Haruki Murakami Quotes

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.

The same principles which at first view lead to skepticism, pursued to a certain point, bring men back to common sense.

I could never accept findings based almost exclusively on mathematics. It ain't ignorance that causes all the trouble in this world. It's the things people know that ain't so.

If two things don't fit, but you believe both of them, thinking that somewhere, hidden, there must be a third thing that connects them, that's credulity.

If it doesn't make sense, it's usually not true.

Faith means the purposeful suspension of critical thinking. It’s nothing to be admired.

The pedant and the priest have always been the most expert of logicians - and the most diligent disseminators of nonsense and worse.

Books are not made to be believed, but to be subjected to inquiry. When we consider a book, we mustn't ask ourselves what it says but what it means.

A simplistic view of scientific evidence risks a path of too much faith followed by too much disillusionment.

Deciding under uncertainty is bad enough, but deciding under an illusion of certainty is catastrophic.

The greatest folly is to accept expert statements uncritically. At the very least, we should always seek another opinion.

Just because things are obvious doesn't mean they're true.

Be very slow to believe that you are wiser than all others; it is a fatal but common error.

No matter how deeply you distrust the government's judgment, you are too trusting.

There are those who scoff at the schoolboy, calling him frivolous and shallow: Yet it was the schoolboy who said 'Faith is believing what you know ain't so'.

I don't see the logic of rejecting data just because they seem incredible ... the establishment defends itself by complicating everything to the point of incomprehensibility.

Many people believe everything others say, even though what they see with their own eyes, should be enough to tell them otherwise.

... We in the USA have been depending on prayers, pleading, and self-abasement to a deity to bring us magical advantages, and have been encouraged to attribute our prosperity and general success among nations, to that sort of action. In my opinion, hard work and dedication to logic and reason ought to be recognized as the reasons for our achievements, not appeals to a mythical friend-in-the-sky. We got where we are in spite of, not because of, those incantations.

That an error made on your own is safer than ten truths accepted on faith, because the first leaves you the means to correct it but the second destroys your capacity to distinguish truth from error.

But with man the case is otherwise, in that when logic leads to any humiliating conclusion, the sole effect is to discredit logic.

No one attacks loose-thinking and folly with half the precision and zest of Thomas Szasz.

Even if all parts of a problem seem to fit together like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, one has to remember that the probable need not necessarily be the truth and the truth not always probable.

A metaphysician is one who, when you remark that twice two makes four, demands to know what you mean by twice, what by two, what by makes, and what by four. For asking such questions metaphysicians are supported in oriental luxury in the universities, and respected as educated and intelligent men.

Mathematics had never had more than a secondary interest for him ; and even logic he cared for chiefly as a means of clearing the ground of doctrines imagined to be proved, by showing that the evidence on which they were supposed to rest had no tendency to prove them. But he had been endeavouring to give a more active and positive help than this to the cause of what he deemed pure religion.

Just because an idea is true doesn't mean it can be proved. And just because an idea can be proved doesn't mean it's true.