I prefer the company of peasants because they have not been educated sufficiently to reason incorrectly.
—Michel de Montaigne
It's a little convenient, isn't it, to say that the reason you did something horrible was because someone else told you to. That doesn't make it any less wrong. No matter how many people are telling you to jump off a bridge, you always have the option to turn around and walk away.
—Jodi Picoult in The Storyteller
True myths may serve for thousands of years as an inexhaustible source of intellectual speculation, religious joy, ethical inquiry, and artistic renewal. The real mystery is not destroyed by reason. The fake one is. You look at it and it vanishes. You look at the Blond Hero—really look—and he turns into a gerbil. But you look at Apollo, and he looks back at you. The poet Rilke looked at a statue of Apollo about fifty years ago, and Apollo spoke to him. "You must change your life," he said. When the true myth rises into consciousness, that is always its message: "You must change your life.
—Ursula K. Le Guin
The decent moderation of today will be the least of human things tomorrow. At the time of the Spanish Inquisition, the opinion of good sense… was that people ought not to burn too large a number of heretics; extreme and unreasonable opinion demanded that they should burn none at all.
—Maurice Maeterlinck
Women need a reason to have sex. Men just need a place.
—Billy Crystal
There is always some madness in love. But there is also always some reason in madness.
—Friedrich Nietzsche
We are here to help each other get through this thing, whatever it is.
—Mark Vonnegut
In my experience, there is only one motivation, and that is desire. No reasons or principles contain it or stand against it.
—Jane Smiley
Nothing has an uglier look to us than reason, when it is not on our side.
—Halifax
A man always has two reasons for what he does-a good one and the real one.
—Karl Marx
Reason has always existed, but not always in a reasonable form.
—William Shakespeare
Do not banish reason for inequality; but let your reason serve to make the truth appear where it seems hid, and hide the false seems true.
—William Shakespeare
Every why hath a wherefore.
—William Shakespeare
His reasons are as two grains of wheat his in two bushels of chaff: you shall seek all day ere you find them, and when you have them, they are not worth the search.
—William Shakespeare
Many that are not mad have, sure, more lack of reason.
—William Shakespeare