This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"Mystery is not the denial of reason but its honest confirmation: reason, indeed, leaves inevitability to mystery… mystery and reality are the two halves of the same sphere." - Arthur Schopenhauer
"Compared with the short span of time they live, men of great intellect are like huge buildings, standing on a small plot of ground. The size of the building cannot be seen by anyone, just in front of it; nor, for an analogous reason, can the greatness of a genius be estimated while he lives. But when a century has passed, the world recognizes it and wishes him back again." - Arthur Schopenhauer
"Of all “evils” death is the most feared although it is the fate of all creatures. It is so natural that reason tells us it must be good. Death is not lifelessness, but life in motion. Our essential being cannot die because it was never born. Only its representations appear and disappear in the chronological sequences we call incarnations. If death is the prelude to life in other forms it ceases to be “evil” but becomes the means for releasing consciousness is that it may express itself in other and more diverse fields." - Arthur W Osborn
"Reason cannot make us experience love, but it can give us intellectual assurance that love is good." - Arthur W Osborn
"Unwelcome are the loiterer, who makes appointments he never keeps; the consulter, who asks advice he never follows; the boaster, who seeks for praise he does not merit; the complainer, who whines only to be pitied; the talker, who talks only because he loves to talk always; the profane and obscene jester, whose words defile; the drunkard, whose insanity has tot the better of his reason; and the tobacco-chewer and smoker, who poisons the atmosphere and nauseates others." - Author Unknown NULL
"Faith without reason leads to superstition: Reason without faith leads to cynicism." - Author Unknown NULL
"The secret of contentment is never to allow yourself to want anything really badly that reason says you have little or no chance of getting." - Author Unknown NULL
"Any refusal to recognize reality, for any reason whatever, has disastrous consequences. There are no evil thoughts except one: the refusal to think. Don't ignore your own desires... Don't sacrifice them. Examine their cause. There is a limit to how much you should have to bear." - Ayn Rand, born Alisa Zinovyevna Rosenbaum
"Productive work is the central purpose of a rational man's life, the central value that integrates and determines the hierarchy of all his other values. Reason is the source, the precondition of his productive work - pride is the result." - Ayn Rand, born Alisa Zinovyevna Rosenbaum
"Reason is man's primary tool for survival." - Ayn Rand, born Alisa Zinovyevna Rosenbaum
"A bad manner spoils everything, even reason and justice; a good one supplies everything, gilds a No, sweetens truth, and adds a touch of beauty to old age itself." - Baltasar Gracián
"The object of government is not to change men from rational beings into beasts or puppets, but to enable them to develop their minds and bodies in security, and to employ their reason unshackled; neither showing hatred, anger or deceit, nor watched with the eyes of jealousy and injustice. In fact, the true aim of government is liberty." -
"We are not indebted to the Reason of man for any of the great achievements which are the landmarks of human action and human progress… Man is only truly great when he acts from the passions; never irresistible but when he appeals to the imagination." - Benjamin Disraeli, 1st Earl of Beaconsfield
"By mysticism we mean, not the extravagance of erring fancy, but the concentration of reason in feeling, the enthusiastic love of good, the true, the one, the sense of infinity of knowledge and of the marvel of the human faculties." - Benjamin Jowett
"Freedom means chance; you are free, because there is no reason which will account for your particular acts, because no one in the world, not even yourself, can possibly say what you will, or will not, do next. You are ‘accountable’, in short, because you are a wholly ‘unaccountable’ creature." - Bernard Bosanquet
"Real life is, to most men, a long second-best, a perpetual compromise between the ideal and the possible; but the world of pure reason knows no compromise, no practical limitations, no barrier to the creative activity." - Bertrand Russell, fully Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell
"The value of philosophy is to be sought largely in its very uncertainty. He who has no tincture of philosophy goes through life imprisoned in the prejudices derived from common sense, from the habitual beliefs of his age or his nation, and from convictions which have grown up in his mind without the cooperation or consent of his deliberate reason. As soon as we begin to philosophize, on the contrary, we find that even the most everyday things lead to problems to which only very incomplete answers can be given. Philosophy, though unable to tell us with certainty what is the true answer to the doubts which it raises, is able to suggest many possibilities which enlarge our thought and free them from the tyranny of custom." - Bertrand Russell, fully Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell
"There can never be any reason for rejecting one instinctive belief except that it clashes with others. It is of course possible that all or any of our beliefs may be mistaken, and therefore all ought to be held with at least some element of doubt. But we cannot have reason to reject a belief except on the ground of some other belief." - Bertrand Russell, fully Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell
"If you think your belief is based upon reason, you will support it by argument rather than by persecution, and will abandon it if the argument goes against you. But if your belief is based upon faith, you will realize that argument is useless, and will therefore resort to force either in the form of persecution or by stunting or distorting the minds of the young in what is called 'education.'" - Bertrand Russell, fully Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell
"Custom should be followed only because it is custom, and not because it is reasonable or just. But people follow it for this sole reason, that they think it just. Otherwise they would follow it no longer, although it were the custom; for they will only submit to reason or justice. Custom without this would pass for tyranny; but the sovereignty of reason and justice is no more tyrannical than that of desire. They are principles natural to man." - Blaise Pascal
