Quotes About Rationalism

A high regard for the unconscious psyche as a source of knowledge is by no means such a delusion as our Western rationalism likes to suppose. We are inclined to assume that, in the last resort, all knowledge comes from without. Yet today we know for certain that the unconscious contains contents which would mean an immeasurable increase of knowledge if they could only be made conscious.

The really dangerous people are not the great heretics and unbelievers, but the swarm of petty thinkers, the rationalizing intellectuals, who suddenly discover how irrational all religious dogmas are. Anything not understood is given short shrift, and the highest values of symbolic truth are irretrievably lost. What can a rationalist do with the dogma of the virgin birth, or with Christ's sacrificial death, or the Trinity?

The relation of the individual to his fantasy is very largely conditioned by his relation to the unconscious in general, and this in turn is conditioned in particular by the spirit of the age. According to the degree of rationalism that prevails, the individual will be more disposed or less to have dealings with the unconscious and its products.

The general undervaluation of the human soul is so great that neither the great religions nor the philosophies nor scientific rationalism have been willing to look at it twice.

This paraphrase not only sounds rationalistic but is meant to be so, for despite every effort the modern mind no longer understands our two-thousand-year-old theological language unless it "accords with reason." As a result, the danger that lack of understanding will be replaced by lip-service, affectation, and forced belief or else by resignation and indifference has long since come to pass.

If, as Max Weber contended, science, modernity and rationalism have disenchanted the world and swept it clean of gods, spirits and magic (or, at least, problematised believing in them), then psychedelics offer a potential way out of the ensuing existential impasse. -Andy Letcher

wir konnen warten. wissen macht frei [we can wait. knowledge liberates]. in these confident words the stalwart Ritter von Schmerling expressed the rationalistic expectations of the political process at the beginning of the liberal era in 1861. at the end of that era, the poet Hugo von Hofmannsthal, scion of a cultivated middle-class family, offered a different formula for political success: politics is magic. he who knows how to summon the forces from the deep, him will they follow.

The Enlightenment sought to rid the world of myths, but the nation could not justify itself without them.

But although all our knowledge begins with experience, it does not follow that it arises from experience.

But, though all our knowledge begins with experience, it by no means follows that all arises out of experience.

I have never, in all my life, not for one moment, been tempted toward religion of any kind. The fact is that I feel no spiritual void. I have my philosophy of life, which does not include any aspect of the supernatural and which I find totally satisfying. I am, in short, a rationalist and believe only that which reason tells me is so.

Nunca, en toda mi vida, ni siquiera por un momento, me he sentido tentado por ninguna religión de ningún tipo. El hecho es que no siento ningún vacío espiritual. Tengo mi filosofía de la vida, que no incluye ningún aspecto sobrenatural y que encuentro totalmente satisfactoria. En resumen, soy un racionalista y sólo creo lo que me dice la razón.

The most regrettable consequence of the discontinuity in the record of American rationalist dissent is that its moral lessons must be relearned in every generation. It is telling that even so voracious a reader as Garrison was beyond the midpoint of his life when he discovered his spiritual ancestor Thomas Paine. When your own mind is your own church, it can take a very long time for future generations to make their way to the sanctuary.

What I am is a proud humanist. Atheism says what I don't accept, humanism says what I do." - Nathan Phelps

Since the Enlightenment, in the great tension between rationalism (how we would like things to be so they make sense to us) and empiricism (how things are), we have been blaming the world for not fitting the beds of "rational" models, have tried to change humans to fit technology, fudged our ethics to fit our needs for employment, asked economic life to fit the theories of economists, and asked human life to squeeze into some narrative.

The story of the wheel also illustrates the point of this chapter: both governments and universities have done very, very little for innovation and discovery, precisely because, in addition to their blinding rationalism, they look for the complicated, the lurid, the newsworthy, the narrated, the scientistic, and the grandiose, rarely for the wheel on the suitcase. Simplicity, I realized, does not lead to laurels.

The only condition for such brand of more sophisticated rationalism: to believe and act as if one does not have the full story—to be sophisticated you need to accept that you are not so.

There's a limit to my patience with anything that smacks of metaphysics. I squirm at the mention of "mind expansion" or "warm healing energy." I don't like drum circles, public nudity or strangers touching my feet.

Intelligence and rationalism are not in themselves revolutionary. But technical thinking is foreign to all social traditions: the machine has no tradition. One of Karl Marx's seminal sociological discoveries is that technology is the true revolutionary principle, beside which all revolutions based on natural law are antiquated forms of recreation. A society built exclusively on progressive technology would thus be nothing but revolutionary; but it would soon destroy itself and its technology.

Wisdom lies in thinking. The spear-head of thinking is rationalism.

En contraposición al racionalismo arquitectónico, en 1939 los arquitectos Antonio Bonet, Juan Kurchan y Jorge Ferrari Hardoy, discípulos de Le Corbusier, conformaron el Grupo Austral, cuyo objetivo fue la incorporación de procedimientos surrealistas en la formación racionalista de los arquitectos y la dimensión psicológica dentro del funcionalismo del movimiento moderno.

I am fundamentally an anthropologist and a rationalist. What I say is that human societies are very different from what specialists call 'animal society' because the former have religion.

Find a society that's adopted the teachings of Spinoza, Voltaire, Galileo, Einstein, Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson and gone down the pits—as a result of doing that—into famine and war and dictatorship and torture and repression. That's the experiment I would like to run. I don't think that's going to end up with a gulag.

The United States, being a strong and wealthy society, and with unrivaled global influence, invites envy. The success of its restless culture of freedom, constitutional democracy, self-critique, secular rationalism, and open markets provokes the resentment of both weaker and less-secure theocracy and autocracy alike.