Irrational Quotes - Page 15

• It has been said that the myth is a public dream, dreams are private myths. Unfortunately we give our mythic side scant attention these days. As a result, a great deal escapes us and we no longer understand our own actions. So it remains important and salutary to speak not only of the rational and easily understood, but also of enigmatic things: the irrational and the ambiguous. To speak both privately and publicly.

  Mary Zimmerman

  Dream, Giving, Important

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• We can surely no longer pretend that our children are growing up into a peaceful, secure, and civilized world. We've come to the point where it's irresponsible to try to protect them from the irrational world they will have to live in when they grow up. The children themselves haven't yet isolated themselves by selfishness and indifference; they do not fall easily into the error of despair; they are considerably braver than most grownups. Our responsibility to them is not to pretend that if we don't look, evil will go away, but to give them weapons against it.

  Madeleine L'Engle

  Growing Up, Children, Fall

  FaceBook post by Madeleine L'Engle from Nov 03, 2016

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• Though philosophers like to define poetry as irrational fancy, for us it is practical, humorous, reasonable way of being ourselves.

  Robert Graves

  Humorous, Poetry, Fancy

  Robert Graves, Patrick J. Quinn (2000). “Some speculations on literature, history, and religion”, Carcanet Press Ltd.

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• Abstract reason, formerly the servant of practical human reasons, has everywhere become its master, and denies poetry any excuse for existence.
  Though philosophers like to define poetry as irrational fancy, for us it is practical, humorous, reasonable way of being ourselves. Of never acquiescing in a fraud; of never accepting the secondary-rate in poetry, painting, music, love, friends. Of safeguarding our poetic institutions against the encroachments of mechanized, insensate, inhumane, abstract rationality.

  Robert Graves

  Humorous, Poetry, Fancy

  "The Crane Bag". Book by Robert Graves. "The Case for Xanthippe", 1969.

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• Most people in Seoul don't care about the North's belligerent statements: The farther one is from the Korean Peninsula, the more one will find people worried about the recent developments here. Scary impressions are important to North Korea because for the last two decades its policy has been, above all, a brilliant exercise in diplomatic blackmail. And blackmail usually works better when the practitioners are seen as irrational and unpredictable.

  Andrei Lankov

  Exercise, Two, Korea

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• Luck doesn't shine her light on each of us equally. She is arbitrary, irrational, unfair and sometimes downright cruel.

  Francine Pascal

  Light, Shining, Luck

  Francine Pascal (2003). “Sam (#2) and Escape (#26)”, p.157, Simon and Schuster

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• You married Elora?” “Yes, briefly.” Oren emphasized how fleeting it had been. “We were wed because we thought it would be a good way to combine our respective kingdoms. Vittra and Trylle have had their disagreements over the years, and we wanted to create peace. Unfortunately, your mother is the most impossible, irrational, horrible woman on the planet.” He smiled at me. “Well, you know. You’ve met her.

  Amanda Hocking

  Mother, Years, Would Be

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• These things sneak up on him for no reason, these flashes of irrational happiness. It's probably a vitamin deficiency.

  Margaret Atwood

  Funny Life, Vitamins, Reason

  FaceBook post by Margaret Atwood from Aug 21, 2016

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• Did it ever occur to you, that 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? There is no conflict, and no call for sacrifice, and no man is a threat to the aims of another if men understand that reality is an absolute not to be faked, that lies do not work, that the unearned cannot be had, that the undeserved cannot be given, that the destruction of a value which is, will not bring value to that which isn't.

  Ayn Rand

  Business, Lying, Sacrifice

  "Atlas Shrugged".

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• The being we call god is merely a pawn working for a powerful and rational force in some far-off galaxy. This force is trying to weed out people who are irrational by seeing who would be stupid enough to believe in his god illusion so easily. Those that believe in this illusion, he will send to eternal damnation and he will deliver the rational beings, those who stoically refused to believe in a god, to heaven.

  Nick Yee

  God, Weed, Atheist

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• The utilitarian behaves sensibly in all that is required for preservation but never takes account of the fact that he must die... His whole life is absorbed in avoiding death, which is inevitable, and therefore he might be thought to be the most irrational of men, if rationality has anything to do with understanding ends or comprehending the human situation as such.

  Allan Bloom

  Powerful, Passion, Men

  "The Closing of the American Mind: How higher education has failed democracy and impoverished the souls of today's students". Book by Allan Bloom, 1987.

