top of page
.png){kind=small}
"Though analogy is often misleading, it is the least misleading thing we have."
Standard
Customized
Exlpore more Reasoning quotes
"Logic is like the sword - those who appeal to it, shall perish by it."
"Facts are always required to draw conclusions and make serious decisions."
"The mechanic, when a wheel refuses to turn, never thinks of dropping on his knees and asking the assistance of some divine power. He knows there is a reason. He knows that something is too large or too small; that there is something wrong with his machine; and he goes to work and he makes it larger or smaller, here or there, until the wheel will turn."
"Reason is up to these demands because it is an open-ended combinatorial system, an engine for generating an unlimited number of new ideas. Once it is programmed with a basic self-interest and an ability to communicate with others, its own logic will impel it, in the fullness of time, to respect the interests of ever-increasing numbers of others. It is reason too that can always take note of the shortcomings of previous exercises of reasoning, and update and improve itself in response. And if you detect a flaw in this argument, it is reason that allows you to point it out and defend an alternative."
"He who thinks and thinks for himself, will always have a claim to thanks; it is no matter whether it be right or wrong, so as it be explicit. If it is right, it will serve as a guide to direct; if wrong, as a beacon to warn."
"An overly complex explanation began with an unsophisticated assumption."
"Success-minded people know that nothing is without a reason."
"You all know the argument from design: everything in the world is made just so that we can manage to live in the world, and if the world was ever so little different, we could not manage to live in it. That is the argument from design. It sometimes takes a rather curious form; for instance, it is argued that rabbits have white tails in order to be easy to shoot. I do not know how rabbits would view that application."
"Though analogy is often misleading, it is the least misleading thing we have."
Explore more quotes by Samuel Butler
"A drunkard would not give money to sober people. He said they would only eat it, and buy clothes and send their children to school with it."
"When a man is in doubt about this or that in his writing, it will often guide him if he asks himself how it will tell a hundred years hence."
"Every man's work, whether it be literature, or music or pictures or architecture or anything else, is always a portrait of himself."
"To know God better is only to realize how impossible it is that we should ever know him at all. I know not which is more childish to deny him, or define him."
"A friend who cannot at a pinch remember a thing or two that never happened is as bad as one who does not know how to forget."
"The dons of Oxford and Cambridge are too busy educating the young men to be able to teach them anything."
bottom of page