J. G. Ballard Quotes

The supreme function of reason is to show man that some things are beyond reason.

Happiness is a mystery, like religion, and should never be rationalised.

My work explores the frontier between rationalism and superstition and the wavering boundary between the two.

Life is a battle between faith and reason in which each feeds upon the other, drawing sustenance from it and destroying it.

Convictions do not imply reasons.

Transcendentalists like Emerson were searching for unity in nature, but resisted what seemed to them the blinkered reliance on deductive reasoning and empirical research enforced by encroaching science.

I hear and behold God in every object, yet understand God not in the least.

Trust is an absurd phenomenon, logically absurd. That's why logic always says love is blind, although love has its own eyes, far more deep-going...still, to logic it is blind.

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

Faith feels itself secure neither with universal consent, nor with tradition, nor with authority. It seeks support of its enemy, reason.

Every dictator is a mystic, and every mystic is a potential dictator. A mystic craves obedience from men, not their agreement. He wants them to surrender their consciousness to his assertions, his edicts, his wishes, his whims - as his consciousness is surrendered to theirs. He wants to deal with men by means of faith and force - he finds no satisfaction in their consent if he must earn it by means of facts and reason. Reason is the enemy he dreads and, simultaneously, considers precarious: reason, to him, is a means of deception

One of the essential and most valid objections against the act of faith is that it is irrational, inasmuch as it offends against the syllogistic rule that the conclusion of an argument shall contain nothing more than the premises.

What does it mean to believe rather than to know? To surrender to something that's not fact but faith?

Discipleship is not limited to what you can comprehend – it must transcend all comprehension. Plunge into the deep waters beyond your own comprehension, and I will help you to comprehend even as I do. Bewilderment is the true comprehension. Not to know where you are going is the true knowledge. My comprehension transcends yours.

Try to reason about love, and you will lose your reason.

In the main, and from the beginning of time, mysticism has kept men sane. The thing that has driven them mad was logic.

Everything I do, I do it for somebody I've never met before, something in the great beyond. That's my primary relationship, really, is with something divine. I feel a connection as real with that as I've ever had with anybody on this earth.

Credo quia absurdum – I believe because it is absurd.

Faith is a kind of sixth sense which works in cases which are without the purview of reason.

We injure mysteries, which are matters of faith by any attempt at explanation in order to make them matters of reason.

Reason is so unreasonable, that few people can say they are in possession of it.

Le coeur a ses raisons que la raison ne connait point. French. Pascal. The heart has its reasons, whereof reason knows nothing.

Two truths cannot contradict one another.

The things that matter don't necessarily make sense.

Faith is the surrender of the mind; it's the surrender of reason, it's the surrender of the only thing that makes us different from other mammals. It's our need to believe, and to surrender our skepticism and our reason, our yearning to discard that and put all our trust or faith in someone or something, that is the sinister thing to me. Of all the supposed virtues, faith must be the most overrated.