Quotes About Rationalism

Compared with members of other nations of Western civilization, the ordinary American is a rationalistic being, and there are close relations between his moralism and his rationalism. Even romanticism, transcendentalism, and mysticism tend to be, in the American culture, rational, pragmatic and optimistic.

Any opposition not based on rationalism or science or experience will one day or other, reveal the fraud, selfishness, lies and conspiracies.

Positivism is a theory of knowledge according to which the only kind of sound knowledge available to human kind is that if science grounded in observation.

To no surprise, the theories and structures of naturalistic science affirm naturalistic assumptions.

Intellectual life in the caliphal court just before and after the Abbasid revolution (750), during which time Ibn al-Muqaffa was active, revolved around questions of what we would now call rationalism – that is, questions of verifiability of information beyond the claims of revealed religions which necessarily, and notoriously, contradicted each other.

Il razionalismo moderno fa come gli struzzi: mette la testa sotto terra per nascondersi, e si ritiene soddisfatto se riesce a drogare milioni e milioni di uomini con le «istruzioni per l'uso»

There comes a time when one must be strong with rationalists, for they can reduce anything whatever to dust, if they happen not to like the look of it, or if it threatens their deep-buried negativism. I mean of course rationalists like you, who take some little provincial world of their own as the whole of the universe and the seat of all knowledge.

And the secret is, I lowered my voice, as at a poetry reading, he was right! It is vanity, it is pride! It is the hubris of rationalism to always attack the prophet, the mystic, the god. It is our blasphemy which has made us great, and will sustain us, and which the gods secretly admire in us.

Aristotle is the champion of this world, the champion of nature, as against the supematuralism of Plato.

Although there are many variants of Plato's system, what makes them the same in regard to integration is their commitment to two fundamental principles. In metaphysics, their principle is supernaturalism. In epistemology, it is rationalism.

Plato appeals to soaring idealism scornful of the practical. Aristotle appeals to joyful realism on earth. Kant appeals to rage.

Poetry, whatever the manifest content of the poem, is always a violation of the rationalism and morality of bourgeois society.

Reason' and 'rationalism' had led men to do the most unreasonable and irrational things. It had been just another system used by men to control other men. Belief in the autonomy of man had been destroyed by men.

The fifty-six minor arcana of the Tarot are, therefore, simply a development from the last Major Arcanum of the Tarot, "The World", developed Cabbalistically-rigorously and mathematically- where sytematisation is pushed so far that one asks oneself involuntarily if it is not a matter of rationalistic performance, pure and simple.

When the chill winds of Rationalism swept over Europe, natural revelation was exalted at the expense of supernatural revelation. Man became intoxicated with a sense of his own ability and goodness, refused to listen and submit to the voice of authority that spoke to him in Scripture, and reposed complete trust in the ability of human reason to lead him out of the labyrinth of ignorance and error into the clear atmosphere of true knowledge.

If Mr. Hauser finds that he is concerned with entities in history which constantly elude his grasp, if he finds that the bourgeoisie and the aristocracy, rationalism and subjectivism constantly seem to change places in his field of vision, he should ask himself whether he is looking through a telescope or a kaleidoscope.

Voltaire abolished Christianity by believing in God.

The difference, Gopal told the Rationalists, between the Science Association and their own society was that they did not consider science alone, something people pursued in the seclusion of laboratories, important in itself. He himself was studying not science but English literature. Their aim was the application of rational principles to everything around them—to their own lives, to society, to religion, to history. It didn't matter what.

In fact, atheism is a term that should not even exist. No one ever needs to identify himself as a non-astrologer or a non-alchemist.

Good men, whether they be Christians or rationalists, do not desire to discriminate between races, but the distinctions implanted by Nature are too conspicuous to escape the observation of our senses.

The Cold War liberal even discovered the political utility of a civil religion. He was prepared to put aside the secularism and rationalism that, historically, had been among liberalism's defining elements and to seek validation for liberal anticommunism abroad and at home by appealing to theology, most notably that of Reinhold Niebuhr's Christian realism. Niebuhr was notoriously pessimistic, subscribing to a view that stressed the dark side of human nature.

Houdini, the magician who debunked magic, could not bear to see the great rationalist [Arthur Conan] Doyle enchanted by ghosts and frauds. And so he did what any friend would: He set out to prove spiritualism false and rob his friend Doyle of the only comforting fiction that was keeping him sane. It was the least he could do.

Rationalism is the enemy of art, though necessary as a basis for architecture.

I find humanism to be the most rational and positive philosophy for life. And it's not a new thing at all - the history of humanist thought is deep and inspiring.