"Earnestness is enthusiasm tempered by reason." - Blaise Pascal
"Human life is thus only a perpetual illusion; men deceive and flatter each other. No one speaks of us in our presence as he does of us in our absence. Human society is founded on mutual deceit; few friendships would endure if each knew what his friend said of him in his absence, although he then spoke in sincerity and without passion. Man is, then, only disguise, falsehood, and hypocrisy, both in himself and in regard to others. He does not wish any one to tell him the truth; he avoids telling it to others, and all these dispositions, so removed from justice and reason, have a natural root in his heart. I set it down as a fact that if all men know what each said to the other, there would not be four friends in the world." - Blaise Pascal
"It is your own assent to yourself, and the constant voice of your own reason, and not of others, that should make you believe." - Blaise Pascal
"There is internal war in man between reason and the passions... But having both, he cannot be without strife, being unable to be a peace with the one without being at war with the other. Thus he is always divided against and opposed to himself." - Blaise Pascal
"We know truth, not only by reason, but also by the heart, and it is from this last that we know first principles; and reason, which has nothing to do with it, tries in vain to combat them. The skeptics who desire truth alone labor in vain." - Blaise Pascal
"Custom creates the whole of equity, for the simple reason that it is accepted." - Blaise Pascal
"If we subject everything to reason, our religion will have nothing mysterious or supernatural. If we violate the principles of reason, our religion will be absurd and ridiculous." - Blaise Pascal
"Imagination cannot makes fools wise; but she can make them happy, to the envy of reason, who can only make her friends miserable." - Blaise Pascal
"It is the heart which experiences God, and not the reason. This, then, is faith: God felt by the heart, not by the reason." - Blaise Pascal
"Men despise religion; they hate it and fear it is true. To remedy this, we must begin by showing that religion is not contrary to reason; that it is venerable, to inspire respect for it; then we must make it lovable, to make good men hope it is true; finally, we must prove it is true. Venerable, because it has perfect knowledge of man; lovable because it promises the true good." - Blaise Pascal
"Our imagination so magnifies this present existence, by the power of continual reflection on it, and so attenuates eternity, by not thinking of it at all, that we reduce an eternity; to nothingness, and expand a mere nothing to an eternity; and this habit is so inveterately rooted in us that all the force of reason cannot induce us to lay it aside." - Blaise Pascal
"Our nature tempts us perpetually; criminal desire is often excited; but sin is not completed till reason consents." - Blaise Pascal
"Reason command us far more imperiously than a master; in disobeying the former, fools." - Blaise Pascal
"The authority of reason is far more imperious than that of a master; for he who disobeys the one is unhappy, but he who disobeys the other is a fool." - Blaise Pascal
"The heart has its reasons which reason knows nothing of." - Blaise Pascal
"The last function of reason is to recognize that there are an infinity of things which surpass it." - Blaise Pascal
"The most powerful cause of error is the war existing between the senses and reason." - Blaise Pascal
"We arrive at truth, not by reason only, but also by the heart." - Blaise Pascal
"When I consider the short duration of my life, swallowed up in the eternity before and after, the little space which I fill and even can see, engulfed in the infinite immensity of spaces of which I am ignorant and which know me not, I am frightened and am astonished at being here rather than there; for there is no reason why here rather than there, why now rather than then. Who has put me here? By whose order and direction have the place and time been allotted to me?... The eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me." - Blaise Pascal
"When malice has reason on its side, it looks forth bravely, and displays that reason in all its luster. When austerity and self-denial have not realized true happiness, and the soul returns to the dictates of nature, the reaction is fearfully extravagant." - Blaise Pascal
"Either God exists or he does not. But to which side shall we lean? Reason can decide nothing; there is infinite chaos which separates us. A game is being played, at the extremity of this infinite distance, where heads or tails will fall. What will you bet? If you win, you win everything. If you lose, you lose nothing. Bet then that he exists, without hesitating." - Blaise Pascal
"If we submit everything to reason, our religion will have nothing in it mysterious or supernatural. If we violate the principles of reason, our religion will be absurd and ridiculous." - Blaise Pascal
"Reason’s last step is the recognition that there are an infinite number of things which are beyond it." - Blaise Pascal
"Since a choice must be made, we must see which is the least bad. You have two things to lose: truth and happiness. You have two things at stake: your reason and your happiness. And you have two things to avoid: error and misery. Since you must necessarily choose, your reason is no more affronted by choosing one rather than the other. How about your happiness? Let us weigh up the gain and loss in calling heads that God exists. If you win, you win everything. If you lose, you lose nothing. So do not hesitate: wager that God exists." - Blaise Pascal
"The heart has its reasons, which reason does not know." - Blaise Pascal
"The last proceeding of reason is to recognize that there is an infinity of things which are beyond it." - Blaise Pascal
"What reason have atheists for saying that we cannot rise again? Which is the more difficult, to be born, or to rise again? That what has never been, should be, or that what has been, should be again? Is it more difficult to come into being than to return to it?" - Blaise Pascal
"When I consider short duration of my life, swallowed up in the eternity before and after, the little space which I fill, and even can see, engulfed in the infinite immensity of spaces of which I am ignorant, and which knows me not, I am frightened, and am astonished at being here rather than there; for there is no reason why here rather than there, why now rather than then. Who has put me here? By whose order and direction have this place and time been allotted to me?" - Blaise Pascal