Quotes About Rationality

He was the world-renowned tamer of lightning, the man who had disarmed the heavens, who had vanquished superstition with reason.

I don't think anything can behave as unintelligently as intelligence.

Progress is a wonderful thing of course, and I can appreciate the lactiferins that are sprinkled on the pasture to turn the grass to cheese. And yet this lack of cows, however rational it may be, gives one the feeling that the fields and meadows, deprived of their phlegmatic, bemusedly ruminating presence, are pitifully empty.

Der Pessimismus der Vernunft verpflichtet zum Optimismus des Willens!

Il comportamento logico ci abbandona molto prima che la vita stessa e non è cosa rara che l'uomo si comporti senza senso.

Las imágenes de vuestra creación, así como de la mía propia, contienen —desde una perspectiva racional— una buena dosis de ridiculez, dado que la intención de la perfección que no logra su propósito es tanto más ridícula cuanta mayor sabiduría se haya empleado en ella. Por ese motivo, la tonterías expresadas por un filósofo resultan más amenas que las tonterías expresadas por un necio.

To me, reason is as spiritual as anything else, the beauty of reason seems to me indelible and ineffable and numinous... the spirit is after all the same word we use to describe... essence

However, one cannot really argue with a mathematical theorem.

as we all know, decisions are often not rational or are based on a defective analysis of the consequences of the choice. That is why the world is in such a mess.

Economics is also an effective theory, based on the notion of free will plus the assumption that people evaluate their possible alternative courses of action and choose the best. That effective theory is only moderately successful in predicting behavior because, as we all know, decisions are often not rational or are based on a defective analysis of the consequences of the choice. This is why the world is in such a mess.

Best not to look back. Best to believe there will be happily ever afters all the way around - and so there may be; who is to say there will not be such endings? Not all boats which sail away into darkness never find the sun again, or the hand of another child; if life teaches anything at all, it teaches that there are so many happy endings that the man who believes there is no God needs his rationality called into serious question..

What I'm saying is that I'm trying to find rational reasons to explain irrational feelings, and that's neveer a good sign.

Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.'

their respect for the mystery--the half-grasped but never spoken idea that maybe, when you got right down to the place where the cheese binds, there is no such thing as marriage, no such thing as union, that each soul stood alone and ultimately defied rationality. That was the mystery.

If life teaches anything at all it teaches that there are so many happy endings that the man who believes that there is no God needs his rationality called into serious question.

People are only rational on the surface.

Sane people don't sacrifice children on the altar of probability. That's not science, it's superstition.

person did what a person could, whether it was setting up gravestones or trying to convince twenty-first-century men and women that there were monsters in the world, and their greatest advantage was the unwillingness of rational people to believe.

Feelings are invulnerable to rational thought.

Deduce is absurd and dangerous

His so-fucking-vivid imagination rarely gave him the horrors, but when it did, God help him. God help him once it was warmed up. It was not only warmed up now, it was hot and running on full choke. That there was no sense at all in what he was thinking made not a whit of difference in the dark. In the dark, rationality seemed stupid and logic a dream. In the dark he thought with his skin.

Someone engulfed by fury cannot think rationally.

esa tozuda negativa de la humanidad a intentar al menos obrar de un modo razonable.

Psychopaths [make] the world go around...society [is] an expression of that particular sort of madness...I've always believed society to be a fundamentally rational thing, but what if it isn't? What if it is built on insanity?