Quotes About Rationality

Do not waste time attempting to make sense out of nonsense.

The trouble was that one's mind did not work quite rationally when one was being kissed by the only man one had ever loved, and the man one had loved so totally that no one had ever been able to take his place.

Writing my own novels in the '90s...I never imagined that in ten years, science and rationality would require explanation and defense in a world rocked and ruled by religious fervor.

He found the life of Jesus profoundly moving; the miracles, on the other hand, seemed a barrier to faith, and he tended to explain them to himself in rational terms. It was as though there were only seven loaves and seven fishes. Maybe the miracle was that people shared what they had with strangers, he thought in the darkness.

Unless all that we take to be knowledge is an illusion, we must hold that in thinking we are not reading rationality into an irrational universe, but responding to a rationality with which the universe has always been saturated.

The idea that being scientific simply means being irreligious is a particularly naive one. It has caused a lot of confusion and will get us nowhere.

In a fit of enthusiastic madness I created a rational creature, and was bound towards him, to assure, as far as was in my power, his happiness and well-being. This was my duty

I still insist that not only the virtue but the knowledge of the two sexes should be the same in nature, if not in degree, and that women, considered not only as moral but rational creatures, ought to endeavour to acquire human virtues (or perfections) by the same means as men, instead of being educated like a fanciful kind of half being [...].

the whole point of science, the whole thrust of the Enlightenment, is the rejection of arguments from authority.

But so long as somewhere somebody is incentivised to invent ways of serving others' needs better, then the rational optimist must conclude that the betterment of human lives will eventually resume.

Whenever you see the word equilibrium in a textbook, blot it out.' It is wrong because it assumes perfect competition, perfect knowledge and perfect rationality, none of which do or can exist.

The middle ages did not care much for alphabetical order, because they were committed to rational order. To the medieval mind, the universe [is] a harmonious whole whose parts are related to one another. It was the responsibility of the author or scholar to discern these rational relationships -- of hierarchy, or of chronology, or of similarities and differences, and so forth.

When a person is in emotional pain, it's hard to be rational and to think of a good solution. Nevertheless, many of the coping strategies used by people with overwhelming emotions only serve to make their problems worse.

Philip Livingston, too, alludes to the virtuous atheist in his magazine from the 1750s: "It is an Opinion too generally received, that Man is led into all the Crimes and Extravagancies he commits, thro' Unbelief. And no Wonder this Doctrine, false as it is, should be so vigorously inculcated by Men whose Interest consists in a Depression of rational Faculties."174

while at the same time insisting that the pursuit of illumination remain within the limits of the shariah. Conservative and dismissive of scientific rationality, it was Al-Ghazali more than anyone else who made Sufism respectable.

The anti-mind is the anti-life.

Happiness is a state of non-contradictory joy—a joy without penalty or guilt, a joy that does not clash with any of your values and does not work for your own destruction. Happiness is possible only to a rational man, the man who desires nothing but rational goals, seeks nothing but rational values and finds his joy in nothing but rational actions.

In that world, you'll be able to rise in the morning with the spirit you have known in your childhood: that spirit of eagerness, adventure and certainty which comes from dealing with a rational universe. No child is afraid of nature; it is your fear of men that will vanish, the fear that has stunted your soul, the fear you acquired in your early encounters with the incomprehensible, the unpredictable, the contradictory, the arbitrary, the hidden, the faked, the irrational in men.

A rational process is a moral process. You may make an error at any step of it, with nothing to protect you but your own severity, or you may try to cheat, to fake the evidence and evade the effort of the quest – but if devotion to truth is the hallmark of morality, then there is no greater, nobler, more heroic form of devotion than the act of a man who assumes the responsibility of thinking.

I will not help you to pretend that I have a chance. I will not help you to preserve an appearance of righteousness where rights are not recognized. I will not help you to preserve an appearance of rationality by entering a debate in which a gun is the final argument. I will not help you to pretend that you are administering justice.

Reason functions by integrating perceptual data into concepts.

We are those who do not disconnect the values of their minds from the actions of their bodies.

Neither life nor happiness can be achieved by the pursuit of irrational whims. Just as man is free to attempt to survive in any random manner, but will perish unless he lives as his nature requires, so he is free to seek his happiness in any mindless fraud, but the torture of frustration is all he will find, unless he seeks the happiness proper to man. The purpose of morality is to teach you, not to suffer and die, but to enjoy yourself and live.

But neither life nor happiness can be achieved by the pursuit of irrational whims.