Best 109 quotes in «irrational quotes» category

When people change their irrational beliefs to undogmatic flexible preferences, they become less disturbed.

When we approach history, we are dealing with a conglomeration of irrational continua. Those who deal with history by nonrational processes are the ones who make history, the actors in it.

When you're in the throes of this romantic love, it's overwhelming - you're out of control, you're irrational, you're going to the gym at 6 A.M. every day - Why? Because she's there.

Writing fiction is fundamentally an irrational act.

Who is more irrational, the guy who believes in a God he can't see, or a guy who's offended by a God he doesn't believe in?

You need to go and find someone to teach you the rudiments of irrational discourse.

COUNT. The fact is, when you start losing your temper, even the most tightly controlled imagination will run wild, just as it does in dreams.

Your trust in rationality makes you irrational.

A sane man is at his sanest just after he has orgasmed.

Black(people) hold onto their God just as the drunken man holds on to the street lamp post—for physical support only.

Don't be in temper, to leave so quickly, that I may be dying. But all too soon, the leaves and debris will gather elsewhere.

Earthquake means destruction; dictator means destruction! In the case of earthquake, you need a strong building; in the case of dictator, you need an educated rational mind, because an irrational ignorant mind always serves the dictator!

[Earl, on liking someone] Because, honestly, the rational part of me know for a rock-solid fact that I would never, ever get with Madison Hartner. But that was just the rational part of me. There's always a stupid irrational part of you, too, and you can't get rid of it. You can never completely kill off that tiny absurd spark of hope that this girl-against all odds, although she could date any guy at school, not to mention guys at college, and even though you look like the Oatmeal Monster and are a compulsive eater and suffer from constant congestion and say so many stupid things per day that it seems like a Stupid Things company is paying you to do it- this girl might like you.

In periods such as the early Middle Ages, which in general were free from social conflict, there is not, as a rule, any radical antagonism between artistic intention and technique; the art forms and the technique are employed harmoniously and say the same thing in different ways, the one factor being no more rational or irrational than the other. But in times like the Gothic age, when the whole of culture was rent by antagonisms, it often happens that the spiritual and material elements in art speak different languages and, as in the present case, the technique appears rational but the artistic aims irrational.

Government as we now know it in the USA and other economically advanced countries is so manifestly horrifying, so corrupt, counterproductive, and outright vicious, that one might well wonder how it continues to enjoy so much popular legitimacy and to be perceived so widely as not only tolerable but indispensable. The answer, in overwhelming part, may be reduced to a two-part formula: bribes and bamboozlement (classically "bread and circuses"). Under the former rubric falls the vast array of government "benefits" and goodies of all sorts, from corporate subsidies and privileges to professional grants and contracts to welfare payments and health care for low-income people and other members of the lumpenproletariat. Under the latter rubric fall such measures as the government schools, the government's lapdog news media, and the government's collaboration with the producers of professional sporting events and Hollywood films. Seen as a semi-integrated whole, these measures give current governments a strong hold on the public's allegiance and instill in the masses and the elites alike a deep fear of anything that seriously threatens the status quo.

If you're rational you don't get to believe whatever you want to believe.

Every irrational and unscientific belief will ruin your life! Your own wrong belief will be your own tragic punishment!

If a man could pass through Paradise in a dream, and have a flower presented to him as a pledge that his soul had really been there, and if he found that flower in his hand when he awoke - Aye! and what then?

I love you. I love you a thousand times. I love you an irrational number. And I will continue to love you long after all this has died and been reborn and we are nothing more than a pair of reincarnated eyes.

In my experience, his reaction was typical of many churchmen when lay people like myself try to explain the irrational using the 'God's Plan' argument. They raise an eyebrow and look at you as if you're slightly bonkers.

It is so easy at times for a lonely individual to begin fantasizing about what the people outside are saying about him and, in result, irrationally and fearfully, and sometimes angrily, fancy himself a villain.

It is only other people’s ridiculous beliefs or customs that seem ridiculous to us.

