Quotes about Logic

It is a very inconvenient habit of kittens (Alice had once made the remark) that, whatever you say to them, they Always purr.  'If them would only purr for "yes" and mew for "no," or any rule of that sort,' she had said, 'so that one could keep up a conversation!  But how can you talk with a person if they always say the same thing?'

'Do you know Languages?  What's the French for fiddle-de-dee?'
'Fiddle-de-dee's not English,' Alice replied gravely.
'Who ever said it was?' said the Red Queen.
Alice thought she saw a way out of the difficulty this time.  'If you'll tell me what language "fiddle-de-dee" is, I'll tell you the French for it!' she exclaimed triumphantly.
But the Red Queen drew herself up rather stiffly, and said 'Queens never make bargains.'
'I wish Queens never asked questions,' Alice thought to herself.

'Speak when you're spoken to!' The Queen sharply interrupted her.
'But if everybody obeyed that rule,' said Alice, who was always ready for a little argument, 'and if you only spoke when you were spoken to, and the other person always waited for you to begin, you see nobody would ever say anything, so that -- '
'Ridiculous!' cried the Queen.  'Why, don't you see, child -- ' here she broke off with a frown, and, after thinking for a minute, suddenly changed the subject of the conversation. 

Zen: the sound of the ax chopping. Chopping logic.

God is the ultimate philosophical questioner, the one who asks the logically paradoxical ultimate philosophical question about the nature of his own existence.

Logic is like the sword - those who appeal to it shall perish by it.

Now logic is a wonderful thing but it has, as the processes of evolution discovered, certain drawbacks.  Anything that thinks logically can be fooled by something else which thinks at least as logically as it does.

The metaphoric mind includes rationality, linearity, and logic - for it created them.  But like some children, the rational mind often seems embarrassed by the presence of its parents.

Contrariwise, if it was so, it might be; and if it were so, it would be; but as it isn't, it ain't.  That's logic.

Strings of coincidence can strengthen us in the determination to follow our deepest intuitions even when they run counter to conventional wisdom and logic and cannot be subjected to rational explanation.

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 discoveries to them.

The worldview of modern scientism and capitalism are profoundly wrongheaded, rooted in an artificialism and arbitrarialism that cannot begin to see the primordial truth of the way nature actually works, in animals and in ourselves as well. All modern culture and ideology that try to disestablish these principles -- radical egalitarianism, capitalist or bourgeois materialist-artificialist hierarchicalism, arbitrarial libertarianism, etc. -- are flying in the face of the headwinds of both nature and values, the tides of human nature and human character. But these ideologies' fallacies are incomprehensible to them just because their culture systematically prohibits them from thinking about issues at the level of structural principles, of ultimate preconceptions: nothing but good pedestrian mechanical bourgeois logic, as remote as it can possibly be from philosophy.

Logic ridicules love, and love smiles knowingly at the whole foolishness of logic.

"Contrariwise," continued Tweedledee, "if it was so, it might be; and if it were so, it would be; but as it isn't, it ain't. That's logic."

"An ounce of history is worth a pound of logic."

Think with your Heart Feel with your Mind

Arithmetic is where the content lies, and not logic; but logic prompts certainty, and not arithmetic.

The individual variables x, y, z,... now make a semiformal appearance, performing the function in logic that pronouns perform in ordinary English, the sentence "She is blonde", cognate to the proposition "x is blonde", both she and x specifying something but specifying that thing indeterminately.

Aristotelian logic is massive and marmoreal, but every monument accumulates graffiti.

The world of shapes, lines, curves, and solids is as varied as the world of numbers, and it is only our long-satisfied possession of Euclidean geometry that offers us the impression, or the illusion, that it has, that world, already been encompassed in a manageable intellectual structure. The lineaments of that structure are well known: as in the rest of life, something is given and something is gotten; but the logic behind those lineaments is apt to pass unnoticed, and it is the logic that controls the system.

Now it is such a bizarrely improbable coincidence that anything so mindbogglingly useful [as the telepathically translating Babel fish] could have evolved by chance that some thinkers have chosen to see it as a 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. Q.E.D."

"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 at the next pedestrian crossing.

