Reason is a light that God has kindled in the soul.
~ Aristotle
No one indeed believes anything unless he has first thought that it it to be believed.
~ Augustine of Hippo
Doubts are the ants in the pants of faith; they keep faith alive and moving.
~ Frederick Buechner
A comprehended God is no God.
~ Dio Chrysostom
If reason be a gift of Heaven, and we can say as much of faith, Heaven has certainly made us two gifts not only incompatible, but in direct contradiction to each other. In order to solve the difficulty, we are compelled to say either that faith is a chimera or that reason is useless.
~ Denis Diderot, in A Philosophical Conversation
Reason is our Soules left hand, Faith is her right, …
~ John Donne
Invisible Pink Unicorns are beings of awesome mystical power. We know this because hey manage to be invisible and pink at the same time. Like all religions; the Faith of the Invisible Pink Unicorns is based upon both logic and faith. We have faith that they are pink; we logically know that they are invisible because we can’t see them.
~ Steve Eley
The majority of mankind is lazy-minded, incurious, absorbed in vanities, and tepid in emotion, and is therefore incapable of either much doubt or much faith.
~ T.S. Eliot, in his Introduction to Pascal’s Pensees
I do not feel obliged to believe that same God who endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect had intended for us to forgo their use.
~ Galileo Galilei
Proof is only applicable to very rarefied areas of philosophy and mathematics…. For the most part we are driven to acting on good evidence, without the luxury of proof. There is good evidence of the link between cause and effect. There is good evidence that the sun will rise tomorrow. There is good reason to believe my mother loves me and is not just fattening me up for the moment when she will pop arsenic into my tea. And there is good reason to believe in God. Very good reason. Not conclusive proof, but very good reason just the same…. I believe it is much harder to reject the existence of a supreme being than accept it.
~ Michael Green, in Faith for the Non-religious
Some things have to be believed to be seen.
~ Ralph Hodgson
A wise man, therefore, proportions his belief to the evidence.
~ David Hume, in An Enquiry Concerning Human Concerning Human Understanding
For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries.
~ Robert Jastrow, in God and the Astronomer
The more we know of God, the more unreservedly we will trust Him; the greater our progress in theology, the simpler and more childlike will be our faith.
~ J. Gresham Machen
Religion is fundamentally opposed to everything I hold in veneration—courage, clear thinking, honesty, fairness, and above all, love of the truth.
~ H. L. Menken
The faith that does not come from reason is to be doubted, and the reason that does not lead to faith is to be feared,
~ G. Campbell Morgan
Faith is reason at rest in God.
~ Charles Haddon Spurgeon
God cannot be understood by logical reasoning but only by submission.
~ Leo Tolstoy, in Wise Thoughts for Every Day
It is impossible to reason without arriving at a Supreme Being. Religion is a necessary to reason, as reason is to religion.
~ George Washington
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Books on Faith & Reason
He who will not reason, is a bigot; he who cannot is a fool; and he who dares not is a slave.
~ William Drummond of Hawthornden, in Academic Questions
To generalize is to be an idiot.
~ William Blake
The first to present his case seems right, till another comes forward and questions him.
~ Proverbs 18:17 (NIV)
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He who is not alone with God’s word is not reading God’s word.
~ in For Self-Examination
If it is true that you know how to describe faith, it only proves that you are a poet, and if you can do it well, it proves that you are a good poet; but this is far from proving that you are a believer. Perhaps you can also weep in describing faith, that would prove then that you are a good actor.
~ in For Self-Examination
It is my joy that the female sex, far from being more imperfect than man, is on the contrary the most perfect.
~ in Stages on Life’s Way
Longbridge gets its name from its length, for as a bridge it is long, though as a road the length of the bridge is not very considerable, of which one can convince oneself by crossing it.
~ Quidam, in Soren Kierkegaard’s Stages on Life’s Way
A poet is an unhappy creature whose heart is tortured by deepest suffering but whose lips are so formed that when his sighs and cries stream out over them, their sound beomes like the sound of beautiful music . . . . And men flock about the poet saying, “Sing for us soon again; that is to say, may new sufferings torture your soul, and may your lips continue to be formed as before.
~ quoted by Madeleine L’Engle, in A Circle of Quiet
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Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Soren Kierkegaard, & C.S. Lewis
While on a sea cruise your ship sinks and you are stranded on a deserted island. With you are three intellectual atheists. They are not just atheists, but militant atheists. You do not have a Bible or any other references. What would be your strategy for sharing with them the reason for the hope that is within you?
Please share your thoughts in the comments below.
Time makes more Converts than Reason.
~ in Common Sense
These are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands it now deserves the love and thanks of men and women.
~ in The American Crisis
Reason is our Soules left hand,
Faith is her right, …
To fight is a radical instinct; if men have nothing else to fight over they will fight over words, fancies, or women, or they will fight because they dislike each other’s looks, or because they have met walking in opposite directions. To knock a thing down, especially if it is cocked at an arrogant angle, is a deep delight to the blood.
Fanaticism consist in redoubling your effort when you have forgotten your aim.
~ in The Life of Reason
Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
~ in The Life of Reason
History is alway written wrong, and so always needs to be rewritten.
~ in The Life of Reason
To call war the soil of courage and virtue is like calling debauchery the soil of love.
Love makes us poets and the approach of death should make us philosophers.
But he who is unable to live in society, or who has not need because he is sufficient for himself, must be either a beast or a god.
~ In Politics, bk. I, ch. 2, 1253a
If liberty and equality, as is thought by some are chiefly to be found in democracy, they will be best attained when all persons alike share in the government to the utmost.
~ In Politics
One who throws a stone has power over it until he has thrown it, but not afterwards.
Every action must be due to one or other of seven causes: chance, nature, compulsion, habit, reasoning, anger, or appetite.
Reason is a light that God has kindled in the soul.
Anybody can become angry — that is easy; but to be angry with the right person, and to the right degree, and at the right time, and for the right purpose, and in the right way — that is not within everybody’s power and is not easy.
The roots of education are bitter, but the fruit is sweet.
