Morris Kline Quotes

Logic: The art of thinking and reasoning in strict accordance with the limitations and incapacities of the human misunderstanding.

The knowledge of the theory of logic has no tendency whatever to make men good reasoners.

Logic can become enormously difficult, and it would undoubtedly be well to produce more assurance in its use.

I am convinced that the act of thinking logically cannot possibly be natural to the human mind. If it were, then mathematics would be everybody's easiest course at school and our species would not have taken several millennia to figure out the scientific method.

The concept of logical thinking is selection and this is brought about by the processes of acceptance and rejection. Rejection is the basis of logical thinking.

Logic teaches rules for presentation, not thinking.

Reasoning draws a conclusion, but does not make the conclusion certain, unless the mind discovers it by the path of experience.

I think there's so much negative influence on children in school settings. It becomes learning by rote to pass a test. It's not contextualized.

I don't really get things very... intuitively. I mean, I don't immediately understand things. The only way I really get it is by writing it down.

Bad reasoning as well as good reasoning is possible; and this fact is the foundation of the practical side of logic.

Logic! Good gracious! What rubbish!

A few observation and much reasoning lead to error; many observations and a little reasoning to truth.

Logic is not a body of doctrine, but a mirror-image of the world. Logic is transcendental.

You should carefully study the Art of Reasoning, as it is what most people are very deficient in, and I know few things more disagreeable than to argue, or even converse with a man who has no idea of inductive and deductive philosophy.

if you do not appreciate the mathematics, you cannot see, among the great variety of facts, that logic permits you to go from one to the other

What I knew was I liked math and science, and I never wanted to memorize everything. I wanted to understand where it came from.

Intelligence is an extremely subtle concept. It's a kind of understanding that flourishes if it's combined with a good memory, but exists anyway even in the absence of good memory. It's the ability to draw consequences from causes, to make correct inferences, to foresee what might be the result, to work out logical problems, to be reasonable, rational, to have the ability to understand the solution from perhaps insufficient information. You know when a person is intelligent, but you can be easily fooled if you are not yourself intelligent.

Physics is a good framework for thinking. ... Boil things down to their fundamental truths and reason up from there.

Education today is a process of filling the mind with the contents of books, emptying the contents in the examination hall and returning empty-headed.

Logic is a feeble reed, friend. "Logic" proved that airplanes can't fly and that H-bombs won't work and that stones don't fall out of the sky. Logic is a way of saying that anything which didn't happen yesterday won't happen tomorrow.

I hope you become comfortable with the use of logic without being deceived into concluding that logic will inevitably lead you to the correct conclusion.

If logic itself is created rather than being inborn, it follows that the first task of education is to form reasoning.

Before anything can be reasoned upon to a conclusion, certain facts, principles, or data, to reason from, must be established, admitted, or denied.

What is thinking? It is the activity of searching out what must be true, or cannot be true, in the light of the given facts or assumptions.

Mathematical reasoning may be regarded.