Quotes About Rationality

People die of common sense

In every sphere of life, form is the beginning of things. […] Forms are the food of faith, cried Newman in one of those great moments of sincerity that made us admire the know the man. […] The Creeds are believed, not because they are rational, but because they are repeated.

wonder who it was defined man as a rational animal. It was the most premature definition ever given. Man is many things, but he is not rational.

He had that rarest of all things, common sense.

La ventaja de las emociones es que nos llevan por el mal camino, y la ventaja de la ciencia es que excluye la emoción.

Logic is the kingdom of the unexpected. To think logically is to be perpetually astonished.

I look forward optimistically to a healthy, happy world as soon as its children are taught the principles of simple and rational living. We must return to nature and nature's God.

For the longest second imaginable, my mind was a black hole, as if my emotions had sucked away the rational part of my brain and left a cavernous skull full of nothing but fear. I can remember that terror now, and can visualize the scene as if in a photograph: emerald-green pasture, black-and-white Luke in full stride just where he ought to be, and a white bullet of doom streaking across the grass toward him.

Today we are apt to downplay or disregard the importance of good thinking to strong faith; and some, disastrously, even regard thinking as opposed to faith. They do not realize that in so doing they are not honoring God, but simply yielding to the deeply anti-intellectualist currents of Western egalitarianism, rooted, in turn, in the romantic idealization of impulse and blind feeling found in David Hume, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and their nineteenth- and twentieth-century followers.

under their influence, and that of a few less significant developments in psychology, the human being has been increasingly taken to be the kind of thing that could not be a subject of moral knowledge. That is because, in such views, the human self (if it even exists, which has been strongly denied) is governed by unconscious forces other than self-awareness and rational self-direction.

Always so reasonable. Langdon smiled, recalling how Edmond had once berated him in public for "knocking on wood" for luck. Robert, unless you're a closet Druid who still raps on trees to wake them up, please leave that ignorant superstition in the past where it belongs!

Or are we?" Langdon intoned overhead. "We consider ourselves modern rational individuals, and yet our species' most widespread religion includes a whole host of magical claims—humans inexplicably rising from the dead, miraculous virgin births, vengeful gods that send plagues and floods, mystical promises

You had a corollary to Occam's Razor," persisted Syd. "I think it went—'All other things being equal, the simplest solution is usually stupidity.

Other research has shown that in the first few milliseconds of our perceiving something we not only unconsciously comprehend what it is, but decide whether we like it or not; the "cognitive unconscious" presents our awareness with not just the identity of what we see, but an opinion about it.7 Our emotions have a mind of their own, one which can hold views quite independently of our rational mind.

In short, out-of-control emotions can make smart people stupid.

In many or most moments these minds are exquisitely coordinated; feelings are essential to thought, thought to feeling. But when passions surge the balance tips: it is the emotional mind that captures the upper hand, swamping the rational mind.

Our journey begins in Part One with new discoveries about the brain's emotional architecture that offer an explanation of those most baffling moments in our lives when feeling overwhelms all rationality. Understanding the interplay of brain structures that rule our moments of rage and fear—or passion and joy—reveals

emotional and rational minds are semi-independent faculties, each, as we shall see, reflecting the operation of distinct, but interconnected, circuitry in the brain.

These two minds, the emotional and the rational, operate in tight harmony for the most part, intertwining their very different ways of knowing to guide us through the world.

el descontrol emocional obstaculiza la labor del intelecto

The fact that the thinking brain grew from the emotional reveals much about the relationship of thought to feeling; there was an emotional brain long before there was a rational one.

The emotional/rational dichotomy approximates the folk distinction between heart and head; knowing something is right in your heart is a different order of conviction - somehow a deeper kind of certainty - than thinking so with your rational mind.

Our journey begins in Part One with new discoveries about the brain's emotional architecture that offer an explanation of those most baffling moments in our lives when feeling overwhelms all rationality.

Newtonian physics runs into problems at the subatomic level. Down there--in the land of hadrons, quarks, and Schrödinger's cat--things gent freaky. The cool rationality of Isaac Newton gives way to the bizarre unpredictability of Lewis Carroll.