift of God's word.
Martin Luther
#23. An enlightened trust in the sovereignty of human reason can be every bit as magical as the exploits of Merlin, and a faith in our capacity for limitless self-improvement just as much a wide-eyed superstition as a faith in leprechauns.
Terry Eagleton
#24. Modernity gone wrong has isolated humanity and made human reason autonomous of (and dismissive toward) revelation.
John Mark Reynolds
#25. Now if the religious skeptic is right, we can know nothing about God. And if we can know nothing about God, how can we know God so well that we can know that he cannot be known? How can we know that God cannot and did not reveal himself - and perhaps even through human reason?
Peter Kreeft
#26. The universe, as we see it, is the result of regularly working forces, having a causal connection with each other and therefore capable of being understood by human reason.
Ludwig Buchner
#27. Our reason has this peculiar fate that, with reference to one class of its knowledge, it is always troubled with questions which cannot be ignored, because they spring from the very nature of reason, and which cannot be answered, because they transcend the powers of human reason.
Immanuel Kant
#28. Human reason is by nature architectonic."
Critique of Pure Reason
Kant
#29. Human Reason cannot be reduced to the result of evolutionary adaptation; art is not just a heightened procedure of providing sensual pleasures, but a medium of Truth;
Slavoj Zizek
#30. The Fall is an offense to human reason, but once accepted, it makes perfect sense of the human condition.
Blaise Pascal
#31. When once passion takes part in the game, the human reason, unassisted by Grace, has about as much chance of retaining its hold on truths already gained as a snowflake has of retaining its consistency in the mouth of a blast furnace.
C.S. Lewis
#32. There is no human reason to be here, except for the sheer ecstasy of being crowded together.
Jean Baudrillard
#33. Religious wars are not caused by the fact that there is more than one religion, but by the spirit of intolerance ... the spread of which can only be regarded as the total eclipse of human reason.
Charles De Secondat
#34. Among the most joyful people I have known have been some who seem to have had no human reason for joy. The sweet fragrance of Christ has shown through their lives.
Elisabeth Elliot
#35. It is fortunate, I think, that nature is not bounded by human reason and by laboratory work and experimentation, for by the laws of pure reason and by microscopic investigation, it might easily have been proved, long before this, that children could not be born.
Maria Montessori
#36. Human reason is a pin dancing on the head of an angel, so small is it in comparison to the Divine vastness that encircles us.
Margaret Atwood
#37. There is no opposing brutal force to the stratagems of human reason.
Roger L'Estrange
#38. To our natural and human reason, I say that these terms 'large,' 'small,' 'immense,' 'minute,' etc. are not absolute but relative; the same thing in comparison with various others may be called at one time 'immense' and at another 'imperceptible.
Galileo Galilei
#39. Human reason needs only to will more strongly than fate, and she is fate.
Thomas Mann
#40. The exaltation of human reason and its capabilities, a commitment to rigorous and rational debate, a promotion of intellectual inquiry and scholarly exchange
all sponsored by the Church
provided the framework for the Scientific Revolution.
Thomas E. Woods Jr.
#41. On the twelfth of June, 1812, the forces of Western Europe crossed the Russian frontier and war began, that is, an event took place opposed to human reason and to human nature.
Leo Tolstoy
#43. 106. A GREAT CITADEL The most likely allegory is that the Citadel represents philosophy (that is, human reason without the light of God) surrounded by seven walls which represent the seven liberal arts,
Dante Alighieri
#44. The idea of God implies the abdication of human reason and justice; it is the most decisive negation of human liberty and necessarily ends in the enslavement of mankind both in theory and practice.
Mikhail Bakunin
#45. Profound minds are the most likely to think lightly of the resources of human reason, and it is the superficial thinker who is generally strongest in every kind of unbelief.
Humphry Davy
#46. Hume argued powerfully that human reason is fundamentally similar to that of the other animals, founded on instinct rather than quasi-divine insight into things.
David Hume
#48. If man is reduced to being nothing but a character in history, he has no other choice but to subside into the sound and fury of acompletely irrational history or to endow history with the form of human reason.
