92 Insightful Logic Quotes

In a world that thrives on quick decisions and rapid conclusions, the enduring power of logic serves as a steadfast guide through the complexities of life. From philosophers to mathematicians, and scientists to strategists, logic has sparked profound insights and driven groundbreaking innovations. This collection of 92 insightful logic quotes encapsulates the wisdom of great thinkers who have mastered the art of reasoning. Whether you're seeking clarity in your personal life, or looking for inspiration in your professional endeavors, these quotes offer timeless reflections on the intricate dance between the mind's rationality and the world's unpredictability. Dive in to explore how logic continues to shape our understanding of reality, influence our decisions, and inspire a deeper appreciation of the rational mind.

1. “The highest function of love is that it makes the loved one a unique and irreplaceable being.” - Tom Robbins

2. “There are crimes of passion and crimes of logic. The boundary between them is not clearly defined.” - Albert Camus

3. “If reason ruled the world would history even exist?” - Ryszard Kapuściński

4. “Common sense and a sense of humor are the same thing, moving at different speeds. A sense of humor is just common sense, dancing.” - Clive James

5. “A mind all logic is like a knife all blade. It makes the hand bleed that uses it.” - Rabindranath Tagore

6. “A truth that's told with bad intentBeats all the lies you can invent.” - William Blake

7. “We loved with a love that was more than love.” - Edgar Allen Poe

8. “Now it is such a bizarrely improbable coincidence that anything so mind-bogglingly useful could have evolved purely by chance that some thinkers have chosen to see it as the final and clinching proof of the non-existence of God.The argument goes something like this: "I refuse to prove that I exist,'" says God, "for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing.""But," says Man, "The Babel fish is a dead giveaway, isn't it? It could not have evolved by chance. It proves you exist, and so therefore, by your own arguments, you don't. QED.""Oh dear," says God, "I hadn't thought of that," and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic."Oh, that was easy," says Man, and for an encore goes on to prove that black is white and gets himself killed on the next zebra crossing.” - Douglas Adams

9. “If we cut up beasts simply because they cannot prevent us and because we are backing our own side in the struggle for existence, it is only logical to cut up imbeciles, criminals, enemies, or capitalists for the same reasons.” - C.S. Lewis

10. “Some ideas are not born of logic and good sense. They are made of clouds and cobwebs. They sprout from nowhere and feed on excitement, sprinkled with adventure juice and the sweet flavor of the forbidden. The psyche moves from the realms of the ordinary and takes a delicate step towards the unknown. We know we shouldn't and that is exactly why we do.” - Brigid Lowry

11. “It is always easy to be logical. It is almost impossible to be logical to the bitter end.” - Albert Camus

12. “I know that two and two make four - and should be glad to prove it too if I could - though I must say if by any sort of process I could convert 2 and 2 into five it would give me much greater pleasure.” - Lord George Gordon Byron

13. “I mean, you could claim that anything's real if the only basis for believing in it is that nobody's proved it doesn't exist!” - J.K. Rowling

14. “It is often argued that religion is valuable because it makes men good, but even if this were true it would not be a proof that religion is true. That would be an extension of pragmatism beyond endurance. Santa Claus makes children good in precisely the same way, and yet no one would argue seriously that the fact proves his existence. The defense of religion is full of such logical imbecilities. The theologians, taking one with another, are adept logicians, but every now and then they have to resort to sophistries so obvious that their whole case takes on an air of the ridiculous. Even the most logical religion starts out with patently false assumptions. It is often argued in support of this or that one that men are so devoted to it that they are willing to die for it. That, of course, is as silly as the Santa Claus proof. Other men are just as devoted to manifestly false religions, and just as willing to die for them. Every theologian spends a large part of his time and energy trying to prove that religions for which multitudes of honest men have fought and died are false, wicked, and against God.” - H.L. Mencken

15. “A leaf cannot return to the bud- bluestar to fireheart and greystripe” - Erin Hunter

16. “Cynicism, like gullibility, is a symptom of underdeveloped critical faculties.” - Jamie Whyte

17. “There are no things man was not meant to know. There are, perhaps, things man is too dumb to figure out, but that's a different problem.” - Michael Kurland

