Best 201 quotes in «rational quotes» category

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 human brain always concocts biases to aid in the construction of a coherent mental life, exclusively suitable for an individual’s personal needs.

The majority of India's adult and elderly population is too medieval to think as civilized, rational and progressive human beings.

The mind was rarely a rational thing when it came to the dark or the unknown.

The most important thing in life is to learn how to give out love, and to let it come in. His voice dropped to a whisper. "Let it come in. We think we don't deserve love, we think if we let it in we'll become too soft. But a wise man named Levine said it right. He said, 'Love is the only rational act.

The only relationships that exist are based on truth. Everything else is just a mutual and isolating delusion.

The real objection to modernism is simply that it is a form of snobbishness. It is an attempt to crush a rational opponent not by reason, but by some mystery of superiority, by hinting that one is specially up to date or particularly "in the know.

The processing of universals is the job of the unconscious. If we feed it the opposite it breaks; when it breaks we break and the people around us break.

There is a morality of reason, a morality proper to man, and Man’s Life is its standard of value. All that which is proper to the life of a rational being is the good; all that which destroys it is the evil.

There is a rationale for every action.

Think rationally, feel humanly, act conscientiously and the world will become a real progressive abode of peace.

The wrong approaches to faith and to skepticism are equally detrimental to the path. For the former declares its answers too soon and is later found false; the latter rejects sound answers altogether and hashes itself useless.

Think of yourselves as pearls. We, sitting in our rows, eyes down, we make her salivate morally. We are hers to define, we must suffer her adjectives. I think about pearls. Pearls are congealed oyster spit.

The use of reason and that of an erect penis are mutually exclusive.

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

Thinking is man’s only basic virtue, from which all the others proceed. And his basic vice, the source of all his evils, is that nameless act which all of you practice, but struggle never to admit: the act of blanking out, the willful suspension of one’s consciousness, the refusal to think - not blindness, but the refusal to see; not ignorance, but the refusal to know. It is the act of unfocusing your mind and inducing an inner fog to escape the responsibility of judgment - on the unstated premise that a thing will not exist if only you refuse to identify it, that A will not be A so long as you do not pronounce the verdict ‘It is.

This, in every hour and every issue, is your basic moral choice: thinking or non-thinking, existence or non-existence, A or non-A, entity or zero.

Thoughts are nothing but cause and effect.

To evade insanity and depression, we unconsciously limit the number of people toward whom we are sincerely sympathetic.

To exist is to be something, as distinguished from the nothing of non-existence, it is to be an entity of a specific nature made of specific attributes.

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.

To reach truth that one cannot be argued out of is to escape from the linguistically expressible to the ineffable. Only the ineffable—what is not describable at all—cannot be described differently.

Truth is on the side of compassion.

When I met Wittgenstein, I saw that Schlick's warnings were fully justified. But his behavior was not caused by any arrogance. In general, he was of a sympathetic temperament and very kind; but he was hypersensitive and easily irritated. Whatever he said was always interesting and stimulating and the way in which he expressed it was often fascinating. His point of view and his attitude toward people and problems, even theoretical problems, were much more similar to those of a creative artist than to those of a scientist; one might almost say, similar to those of a religious prophet or a seer. When he started to formulate his view on some specific problem, we often felt the internal struggle that occurred in him at that very moment, a struggle by which he tried to penetrate from darkness to light under an intense and painful strain, which was even visible on his most expressive face. When finally, sometimes after a prolonged arduous effort, his answers came forth, his statement stood before us like a newly created piece of art or a divine revelation. Not that he asserted his views dogmatically ... But the impression he made on us was as if insight came to him as through divine inspiration, so that we could not help feeling that any sober rational comment of analysis of it would be a profanation.

We don’t see the world as it is. We see the world as we believe it to be. Our perception is a product of our belief and not our rational thinking.

Whatever the degree of your knowledge, these two—existence and consciousness—are axioms you cannot escape, these two are the irreducible primaries implied in any action you undertake, in any part of your knowledge and in its sum, from the first ray of light you perceive at the start of your life to the widest erudition you might acquire at its end.

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.

...you’d be amazed at the grand tales the human brain will throw up to make sense of something nonsensical.

When you go with first principles, a giant light goes off in what you think is a city and turns out to be an insane asylum.

Whether it is rational or empirical, your approach to life must always be empathetic. Emotional intelligence is acquired when knowledge and empathy are combined and applied to situations regularly in everyday life.

While it is true that religious beliefs are often a source of conflict but the so-called rational thoughts are no better. The two World Wars, which killed more than 75 million people were not fought on the ground of religion but on the basis of so called rational thoughts like freedom, communism, nationalism, fascism or Nazism.

When you don’t have explanation for a certain phenomenon, as a real human, you should suspend judgement, instead of concocting supernatural explanations out of ignorance and primordial fanaticism.

Your daily choices and actions should be rational and productive

A rational army would run away.

Always take the short cut; and that is the rational one. Therefore say and do everything according to soundest reason.

A person is an individual substance of a rational nature.

Architecture, in itself, at the end of the day, is a rational profession.

Being so rational, we have created a very simple version of ourselves.

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

Capitalism is the sorcerer's apprentice: it has summoned up powers which have spun wildly out of control and now threaten to destroy us.The task of socialism is not to spur on those powers but to bring them under rational human control.

By any rational metric, I am boring.

Darwinism removed the whole idea of God as the creator from the sphere of rational discussion.

God is in all things, but so far as God is Divine and so far as He is rational, God is nowhere so properly as in the soul - in the innermost of the soul

Fear overrides all rational thinking

Historians are presumed to be unable to "do psychology," which is "mystical" anyway, so they are forced to accept the most "rational" explanations... "and it is on these that history is built.

Guilt isn't always a rational thing, Clio realized. Guilt is a weight that will crush you whether you deserve it or not.

Hedonism can be a rational response to a difficult life.

Human beings aren't rational animals; we're rationalizing animals who want to appear reasonable to ourselves.

Humans alone are created as rational beings in the image of God, capable of a relationship with God and given by him the capacity to understand the universe in which they live.

I am a socialist, a believer in rational thought and the rule of law.