logic Quotes

If the consequences are the same it is always better to assume the more limited antecedent, since in things of nature the limited, as being better, is sure to be found, wherever possible, rather than the unlimited.

If you prove the cause, you at once prove the effect; and conversely nothing can exist without its cause.

How many a dispute could have been deflated into a single paragraph if the disputants had dared to define their terms

Persuasion is clearly a kind of proof, because we are most convinced when we feel something has been proven.

It is evidently equally foolish to accept probable reasoning from a mathematician and to demand from a rhetorician demonstrative proofs.

"Pure logic is the ruin of the spirit."

"The seed haunted by the sun never fails to find its way between the stones in the ground. And the pure logician, if no sun draws him forth, remains entangled in his logic."

"The theoretician believes in logic and believes that he despises dreams, intuition, and poetry. He does not recognize that these three fairies have only disguised themselves in order to dazzle him.... He does not know that he owes his greatest... ...

“Cold completely introspective logic places a philosopher on the road to the abstract. Out of this empty, artificial act of thinking there can result, of course, nothing which bears on the relation of man to himself, and to the universe.”

"There is no logical way to the discovery of these elemental laws. There is only the way of intuition, which is helped by a feeling for the order lying behind the appearance."