Reason
idea · 6 works · 8 mentions · 10 anchored passages
reason · العقل · ratio · rationale · that reason which shall be perfect · the mind · understanding · العقول · اللبيب
in the texts
Adab al-wazīr
ʻAql, reason or intellect, presented as a sword against passion, a faculty corroded by anger and broken by obstinacy, and the measure of how little a man need say.
so fight your passion with your reason and cover the flaw of your character with your forbearance.
And of enemies, when I had put them to the test — I saw no enemy to a man's reason more hostile than anger.
Yet the breaking of a threat should be joined with a reason, so that your threat is not cheapened, that the order of awe (haybah) may be preserved by it and the canon of governance kept exact in it.
Tusculan Disputations
The rational faculty of the mind, described as ruling over its weaker, softer part and as the ultimate ground for enduring pain.
For the mind is divided into two parts, of which one shares in reason, the other is without it.
Come now, let us look at reason — unless you have something to say to this.
but by the opinions of the philosophers it is set forth what such a one will be, if ever there shall be one — he, then, or rather that reason which shall be perfect and complete in him, will so command that lower part as a just parent commands his upright sons;
On Moral Ends
The distinctively human rational faculty, identified as the source of virtue and as more divine than anything else in man; the capstone of the account of nature's hierarchy.
So that which is the uttermost of all things to be sought, and drawn from the first commendation of nature, ascends by many steps, so that it comes to the highest, which is heaped up from the integrity of the body and from the perfected reason of the mind.
So it will come about that the virtue of the mind is set before the virtue of the body, and that the voluntary virtues of the mind surpass the involuntary — which indeed are properly called virtues, and much excel, because they are born from reason, than which there is nothing in man more divine.
' From which it is not strange, as in living creatures, so in these too, to think both that certain things are fitted to nature and others alien, and that there is a certain cultivator for their increasing and nourishing — which is the science and art of farmers, which cuts round, prunes, raises up, lifts, props, so that they can go whither nature bears them;
Consolation to Polybius
The rational faculty that tempers grief to a proper measure without extinguishing natural feeling.
Reason will have done enough if it cuts away from grief only that which is excessive and overflows;
Letters to Lucilius
The rational faculty held to be man's distinguishing and perfected good, the basis of virtue.
If a man has nothing else of his own but reason, this will be his one good, but a good to be weighed against all others.
By as much as reason is braver than all these, by as much as it is more steadfast, by so much the more vehemently will it go out through the very fears and dangers.
Reason, then, made perfect, is his proper good;
De Paenitentia
The divine rational order underlying God's acts, absent among the ignorant.
But they are as far from the rationale of it as they are from the very author of reason.