In this connection I must mention too a not altogether rational idea which I had nourished more or less vaguely for a long time: the notion that before I could achieve greatness as a writer I would have to pass through some ordeal. For this ordeal I had waited in vain. Even total war (I was never in uniform) failed to ruffle my life. I seemed doomed to quietness.

Invalidating someone else is not merely disagreeing with something that the other person said. It is a process in which individuals communicate to another that the opinions and emotions of the target are invalid, irrational, selfish, uncaring, stupid, most likely insane, and wrong, wrong, wrong. Invalidators let it be known directly or indirectly that their targets views and feelings do not count for anything to anybody at any time or in any way.

Irrationality is the exclusive preserve of humans as among all creatures only we have the power to rationalise, that being the art of packaging patently irrational as apparently rational.

It is irrational to assume that you can fault someone because of the color of their skin, no matter what color that may be.

I treat my thoughts like an old person treats their valuables: I cannot for the life of me proceed to throwing them out.

It's a bit like sympathetic magic in a way: the usual Western presumption that 'primitive' rituals mimic what they desire to achieve--that phallic objects might be believed to increase male potency and playacting rainfall might somehow bring it about. I am suspicious of such obvious connections and I suspect that the connections among things, people, and processes can be equally irrational. I sense the world might be more dreamlike, metaphorical, and poetic than we currently believe--but just as irrational as sympathetic magic when looked at in a typically scientific way. I wouldn't be surprised if poetry--poetry in the broadest sense, in the sense of a world filled with metaphor, rhyme, and recurring patterns, shapes, and designs--is how the world works. The world isn't logical, it's a song.

It takes irrationality to hold, but intelligence to profit from, conflicting beliefs and attitudes.

It's time to demand that the faithful keep their personal choices, preferences and beliefs in irrational and sometimes dangerous things strictly private. Everyone is absolutely free to believe what they want, provided they do not harass others (or force, or kill them) .. But nobody has the right to insist on privileges simply because they are supporters of one or other of the world's many religions." From: "Gesels van een imaginaire god" ('Scourges of an imaginary god')

I was afraid of anyone in a costume. A trip to see Santa might as well have been a trip to sit on Hitler's lap for all the trauma it would cause me. Once, when I was four, my mother and I were in a Sears and someone wearing an enormous Easter Bunny costume headed my way to present me with a chocolate Easter egg. I was petrified by this nightmarish six-foot-tall bipedal pink fake-fur monster with human-sized arms and legs and a soulless, impassive face heading toward me. It waved halfheartedly as it held a piece of candy out in an evil attempt to lure me into its clutches. Fearing for my life, I pulled open the bottom drawer of a display case and stuck my head inside, the same way an ostrich buries its head in the sand. This caused much hilarity among the surrounding adults, and the chorus of grown-up laughter I heard echoing from within that drawer only added to the horror of the moment. Over the next several years, I would run away in terror from a guy in a gorilla suit whose job it was to wave customers into a car wash, a giant Uncle Sam on stilts, a midget dressed like a leprechaun, an astronaut, the Detroit Tigers mascot, Ronald McDonald, Big Bird, Bozo the Clown, and every Mickey Mouse, Minnie Mouse, Donald Duck, Pluto, Chip and Dale, Uncle Scrooge, and Goofy who walked the streets at Disneyland. Add to this an irrational fear of small dogs that saw me on more than one occasion fleeing in terror from our neighbor's four-inch-high miniature dachschund as if I were being chased by the Hound of the Baskervilles and a chronic case of germ phobia, and it's pretty apparent that I was--what some of the less politically correct among us might call--a first-class pussy.

Logic may indeed be unshakeable, but it cannot withstand a man who is determined to live. Where was the judge he had never seen? Where was the High Court he had never reached? He raised his hands and spread out all his fingers. But the hands of one of the men closed round his throat, just as the other drove the knife deep into his heart and turned it twice.

Most unintelligent or foolish people do not regard themselves as that; they regard themselves as not-that-intelligent or not-that-wise.