Albert Camus
#49. Human reason has this peculiar fate that in one species of its knowledge it is burdened by questions which, as prescribed by the very nature of reason itself, it is not able to ignore, but which, as transcending all its powers, it is also not able to answer.
Immanuel Kant
#51. If we ever do find a complete theory of the universe, it would be a great triumph of human reason but it wouldn't leave much for us to do. We need an intellectual challenge.
Stephen Hawking
#52. Human reason, in one sphere of its cognition, is called upon to consider questions, which it cannot decline, as they are presented by its own nature, but which it cannot answer, as they transcend every faculty of the mind.
Immanuel Kant
#53. Get into the habit of doing what you see, not what you know. Human reason cannot foresee the accidents of out-of-doors.
Charles Webster Hawthorne
#54. God has sometimes converted wickedness into madness; and it is to the credit of human reason that men who are not in some degree mad are never capable of being in the highest degree wicked.
Edmund Burke
#55. There is no great harm in the theorist who makes up a new theory to fit a new event. But the theorist who starts with a false theory and then sees everything as making it come true is the most dangerous enemy of human reason.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
#56. That language is an instrument of human reason, and not merely a medium for the expression of thought, is a truth generally admitted.
George Boole
#57. Hegel said that 'truth' is subjective, thus rejecting the existence of any 'truth' above or beyond human reason. All knowledge is human knowledge.
Jostein Gaarder
#58. No conclusions can be more agreeable to scepticism than such as make discoveries concerning the weakness and narrow limits of human reason and capacity.
David Hume
#59. Capitalism is of this material world; it provides us with the means to live; it empowers us within the known world of sense and human reason. If it is to be measured by a strict standard of holiness, by religious normativity alone, then there can never be a moral capitalism.
Stephen Young
#60. Intellect takes us along in the battle of life to a certain limit, but at the crucial moment it fails us. Faith transcends reason. It is when the horizon is the darkest and human reason is beaten down to the ground that faith shines brightest and comes to our rescue.
Mahatma Gandhi
#61. I am aware that a philosopher's ideas are not subject to the judgment of ordinary persons, because it is his endeavour to seek the truth in all things, to the extent permitted to human reason by God.
Nicolaus Copernicus
#62. They talk about who won and who lost. Human reason won. Mankind won.
Nikita Khrushchev
#63. No conclusion can be more agreable to scepticism than such as make discoveries concerning the weakness and narrow limites of human reason and capacity
David Hume
#64. I have learned to be less confident in the conclusions of human reason, and give more credit to the honesty of contrary opinions.
Thomas Jefferson
#65. Now it seems that everything in the world stems from sources other than God, since the products of nature have their source in nature; deliberate effects can be traced back to human reason or will as their source. There is no need then to assume that God exists.
Thomas Aquinas
#66. The love of truth, virtue, and the happiness of mankind are specious pretexts, but not the inward principles that set divines at work; else why should they affect to abuse human reason, to disparage natural religion, to traduce the philosophers as they universally do?
George Berkeley
#67. The only reason I'm writing this down is to show how human reason, even very sharp and exact human reason, can get crazily confused and thrown off the track.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
#68. Today we have different idols. . . We have trusted in human reason, science, and technology to solve our problems and progress toward a better world and a prosperous life. Yet idolatry brings death.
Craig G. Bartholomew
#69. God is the true realistic point where human reason mostly, if not completely, breaks down.
Kedar Joshi
#70. Civil liberty can be established on no foundation of human reason which will not at the same time demonstrate the right of religious freedom.
John Quincy Adams
#71. Language is a form of human reason, which has its internal logic of which man knows nothing.
Claude Levi-Strauss
#72. The Greeks' sculpture and athletics celebrated the human form, their literature and music human passion, their discourse and philosophy human reason. In
Steven Pressfield
#73. Human reason borrowed many arts from the instinct of animals.
Samuel Johnson
#74. All the fallacies of human reason had to be exhausted, before the light of a high truth could meet with ready acceptance.
Max Muller
#76. First the lover must learn charity and keep God's law. Then he shall be blessed a hundredfold, and he shall do great things without great effort, and bear all pain without suffering. And so his life will surpass human reason indeed.
