"We know the truth not only through our reason but also through our heart. It is through the latter that we know first principles, and reason, which has nothing to do with it, tries in vain to refute them." (Blaise Pascal, "Pensées", 1670)
"We are made happy when reason can discover no occasion for it. The memory of some past moments is more persuasive than the experience of present ones. There have been visions of such breadth and brightness that these motes were invisible in their light." (Henry D Thoreau, "Letters to Various Persons", 1865)
"Human reason needs only to will more strongly than fate, and she is fate." (Thomas Mann, "The Magic Mountain", 1924)
"If we would guide by the light of reason, we must let our minds be bold." (Louis Brandeis, [dissenting opinion in Jay Burns Baking Co. v. Bryan], 1924)
"I accept nothing on authority. A hypothesis must be backed by reason, or else it is worthless." (Isaac Asimov, "I, Robot", 1950)
"The will is never free - it is always attached to an object, a purpose. It is simply the engine in the car - it can't steer. It is the mind, the reason, the imagination that steers." (Joyce Cary, The Paris Review, 1954)
"Her dance spoke of nothing more and nothing less than the tragedy of being alive, and being human. It spoke, most eloquently, of pain. It spoke, most knowingly, of despair. It spoke of the cruel humor of limitless ambition yoked to limited ability, of eternal hope invested in an ephemeral lifetime, of the driving need to try and create an inexorably predetermined future. It spoke of fear, and of hunger, and, most clearly, of the basic loneliness and alienation of the human animal. It described the universe through the eyes of man: a hostile environment, the embodiment of entropy, into which we are all thrown alone, forbidden by our nature to touch another mind save secondhand, by proxy. It spoke of the blind perversity which forces man to strive hugely for a peace which, once attained, becomes boredom. And it spoke of folly, of the terrible paradox by which man is simultaneously capable of reason and unreason, forever unable to cooperate even with himself." (Spider Robinson & Jeanne Robinson, "Stardance", 1977)
"How often people speak of art and science as though they were two entirely different things, with no interconnection. An artist is emotional, they think, and uses only his intuition; he sees all at once and has no need of reason. A scientist is cold, they think, and uses only his reason; he argues carefully step by step, and needs no imagination. That is all wrong. The true artist is quite rational as well as imaginative and knows what he is doing; if he does not, his art suffers. The true scientist is quite imaginative as well as rational, and sometimes leaps to solutions where reason can follow only slowly; if he does not, his science suffers." (Isaac Asimov, "The Roving Mind", 1983)
"The old knowledge had been difficult but not distressing. It had been all paradox and myth, and it had made sense. The new knowledge was all fact and reason, and it made no sense." (Ursula K Le Guin," "A Man of the People", 1995)
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