Many people do simply awful things out of sincere religious belief, not using religion as a cover the way that Saddam Hussein may have done, but really because they believe that this is what God wants them to do, going all the way back to Abraham being willing to sacrifice Issac because God told him to do that. Putting God ahead of humanity is a terrible thing.

Maybe he should have kept quiet about if he knew they couldn't stand it. Is that what you do?

She realised with every inch of her being that she wanted Freya; she was in love with Freya. Her mind, with its perfectly rational arguments, had list the battle with her heart. She felt it. It was real. The conflict was torture.

Nature has buffered our children not only physically-- prepubescent children have the lowest death rate from all causes-- but psychologically as well, by endowing them with hope, abundant and irrational.

Nightmares are seldom a foreshadowing of real events, but always a showing of real fears.

Paradoxes only stump sane people. Nuts have irrational on our side.

Reason and understanding are represented as the voluntary slaves of the senses.

Nature has buffered out children not only physically--prepubescent children have the lowest death rate from all causes-- but psychologically as well, by endowing them with hope, abundant and irrational.

The Christian who loves his Master needs not fear any longer for himself. For it is then completely irrational, as it is written thus: 'Perfect love casts out fear.' However, it is very much rational for one to instead fear for the enemies of God.

So that, upon the whole, we may conclude, that the Christian Religion not only was at first attended with miracles, but even at this day cannot be believed by any reasonable person without one. Mere reason is insufficient to convince us of its veracity: and whoever is moved by Faith to assent to it, is conscious of a continued miracle in his own person, which subverts all the principles of his understanding, and gives him a determination to believe what is most contrary to custom and experience.

The hardest chore to do, and to do right, is to think. Why do you think the common man would choose labor, partially, as a distraction from his own thoughts? It is because that level of stress, he most absolutely abhors.

The fear of God is one of the most extreme expressions of cowardice.

The woman looked at her heart in all of its fragments. Its voice was clear and true as it reminded her of the injustices done to it. Nothing so forlorn and broken could lie to her — could it? However, the woman was not a rational woman, and did not heed the beings’ warning. “Strip my humanity away, that I may never again walk in the race of men,” was her one wish.

The most important thing to remember about confronting an irrational person is that they are usually attributing an inaccurate meaning to a situation causing them to react irrationally.

There is no conflict of interests among men, neither in business nor in trade nor in their most personal desires—if they omit the irrational from their view of the possible and destruction from their view of the practical?

The unreal is the illogical. And this age seems to have a capacity for surpassing even the acme of illogicality, of anti-logicality: it is as if the monstrous reality of the war had blotted out the reality of the world. Fantasy has become logical reality, but reality evolves the most a-logical phantasmagoria. An age that is softer and more cowardly than any preceding age suffocates in waves of blood and poison-gas; nations of bank clerks and profiteers hurl themselves upon barbed wire; a well-organized humanitarianism avails to hinder nothing, but calls itself the Red Cross and prepares artificial limbs for the victims; towns starve and coin money out of their own hunger; spectacled school-teachers lead storm-troops; city dwellers live in caves; factory hands and other civilians crawl out on their artificial limbs once more to the making of profits. Amid a blurring of all forms, in a twilight of apathetic uncertainty brooding over a ghostly world, man like a lost child gropes his way by the help of a small frail thread of logic through a dream landscape that he calls reality and that is nothing but a nightmare to him. The melodramatic revulsion which characterizes this age as insane, the melodramatic enthusiasm which calls it great, are both justified by the swollen incomprehensibility and illogicality of the events that apparently make up its reality. Apparently! For insane or great are terms that can never be applied to an age, but only to an individual destiny. Our individual destinies, however, are as normal as they ever were. Our common destiny is the sum of our single lives, and each of these single lives is developing quite normally, in accordance, as it were, with its private logicality. We feel the totality to be insane, but for each single life we can easily discover logical guiding motives. Are we, then, insane because we have not gone mad?

The way most people use their minds is analogous to an ambulance that is used only as an umbrella.