Reasoning Quotes (page 55)
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There is no method of reasoning more common, and yet none more blameable, than, in philosophical disputes, to endeavour the refutation of any hypothesis, by a pretence of its dangerous consequences to religion and morality. When any opinion leads to absurdities, it is certainly false; but it is not certain that an opinion is false, because it is of danger-ous consequence. Such topics, therefore, ought entirely to be forborne; as serving nothing to the discovery of truth, but only to make the...
David Hume
...wherever the strength of a faith steps decisively into the foreground, we infer a certain weakness in its ability to demonstrate its truth, even the improbability of what it believes. We, too, do not deny that the belief “makes blessed,” but for that very reason we deny that the belief proves something—a strong belief which confers blessedness creates doubts about what it has faith in. It does not ground “truth.” It grounds a certain probability— delusion.
Friedrich Nietzsche
I've spent my whole life doing some things because they were logical and not doing others because they were not. I've seen what happens when people act on intuition, or for illogical reasons. Sometimes the results are ludicrous and embarrassing; more often they are simply horrible. But here I am, just the same, behaving like a crackbrained crystal gazer.
Stephen King
The annals of official philosophy are populated by ‘bureaucrats of pure reason’ who speak in ‘the shadow of the despot’ and are in historical complicity with the State. They invent ‘a properly spiritual…absolute State that… effectively functions in the mind.’ Theirs is a discourse of sovereign judgment, of stable subjectivity legislated by ‘good’ sense, of rocklike identity, ‘universal’ truth, and (white male) justice. ‘Thus the exercise of their thought is in conformity with the aims of the...
Gilles Deleuze
I closed my eyes and I thought of the lash of her skirt snapping around her as she danced one evening in a bar on the South Side to a jukebox that was playing “Barefootin’,” of the downy slope of her neck and the declivity in her nightgown as she bent to wash her face in the bathroom sink, of a tuna salad sandwich she’d handed me one windy afternoon as we sat at a picnic table in Lucia, California, and looked out for the passage of whales, and I felt that I loved Emily insofar as I loved...
Michael Chabon