Rational Quotes - Page 11

• There is no effective rational answer to the challenge: "But give me a reason why I should love someone who does not deserve it." Love is the highest thing. There can be no higher reason to justify it.

  Peter Kreeft

  Love, Giving, Challenges

  Peter Kreeft (2009). “The God Who Loves You: Love Divine, All Loves Excelling”, p.42, Ignatius Press

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Fear-bola attacks the part of the brain responsible for rational thinking. It starts with a low-grade concern about the two health care workers diagnosed with Ebola in Dallas and slowly builds into fear of a widespread epidemic in the United States.

  Mel Robbins

  Thinking, Two, Epidemics

  "'Fear-bola' hits epidemic proportions" by Mel Robbins, www.cnn.com. October 15, 2014.

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• Empathy requires something extremely difficult: accepting the fact that we are not and never will be in the other person's shoes. There's no rational, universal course because individuals have different goals, different worldviews and different experiences.

  Seth Godin

  Shoes, Different Experiences, Goal

  4 Copy quote

• Man is in need if a symbolical life- badly in need. We only live banal, ordinary, rational or irrational things- but we have no symbolic life. Where do we live symbolically? Nowhere except where we participate in the ritual of life

  Carl Jung

  Men, Ordinary, Needs

  6 Copy quote

• What kind of expression is this - "punishing Israel"? Are we a vassal state of yours? Are we a banana republic? Are we youths of fourteen who, if they don't behave properly, are slapped across the fingers? Let me tell you who this government is composed of. It is composed of people whose lives were spent in resistance, in fighting and in suffering. You will not frighten us with "punishments." He who threatens us will find us deaf to his threats. We are only prepared to listen to rational arguments. You have no right to "punish" Israel - and I protest at the very use of this term.

  Menachem Begin

  Fighting, Government, Israel

  91 Copy quote

• At the moment our rational mind stops, hits against a wall ... something else happens. And a bigger mind, like a pearl, rolls in a silver bowl.

  Natalie Goldberg

  Wall, Mind, Pearls

  4 Copy quote

• In my rational mind, I know... that is a very simplistic way of looking at it, but when there is violence of that kind, it challenges my faith. I still can't say that I totally understand why - why that is allowed to happen.

  Linda Vester

  Faith, Challenges, Mind

  4 Copy quote

• Indeed, I am sometimes inclined to doubt whether some men consider youth as rational and intelligent beings, with minds capable of expansion, and talents formed for usefulness.

  Joseph Lancaster

  Intelligent, Men, Doubt

  Joseph Lancaster (1803). “Improvements in education, as it respects the industrious classes of the community”, p.14

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• I recoil with horror at the ferociousness of man. Will nations never devise a more rational umpire of differences than force? Are there no means of coercing injustice more gratifying to our nature than a waste of the blood of thousands and of the labor of millions of our fellow creatures?

  Thomas Jefferson

  Mean, Men, Blood

  Thomas Jefferson, Barbara B. Oberg, Lyman Henry Butterfield, Charles T. Cullen, John Catanzariti (2003). “The papers of Thomas Jefferson: 1 January 1798 to 31 January 1799”, Princeton Univ Pr

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• In questions of law or of fact conscience is very often confounded with opinion. No man's conscience can tell him the rights of another man; they must be known by rational investigation or historical inquiry.

  Samuel Johnson

  Wisdom, Men, Rights

  Samuel Johnson, Arthur Murphy (1832). “The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL. D.: With an Essay on His Life and Genius”, p.587

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• After a period in which technocrats attempted to become stars and stars to become politicians, the political void has been occupied by the force of mediocrity, which can easily master enough of the star techniques to produce inoffensive personalities and enough of the rational vocabulary to create the sounds of competence.

  John Ralston Saul

  Stars, Vocabulary, Personality

  John Ralston Saul (2013). “Voltaire's Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West”, p.532, Simon and Schuster

  6 Copy quote

  Show source

• RATIONAL, adj. Devoid of all delusions save those of observation, experience and reflection.

