Best 109 quotes in «irrational quotes» category

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

There’s no way to make the irrational work.

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 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 traditional arguments for the existence of God have been fairly thoroughly criticised by philosophers. But the theologian can, if he wishes, accept this criticism. He can admit that no rational proof of God's existence is possible. And he can still retain all that is essential to his position, by holding that God's existence is known in some other, non-rational way. I think, however, that a more telling criticism can be made by way of the traditional problem of evil. Here it can be shown, not that religious beliefs lack rational support, but that they are positively irrational, that the several parts of the essential theological doctrine are inconsistent with one another, so that the theologian can maintain his position as a whole only by a much more extreme rejection of reason than in the former case. He must now be prepared to believe, not merely what cannot be proved, but what can be disproved from other beliefs that he also holds.

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.

Think about the precedents you are setting. It's the Left that runs the world on reckless emotionalism. Don't join.

We are all rational in our own eyes. We are irrational only from the perspective of another person whose concept of rationality is different from ours.

Until now, human organization could only be based upon something negative which could not be conquered: SCARCITY, and something false: PERSONAL ACCOUNTABILITY... No wonder instead of producing stability, it produced the exact opposite. The current human organization based upon dealing with the consequences of scarcity and being considered responsible for our individual characteristics which we could never have chosen (our nature, our nurture, our “soul”, and all the choices they engender), will always lead to an irrational, hence unstable human organization causing perpetual conflicts, which is no organization at all. Today, we have the luxury to initiate a rational self-organization based upon two positives: -our HUMAN CONSENSUS; our common desires shared by all, and -the SCIENTIFIC PROJECT to achieve them.

We irrationally believe we will be the same way we are today in 10 years. You won’t. You’ll be a totally new human. Who do you want to be? Whoever it is, do it on purpose. Intentionally.⁣

We are forced to fall back on fatalism as an explanation of irrational events (that is to say, events the reasonableness of which we do not understand).

What millions believe is often just fairy tales for children! The fabrications of the past are ridiculously accepted as the holies of people! Glory lies in searching the truth not in believing the irrational legends!

We should be agnostic about those things for which there is no evidence. We should not hold beliefs merely because they gratify our desires for afterlife, immortality, heaven, hell, etc.

Advancing bourgeois society liquidates memory, time, recollection as irrational leftovers of the past.

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.

You had me believing that I was crazy. Every time I broke down over what seemed like nothing, it was you.’ Bade ran an anxious hand through his hair. ‘Well, that’s love isn’t it?’ Davina took his restless hand. ‘Love is crazy and irrational, and anything less would be boring.

Your realm is an insane place. In Volaria, no-one goes hungry, slaves are no use when they starve. Those freeborn too lazy or lacking in intelligence to turn sufficient profit to feed themselves are made slaves so they can generate wealth for those deserving of freedom, and be fed in return. Here, your people are chained by their freedom, free to starve and beg from the rich. It's disgusting.

Even the most analytical thinkers are predictably irrational; the really smart ones acknowledge and address their irrationalities.

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

An exotic and irrational entertainment, which has been always combated, and always has prevailed.

Beware: Ignorance Protects itself. Ignorance Promotes suspicion. Suspicion Engenders fear. Fear quails, Irrational and blind, Or fear looms, Defiant and closed. Blind, closed, Suspicious, afraid, Ignorance Protects itself, And protected, Ignorance grows.

Dare to be irrational! - keep free from formulas, open to any fresh impulse, fluid.

I am a reasonable and sane functionalist tempered by irrational frivolity.

Excessive or irrational schedules are probably the single most destructive influence in all of software

I am a superior form of human and I have absolutely no quirks or irrational impulses of any kind.

I am bundle of nerves riddled with irrational fears.

If something is irrational, that means it won't work. It's usually unrealistic.

How do we know when irrational exuberance has unduly escalated asset values?

I have no phobias. Phobias are irrational. My fears are rational and CAREFULLY CULTIVATED, like roses.

Irrational judgements lead to new experience.

If one's patriotism is merely instinctive it is irrational and irresponsible, and consequently a danger to one's country.

Irrational beliefs are culturally accepted delusions.

I see no reason to have my shirts ironed. It's irrational.

I often worry that my idea of personhood is nostalgic, irrational, inaccurate.

I still had an irrational desire to do an interpretive dance about rainbows, but it was a small price to pay for being healed.