Quotes about Reason

The Soul's Upward Yearning by Fr. Robert Spitzer, the intergalactically smart Jesuit who once served as president of Gonzaga University and who now directs the Magis Center on matters of faith, reason, and science,

An aggressive reason that seeks always to grasp on its own terms will never come to know deeper dimensions of reality, including and especially the personal. Such depths can be plumbed only through something like a faith that accepts and receives.

Man will have replicated his own intelligence not when he teaches a computer to reason but when he teaches a computer to have a nagging feeling in its circuits.

First, Whenever a man talks loudly against religion, always suspect that it is not his reason, but his passions, which have got the better of his creed.

Every science in a certain degree starts from faith, and, on the contrary, faith, which does not lead to science, is mistaken faith or superstition, but real, genuine faith it is not.

We should never forget that God granted us the power to reason so that we would do His work here on Earth - so that we would use science to cure disease, and heal the sick, and save lives.

There may be a conflict between softminded religionists and toughminded scientists, but not between science and religion.

Racism is man's gravest threat to man - the maximum of hatred for a minimum of reason.

God is not a hypothesis derived from logical assumptions, but an immediate insight, self-evident as light. He is not something to be sought in the darkness with the light of reason. He is the light.

We do not lealve the shore of the known in search of adventure or suspense or because of the failure of reason to answer our questions, We sail because our mind is like a fantastic seashell, and when applying our ear to its lips we hear a perpetual murmur from the waves beyond the shore.

This is the secret of the spirit, not disclosed to reason: the adaptation of the mind to what is sacred, intellectual humility in the presence of the supreme. The mind surrenders to the mystery of spirit, not in resignation but in love.

Take all that you can of this book upon reason, and the balance on faith, and you will live and die a happier man. (When a skeptic expressed surprise to see him reading a Bible)