I don’t think that anything happens by coincidence. No one is here by accident. Everyone who crosses our path has a message for us. Otherwise they would have taken another path, or left earlier or later. The fact that these people are here means that they are here for some reason.
—James Redfield in The Celestine Prophecy
Irrationally held truths may be more harmful than reasoned errors.
—Thomas H. Huxley
Everything that is beautiful and noble is the product of reason and calculation.
—Charles Baudelaire
Well, if crime fighters fight crime and fire fighters fight fire, what do freedom fighters fight? They never mention that part to us, do they?
—George Carlin
Falling in love is not a rational process. It can’t be planned or avoided. It happens—for good or bad, it simply happens. I knew he’d eventually leave. I knew we couldn’t be together, but I fell anyway.
—Suzanne Selfors in Coffeehouse Angel
Why shouldn't things be largely absurd, futile, and transitory? They are so, and we are so, and they and we go very well together.
—George Santayana
Why is this thus? What is the reason for this thusness?
—Artemus Ward
One is loved because one is loved. No reason is needed for loving.
—Paulo Coelho
In answer to the question of why it happened, I offer the modest proposal that our Universe is simply one of those things which happen from time to time.
—Edward P. Tryon
Patriotism is the willingness to kill and be killed for trivial reasons.
—Bertrand Russell
Because things are the way they are, things will not stay the way they are.
—Bertolt Brecht
To live is like to love—all reason is against it, and all healthy instinct for it.
—Samuel Butler
I can reason down or deny everything, except this perpetual Belly; feed he must and will, and I cannot make him respectable.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
There is no reason to repeat bad history.
—Eleanor Holmes Norton
If there existed no external means for dimming their consciences, one-half of the men would at once shoot themselves, because to live contrary to one's reason is a most intolerable state, and all men of our time are in such a state.
—Leo Tolstoy