Quotes About Rationality

there's no talking sense to sentiment

The world is not magic — and that's the most magical thing about it.

Human beings are not nearly as coolly rational as we like to think we are. Having set up comfortable planets of belief, we become resistant to altering them, and develop cognitive biases that prevent us from seeing the world with perfect clarity. We aspire to be perfect Bayesian abductors, impartially reasoning to the best explanation - but most often we take new data and squeeze it to fit with our preconceptions.

the real world, people are not completely rational, they don't have common knowledge, they misinterpret one another, and they certainly don't start with the same priors

Reasonable men are not reasonable when you're in the bubbles which have characterized capitalism since the beginning of time.

Reason will by degrees submit to absurdity, as the eye is in time accommodated to darkness.

You can't reason with your heart; it has its own laws, and thumps about things which the intellect scorns.

Man is the reasoning animal. Such is the claim.

Having rationally decided to become less rational, we hoped to find new, meaningful, exciting, useful truths. Folk

All I hope for is one moment of rational thought and a shot at action before I'm lost to a great saddening madness, pithed at the hands of my own stumbling biology. [Johnny Truant]

We violate the innocence of things in the name of rationality so we can wander about, uninterrupted, in our search for passion and sentiment.

La razón tiene una dignidad especial que se alza por encima del juego de las fuerzas, y sólo en la medida en que se respeta la razón en una sociedad las minorías serán capaces de hacer escuchar sus justas, pero impopulares, demandas.

The ability to detect fallacy is one of the things that makes democratic life decent.

Today, in the West, there are no good excuses for religious belief - unless we think that ignorance, reaction, and sentimentality are good excuses.

Being the rational animal, man must be capable of thinking if he really wants to. Still, it may be that man wants to think, but cannot.

Certainly, dialectic is a magnificent thing. But one never finds the dialectic, as if it were a mill which exists somewhere and into which one empties whatever one chooses, or whose mechanism one could modify according to taste and need.

The toughminded person always examines the facts before he reaches conclusions; in short, he postjudges.

starts upon the supposition that when you have eliminated all which is impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth. It

Progress in the apparently most rational of human pursuits was achieved in a highly irrational manner, epitomized by Gauss' 'I have had my solutions for a long time, but I do not yet know how I am to arrive at them'. The mind, owing to its hierarchic organization, functions on several levels at once, and often one level does not know what the other is doing; the essence of the creative act is bringing them together.

To talk of rational beings apart from man is as if we attempted to talk of heavy beings apart from bodies.

as experience in fact shows that those purely rational characters commonly called practical philosophers (and rightly so, since real, i.e., theoretical, philosophers translate life into concepts, while they translate concepts into life) are surely the happiest

do nauki tej nale?? ogólne prawa myÅ›lenia, którym rozum podlega w chwili, gdy jest pozostawiony samemu sobie, gdy nic mu nie przeszkadza, a wiÄ™c podczas samotnego myÅ›lenia rozumnej istoty, której nic w bÅ'Ä…d nie wprowadza

The goal is to use explicit, logical, statistical thinking instead of just your gut.

Rationality is not unnecessary. It serves the chaos of knowledge. It serves feeling. It serves to get from this place to that place. But if you don't honor those places, then the road is meaningless. Too often, that's what happens with the worship of rationality and that circular, academic, analytic thinking. But ultimately, I don't see feel/think as a dichotomy. I see them as a choice of ways and combinations.