Quotes About Irrationalities

Reason is the shepherd trying to corral life's vast flock of wild irrationalities.

It is instead the realization that the tragic irrationalities of life must be counterbalanced by an equally irrational commitment to the essential goodness of Being.

Faith is not the childish belief in magic. That is ignorance or even willful blindness. It is instead the realization that the tragic irrationalities of life must be counterbalanced by an equally irrational commitment to the essential goodness of Being. It is simultaneously the will to dare set your sights at the unachievable, and to sacrifice everything, including (and most importantly) your life.

Faith is not the childish belief in magic. That is ignorance or even willful blindness. It is instead the realization that the tragic irrationalities of life must be counterbalanced by an equally irrational commitment to the essential goodness of Being.

History is a record of many such irrationalities.

The curious switch, from initially perceiving an obstruction to a problem to eventually embodying this obstruction as a number or an algebraic object of some sort that we can effectively study, is repeated over and over again, in different contexts, throughout mathematics. Much later, complex quadratic irrationalities also made their appearance. Again these were not at first regarded as "numbers as such," but rather as obstructions to the solution of problems.

The reason special names are given to these quadratic irrationalities is that any quadratic algebraic integer is a linear combination (with ordinary integers as coefficients) of 1 and one of these fundamental quadratic algebraic integers.

Reason is the shepherd trying to corral life's vast flock of wild irrationalities.