Carl Friedrich Gauss Quotes

Argument is not always truth.

...logical validity is not a guarantee of truth.

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

Contradiction is not a sign of falsity, nor the lack of contradiction a sign of truth.

The greater absurdities are, the more strongly they evince the falsity of that supposition from whence they flow.

Logic must look after itself. In a certain sense, we cannot make mistakes in logic.

When a thing is said to be not worth refuting you may be sure that either it is flagrantly stupid—in which case all comment is superfluous—or it is something formidable, the very crux of the problem.

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

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.

Logic is the art of going wrong with confidence.

Our reasonings are grounded upon two great principles, that of contradiction, in virtue of which we judge false that which involves a contradiction, and true that which is opposed or contradictory to the false.

Logic and truth are two very different things, but they often look the same to the mind that's performing the logic.

A train of thought is never false. The falsehood lies deep in the necessities of existence.

It seems like topsy-turvyland to make reason serve the irrational. Yet that is just what it has always done, and ought always to do.

I grow daily to honor facts more and more, and theory less and less.

Arguments that prove too much prove nothing.

The truth is always the strongest argument.

Fakery in allegiance to the truth.

Avoid the precepts of those thinkers whose reasoning is not confirmed by experience.

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

When truth and error have fair play, the former is always an overmatch for the latter.

Logic is pointless.

When the philosopher's argument becomes tedious, complicated, and opaque, it is usually a sign that he is attempting to prove as true to the intellect what is plainly false to common sense.

Nothing is so conformable to reason as to disavow reason.

Paradox implies that stating a contradiction disposes of it.