Quotes About Rational

Philosophy had supplied Socrates with convictions in which he had been able to have rational, as opposed to hysterical, confidence when faced with disapproval. That

We are chaotic chemical propositions, in dire need of basic principles that we can adhere to during our brief rational spells.

We should give chaos pride of place once a year or so, designating occasions on which we can be briefly exempted from the two greatest pressures of secular adult life: having to be rational and having to be faithful.

wondering at what point rational fear of contagion turned to unreasoning dread

But rational thoughts lead only to rational thoughts, whereas irrational thoughts lead to new experiences.

Self-interest and rational calculation can thus look like common sense, but there are other ways of understanding human motivations.

It is ironical that for all the value we give to the rational, life is primarily governed by the irrational. Love is not rational. Sorrow is not rational. Hatred, ambition, rage and greed are irrational. Even ethics, morals and aesthetics are not rational. They depend on values and standards which are ultimately subjective.

It is ironical that for all the value we give to the rational, life is primarily governed by the irrational. Love is not rational. Sorrow is not rational. Hatred, ambition, rage and greed are irrational. Even ethics, morals and aesthetics are not rational. They depend on values and standards which are ultimately subjective. What is right, sacred and beautiful to one group of people need not be right, sacred and beautiful to another group of people.

It is ironical that for all the value we give to the rational, life is primarily governed by the irrational.

We may classify these ideas as secular or religious, rational or supernatural, value one over the other, but they are essentially creations of humans, by humans, for humans. They are artificial constructions, not natural phenomena. They have no independent existence outside humans.

The Reformation biblical faith in God[50] had radically desacralized [entgöttert] the world. Thus the ground was prepared in which rational and empirical science could blossom; and even though the natural scientists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were believing Christians, the disappearance of faith in God left behind only a rationalized and mechanized world.[51]

It was an arrangement, coldly conceived for sexual gratification, without even words that first time, but limited by coldly precise and rational language from there on out. The terms were that they would use each other's bodies for that ornate form of masturbation called Making Love, but there was to be no question of emotional involvement, or prying into one another's soul. This, they decided coldly, would keep them from going crazy.

The last level of metaphor in the Alice books is this: that life, viewed rationally and without illusion, appears to be a nonsense tale told by an idiot mathematician.

I feel that one must deliberate then act, must scan every life choice with rational thinking but then base the decision on whether one's heart will be in it.

All the peoples in the world who talk of a cosmic serpent have been saying as much for millennia. He had not seen it because the rational gaze is forever focalized and can examine only one thing at a time. It separates things to understand them, including the truly complementary. It is the gaze of the specialist, who sees the fine grain of a necessarily restricted field of vision.

One, Western culture has cut itself off from the serpent /life principle, in other words DNA, since it adopted an exclusively rational point of view. Two, the peoples who practice what we call 'shamanism' communicate with DNA. Three, paradoxically, the part of humanity that cut itself off from the serpent managed to discover its material existence in a laboratory some three thousand years later.

To put the point another way, these beliefs provide rational reinforcement for our instinctive moral feelings. This is a significant observation for the obvious reason that we also have feelings and desires that are contrary to moral action. If rational considerations do not support morality but even undermine its rational credentials, it is likely that our moral commitments may be unsettled by thoughtful reflection and awareness.

I hate when I break my own rules. What's the point of me being rational if I flail around like a clown?

Ignorance is not about the amount of knowledge. It is about the mechanism of choosing actions. If one chooses actions based upon that which is known to be true - and tries hard to make that domain grow, the domain of knowledge, then he will be rational. Meanwhile, someone else who has much more knowledge might make decisions without paying any attention to truth. That person is ignorant.

It was the irrational doubt which springs from the isolation and powerlessness of an individual whose attitude toward the world is one of anxiety and hatred. This irrational doubt can never be cured by rational answers; it can only disappear if the individual becomes and integral part of a meaningful world.

If by anarchy one means that the individual does not acknowledge any kind of authority, the answer is to be found in what has been said about the difference between rational and irrational authority. Rational authority—like a genuine ideal—represents the aims of growth and expansion of the individual. It is, therefore, in principle never in conflict with the individual and his real, and not his pathological, aims.

Even to begin to understand the problem of faith one must differentiate between rational and irrational faith.

Even to begin to understand the problem of faith one must differentiate between rational and irrational faith. By irrational faith I understand the belief (in a person or an idea) which is based on one's submission to irrational authority. In contrast, rational faith is a conviction which is rooted in one's own experience of thought or feeling.

Doubt is the starting point of modern philosophy; the need to silence it had a most powerful stimulus on the development of modern philosophy and science. But although many rational doubts have been solved by rational answers, the irrational doubt has not disappeared and cannot disappear as long as man has not progressed from negative freedom to positive freedom.