Within the categorical syllogism, ordinary language represents the ordinary flow of inference. Two premises are given; there is a plash of insight, and one step undertaken. The mind hops right along, not quite knowing where it is going but getting there nonetheless. On the right, a checklist does its work. The logician's clamp retains its force of old, but the inferential steps involve no more than the substitution of symbols for symbols, with the anchor of inference embedded in identities. Inference now proceeds from one identity to the next; no plash of insight is involved, only the solid satisfying ratcheting sound of symbols being substituted for symbols.

Be careful what you say. It comes true. It comes true. I had to leave home in order to see the world logically, logic the new way of seeing. I learned to think that mysteries are for explanation. I enjoy the simplicity. Concrete pours out of my mouth to cover the forests with freeways and sidewalks. Give me plastics, periodical tables, TV dinners with vegetables no more complex than peas mixed with diced carrots. Shine floodlights into dark corners: no ghosts.

SETH said:  Logic deals with exterior conditions, with cause and effect relationships.  Intuitions deal with immediate experience of the most intimate nature, with subjective motions and activities that in your terms move far quicker than the speed of light, and with simultaneous events that your cause and effect level is far too slow to perceive.

"If we limit ourselves to thinking in terms of realities, facts, and knowledge, we have got the future all wrong because it is made, not of certainties, but of dreams. The future does not exist in the physical world but is present in our thoughts and dreams only....Far too many companies search for the future in the rear-view mirror, because that is where certainties are found. There we find the part of reality that can be verified. The strict scientific model of logic is a trap that prevents us from looking ahead."

The problem with smart people is that they like to be right and sometimes will defend ideas to the death rather than admit they’re wrong. This is bad. Worse, if they got away with it when they were young (say, because they were smarter than their parents, their friends, and their parent’s friends) they’ve probably built an ego around being right, and will therefore defend their perfect record of invented righteousness to the death. Smart people often fall into the trap of preferring to be right even if it’s based in delusion, or results in them, or their loved ones, becoming miserable. (Somewhere in your town there is a row of graves at the cemetery, called smartypants lane, filled with people who were buried at poorly attended funerals, whose headstones say “Well, at least I was right.”)

Until they come face to face with someone who is tenacious enough to dissect their logic, and resilient enough to endure the thinly veiled intellectual abuse they dish out during debate (e.g. “You don’t really think that do you?” or “Well if you knew the <insert obscure reference here> rule/law/corollary you wouldn’t say such things”), they’re never forced to question their ability to defend bad ideas. Opportunities for this are rare: a new boss, a new co-worker, a new spouse. But if their obsessiveness about being right is strong enough, they’ll reject those people out of hand before they question their own biases and self-manipulations. It can be easier for smart people who have a habit of defending bad ideas to change jobs, spouses, or cities rather than honestly examine what is at the core of their psyche (and often, their misery).

“We cannot be both the world's leading champion of peace and the world's leading supplier of the weapons of war”

I believe that we are neither a "self" nor "not a self," but that we are awareness residing as a body. This is the sort of apparent paradox about who we are that may not be solvable within the framework of what we call "Aristotelian two-valued logic" -- the logic system basic to all of Western analytical thought. In the two-valued logic, we frame our reality with questions like "Are we mortal or immortal?" "Is the mind or soul part of the body?" or "Is light made of waves or particles?" But none of these have "yes" or "no" answers. The exclusion of a middle ground between the poles of Aristotelian logic is the source of much confusion. Other logic systems have been suggested in Buddhist writings; the great second-century dharma master and teacher Nagarjuna introduced a four-valued logic system in which statements about the world can be (1) true, (2) not true, (3) both true and not true, (4) neither true nor not true -- which Nagarjuna believed was the usual case -- thereby illumination what is known as the Buddhist Middle Path. According to Nagarjuna, the Buddha first taught that the world is real. He next taught that it is unreal. To the more astute students, he taught that it is both real and not real. And to those who were furthest along the path, he taught that the world is neither real nor not real, which is what we would say today.

. . . The slogan "You are entitled to your opinion" is so often repeated that is near impossible for the brain of a modern Westerner not to have absorbed it.

Like many other views that have at times enjoyed universal assent, however, it isn't true. You don't really have the right to your own opinions. And the idea that you do, beside being false, is forever being invoked when it would be irrelevant even if it were true.

But love is many things, none of them logical.