18. “When dealing with people, remember you are not dealing with creatures of logic, but with creatures bristling with prejudice and motivated by pride and vanity.” - Dale Carnegie

19. “I have often had a retrospective vision where everything in my past life seems to fall with significance into logical sequence.” - Ansel Adams

20. “There is no point in using the word 'impossible' to describe something that has clearly happened.” - Douglas Adams

21. “What does the brain matter compared with the heart?” - Virginia Woolf

22. “Everybody knows that Aristotelian two-value logic is fucked.” - Philip K. Dick

23. “The explanations for the things we do in life are many and complex. Supposedly mature adults should live by logic, listen to their reason. Think things out before they act.But maybe they never heard what Dr. London told me one, Freud said that for the little things in life we should react according to our reason. But for really big decisions, we should heed what our unconscious tells us.” - Erich Segal

24. “Insanity is often the logic of an accurate mind overtasked” - Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

25. “I suppose therefore that all things I see are illusions; I believe that nothing has ever existed of everything my lying memory tells me. I think I have no senses. I believe that body, shape, extension, motion, location are functions. What is there then that can be taken as true? Perhaps only this one thing, that nothing at all is certain.” - René Descartes

26. “Logic may be conceived as ruling out what is absolutely impossible, and thus determining the field of what in the absence of empirical knowledge is abstractly possible.” - Morris F. Cohen

27. “A doctor, a logician and a marine biologist had also just arrived, flown in at phenomenal expense from Maximegalon to try to reason with the lead singer who had locked himself in the bathroom with a bottle of pills and was refusing to come out till it could be proved conclusively to him that he wasn't a fish. The bass player was busy machine-gunning his bedroom and the drummer was nowhere on board.Frantic inquiries led to the discovery that he was standing on a beach on Santraginus V over a hundred light years away where, he claimed, he had been happy for over half an hour now and had found a small stone that would be his friend.” - Douglas Adams

28. “There is no such thing as magic, supernatural, miracle; only something that's still beyond logic of the observer.” - Toba Beta

29. “Pure logic is the ruin of the spirit.” - Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

30. “The facts of nature are what they are, but we can only view them through the spectacles of our mind. Our mind works largely by metaphor and comparison, not always (or often) by relentless logic. When we are caught in conceptual traps, the best exit is often a change in metaphor — not because the new guideline will be truer to nature (for neither the old nor the new metaphor lies “out there” in the woods), but because we need a shift to more fruitful perspectives, and metaphor is often the best agent of conceptual transition.” - Stephen Jay Gould

31. “Not too long ago thousands spent their lives as recluses to find spiritual vision in the solitude of nature. Modern man need not become a hermit to achieve this goal, for it is neither ecstasy nor world-estranged mysticism his era demands, but a balance between quantitative and qualitative reality. Modern man, with his reduced capacity for intuitive perception, is unlikely to benefit from the contemplative life of a hermit in the wilderness. But what he can do is to give undivided attention, at times, to a natural phenomenon, observing it in detail, and recalling all the scientific facts about it he may remember. Gradually, however, he must silence his thoughts and, for moments at least, forget all his personal cares and desires, until nothing remains in his soul but awe for the miracle before him. Such efforts are like journeys beyond the boundaries of narrow self-love and, although the process of intuitive awakening is laborious and slow, its rewards are noticeable from the very first. If pursued through the course of years, something will begin to stir in the human soul, a sense of kinship with the forces of life consciousness which rule the world of plants and animals, and with the powers which determine the laws of matter. While analytical intellect may well be called the most precious fruit of the Modern Age, it must not be allowed to rule supreme in matters of cognition. If science is to bring happiness and real progress to the world, it needs the warmth of man's heart just as much as the cold inquisitiveness of his brain.” - Franz Winkler

32. “To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy, to forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again: and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself -- that was the ultimate subtlety: consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed. Even to understand the word 'doublethink' involved the use of doublethink.” - George Orwell

33. “Dubium sapientiae initium. (Doubt is the origin of wisdom.)” - René Descartes

