Louis Aragon Quotes

All our knowledge begins with the senses, proceeds then to the understanding, and ends with reason. There is nothing higher than reason.

Intuition does not in itself amount to knowledge, yet cannot be disregarded by philosophers and psychologists.

It is beyond a doubt that all our knowledge begins with experience.

Intuition and concepts constitute... the elements of all our knowledge, so that neither concepts without an intuition in some way corresponding to them, nor intuition without concepts, can yield knowledge.

But although all our knowledge begins with experience, it does not follow that it arises from experience.

If you use your mind to study reality, you won't understand either your mind or reality. If you study reality without using your mind, you'll understand both.

Our reason arises, at the very least, from this twofold lesson of sensuous revelations and human testimonies.

Where the senses fail us, reason must step in.

I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with senses, reason and intellect has intended us to forego their use and by some other means to give us knowledge which we can attain by them.

The true man of science - will smell, taste, see, hear better than other men.

The greatest empiricists among us are only empiricists on reflection: when left to their instincts, they dogmatize like infallible popes.

If faith is a valid tool of knowledge, then anything can be true 'by faith,' and therefore nothing is true. If the only reason you can accept a claim is by faith, then you are admitting that the claim does not stand on its own merits.

It has been said that metaphysics is the finding of bad reasons for what we believe upon instinct.

Don't ignore the five senses in search of a sixth.

You can only find truth with logic if you have already found truth without it.

All our knowledge begins with the senses...

I bought some books in order to learn the first principles of philosophy.

An absolute can only be given in an intuition, while all the rest has to do with analysis.

If one devalues rationality, the world tends to fall apart.

The fundament upon which all our knowledge and learning rests is the inexplicable.

The very essence of rationalism is that it assumes that the reason is the highest faculty in man and the lord of all the rest.

The man of science is a poor philosopher.

I discovered philosophy in my youth when I read 'wildly,' and thus I was exposed to the world of ideas.

Philosophy is an odd thing. When we use the word in everyday speech, you know, you sometimes hear it hilariously.

To be radical, an empiricism must neither admit into its constructions any element that is not directly experienced, nor exclude from them any element that is directly experienced.