Quotes about logic

Logic ignores the Almost, just as the sun ignores the candle.

It is by logic that we prove, but by intuition that we discover. To know how to criticize is good, to know how to create is better.

Logic teaches us that on such and such a road we are sure of not meeting an obstacle; it does not tell us which is the road that leads to the desired end. For this, it is necessary to see the end from afar, and the faculty which teaches us to see is intuition. Without it, the geometrician would be like a writer well up in grammar but destitute of ideas.

All that was necessary was to use one’s imagination to see how it might have happened, and then check the evidence to see if it did happen that way. The final step is to check the evidence to make sure it could not have happened any other way.

But in this age, logic was a flame that must be frequently starved of fuel.

“It has never happened!” cannot be construed to mean, “It can never happen!”—as well say, “Because I have never broken my leg, my leg is unbreakable,” or “Because I’ve never died, I am immortal.”

There were so many possible logical holes in that statement that Irene could have used it as a tea-strainer.

Humans were inexplicable only if you assumed that they were logical.

Logic was good, but too much logical analysis inhibited action. Darya had heard it seriously suggested that the original human cladeworld, Earth, had degenerated to an ineffectual backwater of a planet because computer trade-off analysis had increasingly been used as the basis for decision making. On purely logical grounds, no one would ever explore, invent, rejoice, sing, strive, fall in love, or take physical and psychological risks of any kind. Better to stay in bed in the morning; it was much safer.

Darya had a few moments of wild hope before logic intruded.

Kallik’s explanation was neat, logical, and complete. Like most such explanations, it was, in Hans Rebka’s view, almost certainly wrong. That was not the way the real world operated.

Darya found the logic of her thought processes so compelling that it never occurred to her that others might have a different reaction. But they did.