Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Quotes

Logical reasoning is an argument which we have with ourselves and which reproduces internally the features of a real argument.

Persons not habituated to reason often argue absurdly, because, from particular instances, they deduce general conclusions, and extend the result of their limited experience of individuals indiscriminately to whole classes.

Reason alone cannot give you a whole steak, but it sure helps with identifying bologna.

Ordinarily men exercise their memory much more than their judgment.

One of the functions of intelligence is to take account of the dangers that come from trusting solely to the intelligence.

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

We need discernment in what we see and what we hear and what we believe.

A great many people mistake opinions for thought.

The problem with most people is that they think with their hopes or fears or wishes rather than their minds.

My mother cared more about how you reasoned than about the conclusions you reached.

Our analysis of truth and falsehood, or of the nature of judgment, is not very likely to be influenced by our hopes and fears.

First, he must hold rational values, and to do this he must be a thinker.

I don't make decisions with my heart, I use my brain to think things through.

Italians think with their heads.

I try to be very smart and use wisdom about everything.

Reason in a creature is a faculty of widening the rules and purposes of the use of all its powers far beyond natural instinct; it acknowledges no limits to its projects. Reason itself does not work instinctively, but requires trial, practice, and instruction in order gradually to progress from one level of insight to another.

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.

I'm disturbed when people let superstition, magical thinking, extreme conspiracy theories and so on blur their minds.

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.

Beginning to reason is like stepping onto an escalator that leads upward and out of sight. Once we take the first step, the distance to be traveled is independent of our will and we cannot know in advance where we shall end.

Much learning does not teach sense.

There is nothing which an untrained mind shows itself more hopelessly incapable, than in drawing the proper general conclusions from its own experience. And even trained minds, when all their training is on a special subject, and does not extend to the general principles of induction, are only kept right when there are ready opportunities of verifying their inferences by facts.

Treat with utmost respect your power of forming opinions, for this power alone guards you against making assumptions that are contrary to nature and judgments that overthrow the rule of reason.

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.

When you have answers, when everything has a reason, when it makes sense to an analytical person, you're going to be more successful. You're going to be more comfortable.