Sunday, October 15, 2017 – Employing Logic
In a republican nation, whose citizens are to be led by reason and persuasion and not by force, the art of reasoning becomes of first importance. ~ Thomas Jefferson
I’m an old-fashioned guy. I believe in the Enlightenment, and reason, and logic, and you know, facts. ~ Barack Obama
Toxic people defy logic. Some are blissfully unaware of the negative impact that they have on those around them, and others seem to derive satisfaction from creating chaos and pushing other people’s buttons. ~ Travis Bradbury
Men are apt to mistake the strength of their feeling for the strength of their argument. The heated mind resents the chill touch and relentless scrutiny of logic. ~ William Gladstone
The logic of validation allows us to move between the two limits of dogmatism and skepticism. ~ Paul Ricoeur
Many of our deepest motives come, not from an adult logic of how things work in the world, but out of something that is frozen from childhood. ~ Kazuo Ishiguro
Logic takes care of itself; all we have to do is to look and see how it does it. ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein
Logic is not a body of doctrine, but a mirror-image of the world. Logic is transcendental. ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein
Logic: The art of thinking and reasoning in strict accordance with the limitations and incapacities of the human misunderstanding. ~ Ambrose Bierce
Logic is the beginning of wisdom, not the end. ~ Leonard Nimoy
Logic, like whiskey, loses its beneficial effect when taken in too large quantities. ~ Lord Dunsany
A mind all logic is like a knife all blade. It makes the hand bleed that uses it. ~ Rabindranath Tagore
Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere. ~ Albert Einstein
We live in a Newtonian world of Einsteinian physics ruled by Frankenstein logic. ~ David Russell
Nature is the source of all true knowledge. She has her own logic, her own laws, she has no effect without cause nor invention without necessity. ~ Leonardo da Vinci
Trying to understand the way nature works involves a most terrible test of human reasoning ability. It involves subtle trickery, beautiful tightropes of logic on which one has to walk in order not to make a mistake in predicting what will happen. The quantum mechanical and the relativity ideas are examples of this. ~ Richard P. Feynman
People who lean on logic and philosophy and rational exposition end by starving the best part of the mind. ~ William Butler Yeats
Intuition is a suspension of logic due to impatience. ~ Rita Mae Brown
Logic and mathematics are nothing but specialized linguistic structures. ~ Jean Piaget
Contrariwise, if it was so, it might be; and if it were so, it would be; but as it isn’t, it ain’t. That’s logic. ~ Lewis Carroll
Most of the mistakes in thinking are inadequacies of perception rather than mistakes of logic. ~ Edward de Bono
Against logic there is no armor like ignorance. ~ Laurence J. Peter
Logic is like the sword – those who appeal to it, shall perish by it. ~ Samuel Butler
The fact that logic cannot satisfy us awakens an almost insatiable hunger for the irrational. ~ A. N. Wilson
Insanity is often the logic of an accurate mind overtasked. ~ Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
Logic has made me hated in the world. ~ Peter Abelard
The world is full of strange phenomena that cannot be explained by the laws of logic or science. Dennis Rodman is only one example. ~ Dave Barry
Better to be without logic than without feeling. ~ Charlotte Bronte
Logic is neither an art nor a science but a dodge. ~ Stendhal
Logic! Good gracious! What rubbish! ~ E. M. Forster
Logic and fact keep interfering with the easy flow of conversation. ~ Mason Cooley
I noticed this process of waking, and predicted with terrifying logic that one of these years not far away I would be awake continuously and never slip back, and never be free of myself again. ~ Annie Dillard
The knowledge of the theory of logic has no tendency whatever to make men good reasoners. ~ Thomas Babington Macaulay
The logic of words should yield to the logic of realities. ~ Louis D. Brandeis
Poets do not go mad, but chess-players do. Mathematicians go mad, and cashiers; but creative artists very seldom. I am not, as will be seen, in any sense attacking logic: I only say that this danger does lie in logic, not in imagination. ~ G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy
There are crimes of passion and crimes of logic. The boundary between them is not clearly defined. ~ Albert Camus
It is useless to attempt to reason a man out of a thing he was never reasoned into. ~ Jonathan Swift
If someone doesn’t value evidence, what evidence are you going to provide to prove that they should value it? If someone doesn’t value logic, what logical argument could you provide to show the importance of logic? ~ Sam Harris
I know that two and two make four – and should be glad to prove it too if I could – though I must say if by any sort of process I could convert 2 and 2 into five it would give me much greater pleasure. ~ George Gordon Byron
We can’t avoid reasoning; we can only avoid doing it well. ~ Peter Kreeft
If reason ruled the world would history even exist? ~ Ryszard Kapuściński
There are no things man was not meant to know. There are, perhaps, things man is too dumb to figure out, but that’s a different problem. ~ Michael Kurland
Logic is something the mind has created to conceal its timidity, a hocus-pocus designed to give formal validity to conclusions we are willing to accept if everybody else in our set will too. ~ Carl Lotus Becker
Sapiens don’t behave according to a cold mathematical logic, but rather according to a warm social logic. We are ruled by emotions.~ Yuval Noah Harari
If you can’t define something you have no formal rational way of knowing that it exists. Neither can you really tell anyone else what it is. There is, in fact, no formal difference between inability to define and stupidity. ~ Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values
Reason means truth and those who are not governed by it take the chance that someday the sunken fact will rip the bottom out of their boat. ~ Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
The vast majority of human beings are not interested in reason or satisfied with what it teaches. ~ Aldous Huxley
No, no, you’re not thinking; you’re just being logical. ~ Niels Bohr
Reason is the shepherd trying to corral life’s vast flock of wild irrationalities. ~ Paul Eldridge
A wise man is not governed by others, nor does he try to govern them; he prefers that reason alone prevail. ~ La Bruyère, Characters, 1688
The last function of reason is to recognize that there are an infinity of things which surpass it. ~ Blaise Pascal, Pensées, 1670
Logic is a large drawer, containing some useful instruments, and many more that are superfluous. A wise man will look into it for two purposes, to avail himself of those instruments that are really useful, and to admire the ingenuity with which those that are not so are assorted and arranged. ~ Charles Caleb Colton
If the world were all logic, poetry would starve to death. ~ Terri Guillemets
There is science, logic, reason; there is thought verified by experience. And then there is California. ~ Edward Abbey
Just Above Sunset 