Quotes about Reasoning

What is a demanding pleasure that demands the use of ones mind! Not in the sense of problem solving, but in the sense of exercising discrimination, judgment, awareness.

Contradictions do not exist. Whenever you think that you are facing a contradiction, check your premises. You will find that one of them is wrong.

He never does a proper thing without giving an improper reason for it.

In the main, and from the beginning of time, mysticism has kept men sane. The thing that has driven them mad was logic.

It is the mark of an educated man to look for precision in each class of things just so far as the nature of the subject admits; it is evidently equally foolish to accept probable reasoning from a mathematician and to demand from a rhetorician demonstrative proofs.

Dialectic as a whole, or of one of its parts, to consider every kind of syllogism in a similar manner, it is clear that he who is most capable of examining the matter and forms of a syllogism will be in the highest degree a master of rhetorical argument

a man investigating principles cannot argue with one who denies their existence.

WATSON: Then you are yourself inclining to the supernatural explanation.      HOLMES: if Dr. Mortimer's surmise should be correct, and we are dealing with forces outside the ordinary laws of Nature, there is an end of our investigation. But we are bound to exhaust all other hypotheses before falling back upon this one.

Problems may be solved in the study which have baffled all those who have sought a solution by the aid of their senses.

I should have more faith. I ought to know by this time that when a fact appears to be opposed to a long train of deductions, it invariably proves to be capable of bearing some other interpretation.

That head of yours should be for use as well as ornament.

It would be superfluous to drive us mad, my dear Watson, said he. A candid observer would certainly declare that we were so already before we embarked upon so wild an experiment.