A Quote by William Butler Yeats
People who lean on logic and philosophy and rational exposition end by starving the best part of the mind.
Quote Topics
Quote Author
Related Quotes
Philosophy is not a body of knowledge to impart to someone, that's why reading philosophy books isn't always the best way of learning philosophy. Philosophy is really more the process of rational engagement, rational reflection with a diversity of views and ideas and opinions and trying to sort of reason your way through to a more reflective position. I think if you look at it that way, philosophizing is to some extent some small way a part of almost everyone's lives although they don't recognize it as such and a lot of people are embarrassed about it.
At the end of day, people are starving and, if people are starving and thirsty and they need to keep their families alive, people become desperate quickly. There are real world examples of this.
Everyone finds justification for his or her views in logic and analysis, but a personal philosophy often emerges from some archaic part of the mind, an early idea of how the world should be.
The metaphoric mind includes rationality, linearity, and logic - for it created them. But like some children, the rational mind often seems embarrassed by the presence of its parents.
You get your intuition back when you make space for it, when you stop the chattering of the rational mind. The rational mind doesn't nourish you. You assume that it gives you the truth, because the rational mind is the golden calf that this culture worships, but this is not true. Rationality squeezes out much that is rich and juicy and fascinating.
What is rational is actual and what is actual is rational. On this conviction the plain man like the philosopher takes his stand,and from it philosophy starts in its study of the universe of mind as well as the universe of nature.
All logic texts are divided into two parts. In the first part, on deductible logic, the fallacies are explained; in the second part, on inductive logic, they are committed.
I want to say, and this is very important: at the end we lucked out. It was luck that prevented nuclear war. We came that close to nuclear war at the end. Rational individuals: Kennedy was rational; Khrushchev was rational; Castro was rational. Rational individuals came that close to total destruction of their societies. And that danger exists today.
Most mistakes in philosophy and logic occur because the human mind is apt to take the symbol for the reality.
One thing I really like about philosophy is that it's possible actually to do work in a wide range of different areas. I am particularly happy that I've even been able to do work in logic that has allowed me to use and develop my mathematical abilities, as well as to work on quite distant topics in philosophy of language and mind.
A history of civilization shares the presumptuousness of every philosophical enterprise: it offers the ridiculous spectacle of a fragment expounding the whole. Like philosophy, such a venture has no rational excuse, and is at best but a brave stupidity; but let us hope that, like philosophy, it will always lure some rash spirits into its fatal depths.
The mind can go either direction under stress—toward positive or toward negative: on or off. Think of it as a spectrum whose extremes are unconsciousness at the negative end and hyperconsciousness at the positive end. The way the mind will lean under stress is strongly influenced by training.
Logic issues in tautologies, mathematics in identities, philosophy in definitions; all trivial, but all part of the vital work of clarifying and organising our thought.
You can be totally rational with a machine. But if you work with people, sometimes logic often has to take a backseat to understanding.
...there ... remains a huge following [of Ayn Rand's philosophy] of those who ignore the indiscretions, infidelities, and moral inconsistencies of the founder and focus instead on the positive aspects of her philosophy. There is much in it to admire, if you do not have to accept the whole package... Criticism of the founder or followers of a philosophy does not, by itself, constitute a negation of any part of the philosophy... Criticism of part of a philosophy does not gainsay the whole.
I end with a word on the new symbols which I have employed. Most writers on logic strongly object to all symbols. ... I should advise the reader not to make up his mind on this point until he has well weighed two facts which nobody disputes, both separately and in connexion. First, logic is the only science which has made no progress since the revival of letters; secondly, logic is the only science which has produced no growth of symbols.
Related Authors
Alexander Pope Quotes
English
Poet
Emily Dickinson Quotes
American
Poet
George Herbert Quotes
British
Poet
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Quotes
American
Poet
Homer Quotes
Greek
Poet
Horace Quotes
Roman
Poet
John Milton Quotes
English
Poet
Khalil Gibran Quotes
Lebanese
Poet
Lord Byron Quotes
British
Poet
Maya Angelou Quotes
American
Poet
Oscar Wilde Quotes
Irish
Poet
Ovid Quotes
Roman
Poet
Samuel Taylor Coleridge Quotes
English
Poet
T. S. Eliot Quotes
American
Poet
Walt Whitman Quotes
American
Poet