  Ambrose Bierce

  Reflection, Experience, Observation

  Ambrose Bierce (2016). “The Devil's Dictionary: The Devil World”, p.175, 谷月社

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• If we state the function of man to be a certain kind of life, and this to be an activity or actions of the soul implying a rational principle, and the function of a good man to be the good and noble performance of these, and if any action is well performed when it is performed in accordance with the appropriate excellence human good turns out to be activity of the soul in accordance with virtue, and if there are more than one virtue, in accordance with the best and most complete.

  Aristotle

  Men, Soul, Good Man

  "Nicomachean Ethics". Book by Aristotle. Book I, 1098a,

  10 Copy quote

  Show source

• I would never sit and write a song in front of anyone, because you're so vulnerable. I don't know at what point in the process that it becomes acceptable to pass them on. When a song wants to be written, it will be written. When it does come, I will very rarely go back and edit lyrics. I'm quite a rational human being, and the only part of my life that I can't rationalise, or can't make sense of, is how a song gets written or why.

  Laura Marling

  Song, Writing, Doe

  8 Copy quote

• In man (as the only rational creature on earth) those natural capacities which are directed to the use of his reason are to be fully developed only in the race, not in the individual.

  Immanuel Kant

  Men, Race, Use

  Immanuel Kant (1986). “Philosophical Writings”, Continuum

  10 Copy quote

  Show source

• Man is not a rational animal, he is a rationalizing animal.

  Robert A. Heinlein

  Animal, Men

  Robert A. Heinlein (2005). “Tunnel in the Sky”, p.38, Simon and Schuster

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• Crime fiction confirms our belief, despite some evidence to the contrary, that we live in a rational, comprehensible, and moral universe.

  P. D. James

  Fiction, Belief, Moral

  4 Copy quote

• It is more rational to suspect knavery and folly than to discount, at a stroke, everything that past experience has taught me about the way things actually work

  David Hume

  Past, Knavery, Way

  5 Copy quote

• Only one rational path is open to us - simultaneous de-development of the [overdeveloped countries] and semi-development of the underdeveloped countries (UDCs), in order to approach a decent and ecologically sustainable standard of living for all in between. By de-development we mean lower per-capita energy consumption, fewer gadgets, and the abolition of planned obsolescence.

  John Holdren

  Country, Mean, Order

  4 Copy quote

• If the finding of Coines, Medals, Urnes, and other Monuments of famous Persons, or Towns, or Utensils, be admitted for unquestionable Proofs, that such Persons or things have, in former Times, had a being, certainly those Petrifactions may be allowed to be of equal Validity and Evidence, that there have been formerly such Vegetables or Animals. These are truly Authentick Antiquity not to be counterfeited, the Stamps, and Impressions, and Characters of Nature that are beyond the Reach and Power of Humane Wit and Invention, and are true universal Characters legible to all rational Men.

  Robert Hooke

  Character, Men, Animal

  36 Copy quote

• Arithmetic starts with the integers and proceeds by successively enlarging the number system by rational and negative numbers, irrational numbers, etc... But the next quite logical step after the reals, namely the introduction of infinitesimals, has simply been omitted. I think, in coming centuries it will be considered a great oddity in the history of mathematics that the first exact theory of infinitesimals was developed 300 years after the invention of the differential calculus.

  Abraham Robinson

  Thinking, Oddities, Discovery

  8 Copy quote

• Sometimes fear is wholesome and rational; it is well to swing fear as a mighty battle-axe over men's heads when no other motive will move them.

  Henry Ward Beecher

  Fear, Moving, Men

  Henry Ward Beecher, William Drysdale (1887). “Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit”

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• The only weapon we have to oppose the bad effects of technology is technology itself. There is no other. We can't retreat into a nontechnological Eden which never existed...It is only by the rational use of technology to control and guide what technology is doing that we can keep any hopes of a social life more desireable than our own: or in fact of a social life which is not appalling to imagine.

  C.P. Snow

  Technology, Eden, Space

  13 Copy quote

• Tension is an interesting quality - and architecture must have it. There should be elements of the inexplicable, the mysterious, and the poetic in something that is perfectly rational.

  Annabelle Selldorf

  Interesting, Quality, Elements

  "Women in Design: Annabelle Selldorf". Interview with Vicky Lowry, www.elledecor.com. November 10, 2008.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• We have a high moral responsibility to be rational

  Charlie Munger

  Responsibility, Moral, Moral Responsibility

  15 Copy quote