Hadewijch
#77. Science and technology has tried to offer an alternative to religion by making a god out of human reason, but that didn't work out too well.
Thomas Keating
#78. Winter and Summer
While it's summer people say
Winter is the better season.
Such is human reason.
Kamijima Onitsura
Reiko Chiba
#79. I am aware that true miracles, things unexplained by human reason, can only occur when Jesus does them.
Gail Davis
#80. We are fallen fools, most of our philosophy is not "the proper use of human reason" but the improper use of human reason.
Peter Kreeft
#81. On the twelfth of June, the forces of Western Europe crossed the borders of Russia, and war began
that is, an event took place contrary to human reason and to the whole of human nature.
Leo Tolstoy
#82. We're not called to live by human reason. All that matters is obedience to God's Word and his leading in our lives. if God says go,we'll go. If he says stay, we'll stay. When we are in his will, we are in the safest place in the world.
Brother Yun
#83. Can reason be an idol? Certainly. The philosophy of rationalism puts human reason in the place of God as the source and standard of all truth.
Nancy Pearcey
#84. Somebody must trespass on the taboos of modern nationalism, in the interests of human reason. Business can't. Diplomacy won't. It has to be people like us.
Robert Byron
#85. For the existentials, negation is their God. To be precise, that god is maintained only through the negation of human reason. But, like suicides, gods change with men.
Albert Camus
#86. Mathematics is one of the deepest and most powerful expressions of pure human reason, and, at the same time, the most fundamental resource for description and analysis of the experiential world.
Hyman Bass
#87. Love is a brilliant illustration of a principle everywhere discoverable: namely, that human reason lives by turning the friction of material forces into the light of ideal goods.
George Santayana
#88. To prove religious faith by human reason is rationalistic claptrap.
Jostein Gaarder
#89. The problem is that spiritual answers cannot be deduced by human reason alone (1 Cor. 2:14). It's not that spiritual truth is irrational or illogical, but that human wisdom is defective, because it's tainted by man's sinfulness, and unable to perceive the things of God.
John F. MacArthur Jr.
#90. Human reason is beautiful and invincible.
No bars, no barbed wire, no pulping of books,
No sentence of banishment can prevail against it.
It puts what should be above things as they are.
It does not know Jew from Greek nor slave from master.
Czeslaw Milosz
#91. Magic has power to experience and fathom things which are inaccessible to human reason. For magic is a great secret wisdom, just as reason is a great public folly.
Paracelsus
#92. There are, then, these three means of effecting persuasion. The man who is to be in command of them must, it is clear, be able (1) to reason logically, (2) to understand human character and goodness in their various forms, and (3) to understand the emotions-that is, to name them and
Aristotle.
#93. Subjection of any kind and in any place is beneath the dignity of man ... the highest joy is to fight by the side of those who for any reason of their own making or ours, are unable to develop to full human stature.
Agnes Smedley
#94. Laughter is one of the very privileges of reason, being confined to the human species.
Thomas Carlyle
#95. The moon is considered a relatively easy object to land humans on, everything else is much harder by orders of magnitude. It is the reason why we have not been to Mars and will likely never go there successfully with humans.
Steven Magee
#96. Dogmas of every kind put assertion in the place of reason and give rise to more contention, bitterness, and want of charity than any other influence in human affairs.
Arthur Conan Doyle
#97. it is hard to argue that housing is not a fundamental human need. Decent, affordable housing should be a basic right for everybody in this country. The reason is simple: without stable shelter, everything else falls apart.
Matthew Desmond
#98. The reason, simply put, is that seeking control is not the solution to the human condition but is part of the problem.
Skye Jethani
#99. You will notice that in all disputes between Christians since the birth of the Church, Rome has always favored the doctrine which most completely subjugated the human mind and annihilated reason.
Voltaire
#100. Reality is that which exists; the unreal does not exist; the unreal is merely that negation of existence which is the content of a human consciousness when it attempts to abandon reason. Truth is the recognition of reality; reason, man's only means of knowledge, is his only standard of truth.
Ayn Rand
