Quotes about Reason

the will can obey the passions instead of the reason, and this accounts for the fact that we often know what is good and what is evil—even what is good for us, what is truly best for us, for our own ultimate happiness—and yet choose evil over good, choose what we know is not in our own best interests. We can choose misery over joy if our will, led by our passions, commands our mind to focus on the short-range pleasures and ignore the long-run miseries.

Delight is a subjective reason for praying, but it is a valid one.

it is possible to love one's friend for another reason than God, whereas God is the only reason for loving one's enemy.

we are fallen fools, most of our philosophy is not "the proper use of human reason" but the improper use of human reason.

T]o scorn the dictate of reason is to scorn the commandment of God (I-II,19,5).

Reason and truth themselves that are in question? Socrates never visited these terrifying heights and depths; they are distinctively modern and post-Christian. Socrates was a simple virgin; Christians are like married women (married to God), and modernists are like divorcees.

we have that the animal does not: reason and free will, or free choice.

Reason is His voice, His interior prophet, in our souls. We call that prophet conscience. (St. Thomas used two terms for it: "synderesis" was the awareness of its reality and truth and authority and rules, and "conscience" was the application of it. We use "conscience" for both.) Conscience is essentially the power of reason to know good and evil.

Heart" here refers especially to deep feeling or emotion. "Heart" means not only (1) intuitive reason ("the heart has its reasons") and (2) will

Lewis said, "Reason is the natural organ of truth; but imagination is the organ of meaning." He was saying that stories can align reason with imagination and mind with emotion. When truth is put in imaginative form, it can be driven not only into the mind but also into the heart.

A little flesh, a little breath, and a Reason to rule all - that is myself.

But there is another reason for the high repute of mathematics: it is mathematics that offers the exact natural sciences a certain measure of security which, without mathematics, they could not attain.