Rational Quotes

Better a superstitious believer than a rational unbeliever.

..the self-knowledge that I am talking about is concrete, verifiable and is tangible like science itself and completely understandable in rational terms.

We are all born with a powerful herd instinct and it can force otherwise rational people to act in inexplicable ways.

My mother wasn't rational those last years; if she had been, she would have been horrified by her own behavior.

At the constitutional level where we work, 90 percent of any decision is emotional. The rational part of us supplies the reasons for supporting our predilections.

Some problems are just too complicated for rational, logical solutions. They admit of insights, not answers.

The more rational statement is that we feel sorry because we strike, afraid because we tremble, and not that we cry, strike, or tremble because we are sorry, angry, or fearful as the case may be.

There are men who never err, because they never propose anything rational.

There is no way any rational, reasonable person can say that the Bush Administration has been good for America.

The oceans are the planet's last great living wilderness, man's only remaining frontier on earth, and perhaps his last chance to produce himself a rational species.

Everything must be organized in the most rational way. The state won't accept excessive prices.

Zen is based on the recognition of two incompatible types of thought: rational and intuitive.

Man [is] a rational animal, endowed by nature with rights and with an innate sense of justice.

Good and evil, reward and punishment, are the only motives to a rational creature

It is not to be forgotten that what we call rational grounds for our beliefs are often extremely irrational attempts to justify our instincts.

Sometimes I feel that a more rational explanation for all that has happened during my lifetime is that I am still only thirteen years old, reading Jules Verne or H. G. Wells, and have fallen asleep.

I have heard about the civilized, the marriages run on talk, elegant and honest, rational. But and I are savages.

The problem of human suffering is never too much rational thinking, or too high a demand for evidence. But the solutions are. ... Reason is nothing less than the guardian of love.

The first koan do not have rational answers. They are techniques devised over the millennia for triggering an actual experience.

All the dancer's gestures are signs of things, and the dance called rational, because it aptly signifies and displays something over and above the pleasure of the senses.

The techniques of kitsch, which are based on imitation, are rational and operate according to formulas; the remain rational even when their result has a highly irrational, even crazy, quality.

The illogical man is what advertising is after. This is why advertising is so anti-rational; this is why it aims at uprooting not only the rationality of man but his common sense.

I was once like you, enlightened and "rational", I too scoffed at lovers, Now I am drunk, crazed, thin with misery. No one is safe! Watch out.

While men define themselves by deeds, women simply "are" beauty, grace, faith and goodness. Men tend to be rational and objective, women subjective, intuitive and emotional.

I no longer idolize reason. I have come to accept that ninety percent of what we do is irrational and that we spend what little rational thought we have in justifying our irrationality.

To say that a man is a reasoning animal is a very different thing than to say that most of man's decisions are based on his rational process. That I don't believe at all.

Fear overrides all rational thinking

In an evolutionary perspective, the rational mind takes a certain distance and no further, & we must be able to transcend it.

Our rational minds can never understand what has happened, but our hearts.. if we can keep them open to God, will find their own intuitive way.

The only reason of the institution of civil government; and the only rational ground of submission to it, is the common safety and utility

True generosity is a duty as indispensably necessary as those imposed upon us by the law. It is a rule imposed upon us by reason, which should be the sovereign law of a rational being.

The mind of man, cleansed of secondary and merely temporal concerns, beholds with the radiance of a cleansed mirror a reflection of the rational mind of God.

Water creates a neurosis in golfers. The very thought of this harmless fluid robs them of their normal powers of rational thought, turns their legs to jelly, and produces a palsy of the upper limbs.

To him who looks upon the world rationally, the world in its turn presents a rational aspect. The relation is mutual.

Man has a tendency to try to give clear reasons to be rational, but often you can see how all those reasons are not convincing and turn out to be a big nonsense.

Guilt was never a rational thing; it distorts all the faculties of the human mind, it perverts them, it leaves a man no longer in the free use of his reason, it puts him into confusion.

Thinking. A process by which I use my brain to make a rational decision.

To the rational being only the irrational is unendurable, but the rational is endurable.

I'm a very rational person but I pray every day.

Devotion is diligence without assurance. If faith were rational, it wouldn't be by definition faith. Faith is walking face-first and full speed into the dark.

If faith were rational , it wouldn't be -by definition- faith.

A rational nature admits of nothing but what is serviceable to the rest of mankind.

Feelings are more dangerous than ideas, because they aren't susceptible to rational evaluation. They grow quietly, spreading underground, and erupt suddenly, all over the place.

The love of study, a passion which derives fresh vigor from enjoyment, supplies each day, each hour, with a perpetual source of independent and rational pleasure.

The happiness and unhappiness of the rational, social animal depends not on what he feels but on what he does; just as his virtue and vice consist not in feeling but in doing.

Art is the expression of the conviction that we can have a rational relationship with the world and each other. It isn't the faith or hope that we can, it is the demonstration that we can.

Many mathematicians derive part of their self-esteem by feeling themselves the proud heirs of a long tradition of rational thinking; I am afraid they idealize their cultural ancestors.

Nobody ever arrives at a very big idea through a conscious, rational thought process. It comes from your unconscious.

It is a mistake to let aesthetics drive your rational decision making.

From 1918 on, trade unionists were to express from the platforms of their congresses the workers' desire for peace through a rational organization of the world.