Pascal’s wager

418. [...] Let us the examine this point, and let us say: ‘Either God is or he is not’. But to which view shall we be inclined? Reason cannot decide this question. Infinite chaos separate us. At the far end of this infinite distance a coin is being spun which will come down heads or tails. How will you wager? 

[...]Let us weigh up the gain and the loss involved in calling heads that God exists. Let us asses the two cases: if you win you win everything, if you lose you lose nothing.

[...] I tell you that you will gain even in this life, and that at every step you take along this road you will see that your gain is so certain and your risk so negligible that in the end you will realize that you have wagered on something certain and infinite for which you have paid nothing.

Blaise Pascal - Pensées 

The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing

423. The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing: we know this in countless ways.

424. It is the heart which perceives God and not the reason. That is what faith is: God perceived by heart, not by he reason. 

Blaise Pascal - Pensées

The shape of a woman

X. 5

Once, a certain man said, "I know the shape of 'reason' and 'women'. When somebody asked what shape these things were, he replied: "Reason is a square, and it will not budge at all. Women are round. Women do not discriminate between good or evil, wrong or right, and will roll into any position."

Hagakure

Reason is impaired by passions

This does the poor philosopher reason when he undertakes to reason at moments when a tumultuous passion leads the divine faculties of his soul astray. To reason rightly one must be neither in love nor in anger; for those two passions reduce as to the level of animals; and unfortunately we are never so much inclined to reason as when we are agitated by one or the other of them.

Giacomo Casanova - History of my life (2, 1)

Freedom versus destiny

Man is a free agent; but he is not free if he does not believe it, for the more power he attributes to Destiny, the more he deprives himself of the power which God granted him when he gave him reason.

Giacomo Casanova - History of my life

Man's only power - his MIND

Man cannot survive except through his mind. He comes on earth unarmed. His brain is his only weapon. Animals obtain food by force. Man has no claws, no fangs, no horns, no great strength of muscle. He must plant his food or hunt it. To plant, he needs a process of thought. To hunt, he needs weapons, and to make weapons - a process of though. From this simple necessity to the highest religious abstraction, from the wheel to the skyscraper, everything we are and everything we have comes from a single attribute of man - the function of his reasoning mind.

Ayn Rand - The Fountainhead