34. “How do you feel right now?" "I hurt like hell.""You'll feel worse tomorrow.""So?""So, better get a jump on this while you still feel...not as bad.""What kind of logic is that?" I retorted.” - Richelle Mead

35. “Smartass Disciple: Which one was first created, time or things?Master of Stupidity: No things, no changes. No changes, no time.” - Toba Beta

36. “Logic is something the mind has created to conceal its timidity, a hocus-pocus designed to give formal validity to conclusions we are willing to accept if everybody else in our set will too.” - Carl Lotus Becker

37. “When examining evidence relevant to a given belief, people are inclined to see what they expect to see, and conclude what they expect to conclude. Information that is consistent with our pre-existing beliefs is often accepted at face value, whereas evidence that contradicts them is critically scrutinized and discounted. Our beliefs may thus be less responsive than they should to the implications of new information” - Thomas Gilovich

38. “How do we distinguish between the legitimate skepticism of those who scoffed at cold fusion, and the stifling dogma of the seventeenthcentury clergymen who, doubting Galileo's claim that the earth was not the center of the solar system, put him under house arrest for the last eight years of his life? In part, the answer lies in the distinction between skepticism and closed-mindedness. Many scientists who were skeptical about cold fusion nevertheless tried to replicate the reported phenomenon in their own labs; Galileo's critics refused to look at the pertinent data.” - Thomas Gilovich

39. “We humans seem to be extremely good at generating ideas, theories, and explanations that have the ring of plausibility. We may be relatively deficient, however, in evaluating and testing our ideas once they are formed” - Thomas Gilovich

40. “For desired conclusions, we ask ourselves, "Can I believe this?", but for unpalatable conclusions we ask, "Must I believe this?” - Thomas Gilovich

41. “The right thing was confusing, and difficult, and sometimes Jason wondered if it was in fact a nonexistent ideal, like heaven or the American dream. There was no right thing. You did what you did for whatever reasons occurred to you at the time, depending on whichever emotion was running thickest in your blood. Your desire and fear and adrenaline and longing. You made your choice and came up with the reasons later.” - Thomas Mullen

42. “But that's men all over ... Poor dears, they can't help it. They haven't got logical minds.” - Dorothy L. Sayers

43. “A singer can shatter glass with the proper high note," he said, "but the simplest way to break glass is simply to drop it on the floor.” - Anne Rice

44. “Kindness is strength. Good-nature is often mistaken for virtue, and good health sometimes passes for genius. Anger blows out the lamp of the mind. In the examination of a great and important question, every one should be serene, slow-pulsed, and calm. Intelligence is not the foundation of arrogance. Insolence is not logic. Epithets are the arguments of malice.” - Robert Green Ingersoll

45. “As hatred is defined as intense dislike, what is wrong with inciting intense dislike of a religion, if the activities or teachings of that religion are so outrageous, irrational or abusive of human rights that they deserve to be intensely disliked?” - Rowan Atkinson

46. “Logic only tells us what's there; it can't really address what isn't. Even the most devoted empiricist must admit that we have no hope of understanding the universe. Some things are unknowable.” - Megan Chance

47. “You can't win. Logic has no power over her when her territory has been invaded by heathens.” - Mira Grant

48. “Faith is the mortar that fills the cracks in the evidence and the gaps in the logic, and thus it is faith that keeps the whole terrible edifice of religious certainty still looming dangerously over our world.” - Sam Harris

49. “I am convinced that the act of thinking logically cannot possibly be natural to the human mind. If it were, then mathematics would be everybody's easiest course at school and our species would not have taken several millennia to figure out the scientific method.” - Neil deGrasse Tyson

50. “To think or not to think? That is the new question.” - Nadina Boun

51. “There's a weird logic that explains a common truth.” - Toba Beta

52. “I, on the other hand, am a finished product. I absorb electrical energy directly and utilize it with an almost one hundred percent efficiency. I am composed of strong metal, am continuously conscious, and can stand extremes of environment easily. These are facts which, with the self-evident proposition that no being can create another being superior to itself, smashes your silly hypothesis to nothing.” - Isaac Asimov

53. “I know that if you don't look for an alternative, Sophos, you certainly won't find one.” - Megan Whalen Turner

