The exercise of reason is not available only to specialists; it is accessible to everyone.
Interpretation
Reason and critical thinking are skills that everyone can use, not just experts.
This quote emphasizes the importance of reason and logical thinking as tools that are not limited to specialists or professionals. It suggests that every individual has the capacity to engage with and apply rational thought in various aspects of life, making it a universal skill that can benefit society as a whole.
In practice
In a debate, one might quote this to emphasize the value of reasoned arguments accessible to all participants.
I've been at this for 40 years. And, as an academic, I've been content with relatively small audiences, with the thought that the audience I long for will find its way eventually to what I have written, provided that what I have written is good enough.
What I wanted to do was to get that sense of being in touch with this lost world while holding onto what draws readers and audiences there in the first place.
What matters here are the works - finally without them his life would be uninteresting. What matters, that is, are the astonishing things that he left behind. If we can get the life in relation to the works, then it can take off.
Compared to the unleashed forces of warfare and of faith, Mount Vesuvius was kinder to the legacy of antiquity.
The greatest obstacle to pleasure is not pain; it is delusion.
I believe in broken, fractured, complicated narratives, but I believe in narratives as a vehicle for truth, not simply as a form of entertainment, though I love entertainment, but also a way of conveying what needs to be conveyed about the works that I care about.
You have to be willing to grow. Growth is different from something that happens to you: You produce it. You live it. The prerequisites for growth are the openness to experience events and the willingness to be changed by them.
Money is like manure. It stinks when you pile it; it grows when you spread it
It is remarkable how long men will believe in the bottomlessness of a pond without taking the trouble to sound it.
What lies behind us and what lies ahead of us are tiny matters compared to what lives within us.
I think us here to wonder, myself. To wonder. To ask. And that in wondering bout the big things and asking bout the big things, you learn about the little ones, almost by accident. But you never know nothing more about the big things than you start out with. The more I wonder, the more I love.
It is a rare mind indeed that can render the hitherto non-existent blindingly obvious. The cry 'I could have thought of that' is a very popular and misleading one, for the fact is that they didn't, and a very significant and revealing fact it is too.
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