Quotes About Rationality

A nadie le vino la cordura antes que la insensatez. LUCIO ANNEO SÉNECA

Knowledge of precepts and understanding appropriate action can help us to live ethically. But even more important is cultivating what could be called 'calm emotions'. For the Stoics, these were joy, wishing and caution. These are supposed to be a rational alternative to ordinary kinds of emotions: joy replaces pleasure, wishing replaces desire and caution replaces fear.

In love, there is no criticism. In love, there is no rationality

El hombre es por natura la bestia paradójica, un animal absurdo que necesita lógica.

The only thing about a man that is a man . . . is his mind. Everything else you can find in a pig or a horse.

It is absurd to hold that a man ought to be ashamed of being unable to defend himself with his limbs, but not of being unable to defend himself with speach and reason, when the use of rational speech is more distinctive of a human being than the use of his limbs.

All proofs rest on premises.

Law is mind without reason.

the brave picture we have of humans as rational beings is utterly misleading, a kind of photograph of our surface composure and thus unreflective of-- and unattuned to-- the seismic emotional and psychic reality underneath, our true reality... The arts put onto the page or the stage or the canvas or the screen a special portraiture that does justice to our depths.

We are, perhaps, more sensitive about the pedigree of our intellectual creed than we are about the pedigree of our tastes or our sentiments. We like to think that beliefs which claim to be rational are the product of a purely rational process; and though, where others are concerned, we complacently admit the intrusion of non-rational links in the causal chain, we have higher ambitions for ourselves.

LEGGE DI KATZ Uomini e nazioni agiranno razionalmente solo dopo aver esaurito ogni altra possibilità.

Prospect theory challenges the assumption that people are rational agents who assess gains and losses the same way; in fact, it asserts that people are much more affected emotionally by losing something than they are by gaining the same thing.

Human knowledge has been changing from the word go and people in certain respects behave more rationally than they did when they didn't have it. They spend less time doing rain dances and more time seeding clouds.

For nothing is more democratic than logic; it is no respecter of persons and makes no distinction between crooked and straight noses.

If one shifts the center of gravity of life out of life into the "Beyond" – into nothingness – one has deprived life as such of its center of gravity. The great lie of personal immortality destroys all rationality, all naturalness of instinct, all that is salutary, all that is life-furthering.

For nothing is of greater importance than that a powerful, long-established, and irrational custom should be once again confirmed by the act of some one who is recognized as rational. In this way the proceeding is thought to be sanctioned by reason itself! All honor to your opinions! but little unconventional actions are of still greater value.

The harshest daylight, rationality at any cost, life bright, cold, circumspect, conscious, without instinct, in opposition to the instincts, has itself been no more than a form of sickness, another form of sickness – and by no means a way back to 'virtue', to 'health', to happiness…. To have to combat one's instincts – that is the formula for décadence: as long as life is ascending, happiness and instinct are one. –

We possess scientific knowledge today to precisely the extent that we have decided to accept the evidence of the senses – to the extent that we have learned to sharpen and arm them and to think them through to their conclusions.

A culture based on the principle of science must perish once it begins to become illogical, i.e. to turn and flee its own consequences.

We have become so obsessed with rational knowledge, objectivity, and quantification that we are very insecure in dealing with human values and human experience. - Margaret M. Lock

What the new morality resolves itself into is this: You are wrong if you do a thing you do not feel like doing; and you are right if you do a thing you feel like doing. Such a morality is based not only on "fastidiousness," but on "facetiousness." The standard of morality then becomes the individual feeling of what is beautiful, instead of the rational estimate of what is right.

The mathematical method is disinterested in the efficient cause and the final cause or the goodness of a thing and it should not be so disinterested.

Another evidence of this same disrespect for rational foundations is the general readiness of the modern mind to accept a statement because of the literary way in which it is couched, or because of the popularity of the one who says it, rather than for the reasons behind the statement.

Where the senses fail us, reason must step in.