54. “It's been said before: 'The sleep of reason produces monsters.” - Apostolos Doxiadis

55. “Put a man on the brink of the abyss and - in the unlikely event that she doesn't fall into it - he will become a mystic or a madman... Which is probably the same thing!” - Apostolos Doxiadis

56. “It would have been so pointless to kill himself that, even if he had wanted to, the pointlessness would have made him unable.” - Franz Kafka

57. “Reason itself is fallible, and this fallibility must find a place in our logic.” - Nicola Abbagnano

58. “It is from their foes, not their friends, that cities learn the lesson of building high walls” - Aristophanes

59. “How very wet this water is.” - L. Frank Baum

60. “Miracles define common sense.” - Toba Beta

61. “So how does one go about proving something like this? It's not like being a lawyer, where the goal is to persuade other people; nor is it like a scientist testing a theory. This is a unique art form within the world of rational science. We are trying to craft a "poem of reason" that explains fully and clearly and satisfies the pickiest demands of logic, while at the same time giving us goosebumps.” - Paul Lockhart

62. “Some philosophers can't bear to say simple things, like "Suppose a dog bites a man." They feel obliged instead to say, "Suppose a dog d bites a man m at time t," thereby demonstrating their unshakable commitment to logical rigor, even though they don't go on to manipulate any formulae involving d, m, and t.” - Daniel C. Dennett

63. “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

64. “We are raised in a society where we are taught to believe a more logical reason for an illogical happening rather than the illogical reason for something which may be of the unknown, hence, why the logical answer is illogical to the logical person.” - Nicholas A. McGirr

65. “Though I do not believe in the order of things, still the sticky little leaves that come out in the spring are dear to me, the blue sky is dear to me, some people are dear to me, whom one loves sometimes, would you believe it, without even knowing why; some human deeds are dear to me, which one has perhaps long ceased believing in, but still honors with one's heart, out of old habit..."--Ivan Karamazov” - Fyodor Dostoyevsky

66. “And yet Praecursoris is not punished the same way, only because it is not practical, and he is needed for breeding?” - Naomi Novik

67. “Clinging to any form of conservatism can be dangerous. Become too conservative and you are unprepared for surprises. You cannot depend on luck. Logic is blind and often knows only its own past. Logic is good for playing chess but is often too slow for the needs of survival.” - Frank Herbert

68. “To be against rationalization is not the same as to be opposed to reasoning.” - Christopher Hitchens

69. “[T]he success of democracy depends, in the end, on the reliability of the judgments we citizens make, and hence upon our capacity and determination to weigh arguments and evidence rationally.” - Irving Copi

70. “In the end, he had to admit, he didn't really understand her. He didn't understand women. He didn't understand men. He didn't even understand children very well. All he really understood, he thought, was himself and the rest of the universe. Neither anything like completely, of course, but both well enough to know that what remained to be discovered would make sense; it would fit in, it could all be gradually and patiently fitted together a bit at a time, like an infinite jigsaw puzzle, with no straight edges to look for and no end in sight, but one in which there was always going to be somewhere for absolutely any piece to fit.” - Iain Banks

71. “If someone doesn't value evidence, what evidence are you going to provide to prove that they should value it? If someone doesn’t value logic, what logical argument could you provide to show the importance of logic?” - Sam Harris

72. “When I say "The good man gave his good dog a good meal," I use "good" analogically, for there is at the same time a similarity and a difference between a good man, a good dog, and a good meal. All three are desirable, but a good man is wise and moral, a good dog is tame and affectionate, and a good meal is tasty and nourishing. But a good man is not tasty and nourishing, except to a cannibal; a good dog is not wise and moral, except in cartoons, and a good meal is not tame and affectionate, unless it's alive as you eat it.” - Peter Kreeft

73. “Kids didn't have huge backpacks when I was their age. We didn't have backpacks at all. Now it seemed all the kids had them. You saw little second-graders bent over like sherpas, dragging themselves through the school doors under the weight of their packs. Some of the kids had their packs on rollers, hauling them like luggage at the airport. I didn't understand any of this. The world was becoming digital; everything was smaller and lighter. But kids at school lugged more weight than ever.” - Michael Crichton