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• Man represses the irrational passions of destructiveness, hate, envy, revenge; he worships power, money, the sovereign state, the nation; while he pays lip service to the teachings of the great spiritual leaders of the human race, those of Buddha, the prophets, Socrates, Jesus, Mohammed-he has transformed these teachings into a jungle of superstition and idol-worship. How can mankind save itself from destroying itself by this discrepancy between intellectual-technical overmaturity and emotional backwardness?

  Erich Fromm

  Spiritual, Jesus, Revenge

  Erich Fromm (2013). “Escape from Freedom”, p.11, Open Road Media

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• If the world is irrational, we can never know it -- either it or its irrationality.

  Edward Abbey

  World, Knows, Ifs

  Edward Abbey (1996). “The Serpents of Paradise: A Reader”, p.53, Macmillan

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• All that is real in human history becomes irrational in the process of time.

  Friedrich Engels

  Real, Process, Humans

  Friedrich Engels, Karl Marx (1941). “Ludwig Feuerbach & the Outcome of Classical German Philosophy”, p.11, International Publishers Co

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• Collage is the noble conquest of the irrational, the coupling of two realities, irreconcilable in appearance, upon a plane which apparently does not suit them.

  Max Ernst

  Reality, Two, Suits

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• A lot of people are just really confused by me; they don’t know what to think of me, so they try to compartmentalize me or diminish me. Maybe they just feel unsafe. But any time you have an overtly emotional or irrational, negative reaction to something, you’re fearing something that it’s bringing up in you.

  Madonna Ciccone

  Confused, Emotional, Thinking

  "Madonna Interview: Sunday Times Culture". The Times Interview, September 20, 2009.

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• My pictures are about everyday life combined with theatrical effect. I want them to feel outside of time, to take something routine and make it irrational. I’m always looking for a small moment that is a revelation

  Gregory Crewdson

  Photography, Time, Everyday

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• To believe in faeries is to step into an enchanted space where the rational mind meets the irrational heart, and all things become possible.

  Brian Froud

  Believe, Heart, Space

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• Anytime that is ‘betwixt and between’ or transitional is the faeries’ favorite time. They inhabit transitional spaces: the bottom of the garden, existing in a space between manmade cultivation and wilderness. Look for them in the space between nurture and nature, they are to be found at all boarders and boundaries, or on the edges of water where it is neither land nor lake, neither path nor pond. They come when we are half-asleep. They come at moments when we least expect them; when our rational mind balances with the fluid irrational.

  Brian Froud

  Garden, Lakes, Land

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• The creative person, the person who moves from an irrational source of power, has to face the fact that this power antagonizes. Under all the superficial praise of the creative is the desire to kill. It is the old war between the mystic and the nonmystic, a war to the death.

  May Sarton

  War, Moving, Power

  May Sarton (2014). “Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing: A Novel”, p.96, Open Road Media

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• Mark the babe not long accustomed to this breathing world; One that hath barely learned to shape a smile, though yet irrational of soul, to grasp with tiny finger - to let fall a tear; And, as the heavy cloud of sleep dissolves, To stretch his limbs, becoming, as might seem. The outward functions of intelligent man.

  William Wordsworth

  Baby, Fall, Sleep

  William Wordsworth (1847). “The Poems of William Wordsworth”, p.491

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• But neither life nor happiness can be achieved by the pursuit of irrational whims. Just as man is free to attempt to survive in any random manner, but will perish unless he lives as his nature requires, so he is free to seek his happiness in any mindless fraud, but the torture of frustration is all he will find, unless he seeks the happiness proper to man. The purpose of morality is to teach you, not to suffer and die, but to enjoy yourself and live.

  Ayn Rand

  Life, Frustration, Men

  Ayn Rand (1988). “The Ayn Rand Lexicon: Objectivism from A to Z”, p.212, Penguin

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

  Alan Lightman

  New Experiences, Rational, Rational Thought

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• In our day the feeling of patriotism is an unnatural, irrational, and harmful feeling, and a cause of a great part of the ills from which mankind is suffering, and that, consequently, this feeling - should not be cultivated, as is now being done, but should, on the contrary, be suppressed and eradicated by all means available to rational men.

  Leo Tolstoy

  Mean, Patriotic, Men

  graf Leo Tolstoy (1903). “Essays and Letters /by Leo Tolstoy ; Translated by Aylmer Maude”

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• Through humour, we see in what seems rational, the irrational; in what seems important, the unimportant

  Charlie Chaplin

  Important, Humour, Seems

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