74. “The man who cannot believe his senses, and the man who cannot believe anything else, are both insane, but their insanity is proved not by any error in their argument, but by the manifest mistake of their whole lives. They have both locked themselves up in two boxes, painted inside with the sun and stars; they are both unable to get out, the one into the health and happiness of heaven, the other even into the health and happiness of the earth.” - G.K. Chesterton

75. “But still," Ayumi said, "it seems to me that this world has a serious shortage of both logic and kindness.""You may be right," Aomame said, "But it's too late to trade it in for another one.” - Haruki Murakami

76. “Yeah, all right, but everyone knows they torture people," mumbled Sam."Do they?" said Vimes. "Then why doesn't anyone do anything about it?""'cos they torture people.” - Terry Pratchett

77. “I lose faith in mathematics, logical and rigid. What with those that even zero doesn’t accept?” - Dejan Stojanovic

78. “There is a circularity here I do not doubt. I am defending the Bible by the Bible. Circularity of a kind is unavoidable when one seeks to defend an ultimate standard of truth, for one's defense must itself be accountable to that standard.” - John M. Frame

79. “Generally, there is a lot of truth value in stepping back, observing, then logically generalizing the extremes of what you see.” - Criss Jami

80. “How can we satisfy ourselves without going on in infinitum? And, after all, what satisfaction is there in that infinite progression? Let us remember the story of the Indian philosopher and his elephant. It was never more applicable than to the present subject. If the material world rests upon a similar ideal world, this ideal world must rest upon some other; and so on, without end. It were better, therefore, never to look beyond the present material world.” - David Hume

81. “Love is illogical, love had consequences--I did this to myself, and I should be able to take it.” - Marie Lu

82. “As many critics of religion have pointed out, the notion of a creator poses an immediate problem of an infinite regress. If God created the universe, what created God? To say that God, by definition, is uncreated simply begs the question. Any being capable of creating a complex world promises to be very complex himself. As the biologist Richard Dawkins has observed repeatedly, the only natural process we know of that could produce a being capable of designing things is evolution.” - Sam Harris

83. “It's completely logical," explained the Dodecahedron. "The more you want, the less you get, and the less you get, the more you have. Simple arithmetic, that's all. Suppose you had something and added something to it. What would that make?""More," said Milo quickly."Quite correct," he nodded. "Now suppose you had something and added nothing to it. What would you have?""The same," he answered again, without much conviction. "Splendid," cried the Dodecahedron. "And suppose you had something and added less than nothing to it. What would you have then?""FAMINE!" roared the anguished Humbug, who suddenly realized that that was exactly what he'd eaten twenty-three bowls of.” - Norton Juster

84. “I don’t have to be logical. I’m a leopard. We’re considered wild animals, you know. (Spoken by Megan.)” - Amy Neftzger

85. “I know when something is too important to be decided by logic.” - Lisa Kleypas

86. “The past is behind us unless we fail to learn from it.” - L.M. Fields

87. “All men are mortal. Socrates was mortal. Therefore, all men are Socrates.” - Woody Allen

88. “Aristotle was convinced that a trained memory helped the development of logical thought processes.” - Janet M. Tavakoli

89. “Cursed luck! —said he, biting his lip as he shut the door, —for man to be master of one of the finest chains of reasoning in nature, —and have a wife at the same time with such a head-piece, that he cannot hang up a single inference within side of it, to save his soul from destruction.” - Laurence Sterne

90. “The sensible man,' Crow had said (to Sherlock Holmes), 'don't look to confirm what he already knows -- he looks to deny it. Finding evidence that backs up your theories ain't useful, but finding evidence that your theories are wrong is priceless. Never try to prove yourself right -- always try to prove yourself wrong instead.” - Andrew Lane

91. “Logic was puny in the face of my wrath. Logic was puny and magic was mighty: I had just gotten rebirthed, refilled and renewed, and was fast on my way to resentful.” - C.E. Murphy

92. “So each one of you agrees to disagree with whatever the other one agrees with, but if you both disagree with the same thing, aren't you really in agreement?” - Norton Juster