Rational Quotes - Page 5

• The chief aim of all investigations of the external world should be to discover the rational order and harmony which has been imposed on it by God and which He revealed to us in the language of mathematics.

  Johannes Kepler

  Math, Order, World

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• There are sacred moments in life when we experience in rational and very direct ways that separation, the boundary between ourselves and other people and between ourselves and Nature, is illusion. Oneness is reality. We can experience that stasis is illusory and that reality is continual flux and change on very subtle and also on gross levels of perception . . . When people bother you in any way, it is because their souls are trying to get your divine attention and your blessing.

  Catherine Ponder

  Blessing, Reality, Oneness

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• For the rational, psychologically healthy man, the desire for pleasure is the desire to celebrate his control over reality. For the neurotic, the desire for pleasure is the desire to escape from reality.

  Nathaniel Branden

  Reality, Men, Healthy

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• Let it never be forgotten that it is not by means of war that states are rendered fit for the enjoyment of constitutional freedom; on the contrary, whilst terror and bloodshed reign in the land, involving men's minds in the extremities of hopes and fears, there can be no process of thought, no education going on, by which alone can a people be prepared for the enjoyment of rational liberty.

  Richard Cobden

  War, Mean, Men

  Richard Cobden (1835). “England, Ireland, and America”, p.44

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• I am devoting my lecture in this seminar to a discussion of the possibility that we are now entering a Jewish century, a time when the spirit of the community, the non-ideological blend of the emotional and rational and the resistance to categories and forms will emerge through the forces of anti-nationalism to provide us with a new kind of society. I call this process the Judaization of Christianity because Christianity will be the vehicle through which this society becomes Jewish.

  Martin A. Siegel

  Emotional, Community, Resistance

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• My father was the most rational and the most dispassionate of men.

  Simon Newcomb

  Boyfriend, Dad, Father

  Simon Newcomb (1903). “The reminiscences of an astronomer”, Harper and Brothers

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• If you ask what you are going to do about global warming, the only rational answer is to change the way in which we do transportation, energy production, agriculture and a good deal of manufacturing. The problem originates in human activity in the form of the production of goods.

  Barry Commoner

  Agriculture, Energy, Answers

  "At 90, an Environmentalist From the '70s Still Has Hope". Interview With Thomas Vinciguerra, www.nytimes.com. June 19, 2007.

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• We consider it vital that the community of nations be drawn together in an orderly, disciplined, rational way to review the history of our global environment, to assess the potential for future climate change, and to develop effective programs.

  George H. W. Bush

  Community, Together, Climate

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• How is it that we have created an economic system that tells us it is cheaper to destroy the earth and exhaust its people than to nurture them both? Is it rational to have an pricing system which discounts the future and sells off the past? How did we create an economic system that confused capital liquidation with income?

  Paul Hawken

  Confused, Past, People

  Paul Hawken, Amory B. Lovins, L. Hunter Lovins (2013). “Natural Capitalism: The Next Industrial Revolution”, p.321, Routledge

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• The creative scientist studies nature with the rapt gaze of the lover, and is guided as often by aesthetics as by rational considerations in guessing how nature works.

  Albert Einstein

  Science, Creative, Guessing

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• I have always been a friend to hero-worship; it is the only rational one, and has always been in use amongst civilized people - the worship of spirits is synonymous with barbarism - it is mere fetish. ... There is something philosophic in the worship of the heroes of the human race.

  George Henry Borrow

  Hero, Race, People

  George Henry Borrow (1852). “Roving Adventures, Or Lavengro: The Scholar - the Gipsy - the Priest”, p.138

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• Outside of the marriage context, can you think of any other rational basis, reason, for a state using sexual orientation as a factor in denying homosexuals benefits or imposing burdens on them? Is there any other rational decision-making that the government could make? Denying them a job, not granting them benefits of some sort, any other decision?

  Sonia Sotomayor

  Jobs, Gay, Thinking

  "These are the exchanges you need to read from today’s Supreme Court arguments". Supreme Court arguments, www.washingtonpost.com. March 26, 2013.

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• Sex and excretion are reminders that anyone's claim to round-the-clock dignity is tenuous. The so-called rational animal has a desperate drive to pair up and moan and writhe.

  Steven Pinker

  Sex, Fear, Animal

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• Strings of coincidence can strengthen us in the determination to follow our deepest intuitions even when they run counter to conventional wisdom and logic and cannot be subjected to rational explanation.

  Robert Moss

  Running, Determination, Words Of Wisdom

  Robert Moss (2010). “The Three "Only" Things: Tapping the Power of Dreams, Coincidence, and Imagination”, p.122, New World Library

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• As we enter the 21st Century it is clear that we have entered an unprecedented global age in which our diverse cultures, religions, philosophies, worldviews and perspectives encounter one another in the marketplace of our global village. It is now clear that our future sustainability on this planet calls for radical advances in our rational and human capacities to negotiate the powerful forces between worlds as the human family moves towards a sustainable global civilization.

  Ashok Gangadean

  Powerful, Philosophy, Moving

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• ... immediately call on Congress to pass far-reaching industry regulation like the Firearms Safety and Consumer Protection Act ... [which] would give the Treasury Department health and safety authority over the gun industry, and any rational regulator with that authority would ban handguns.

  Josh Sugarmann

  Gun, Safety, Giving

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• He had by now divested himself of schoolboy attitudes. He was unburdened by the desire to be a martyr or a hero. Any thoughts in that direction, Belgica effectively had quashed. Heroism in the corrupt sense of the age almost by definition, meant wanton self-sacrifice and bungling. For neither had he any taste. He wanted rational attainment; victory, but not at any price. No point upon the globe was worth the cost of a single life.

  Roland Huntford

  Life, Attitude, Hero

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• It is science that brings us an understanding of the true complexity of natural systems. The insights from the science of ecology are teaching us how to work with the checks and balances of nature, and encouraging a new, rational, limited-input, environmentally sound means of vineyard management that offers a third way between the ideologically driven approach of Biodynamics and conventional chemical-based agricultural systems.

  Jamie Goode

  Teaching, Wine, Mean

  Jamie Goode (2005). “The Science of Wine: From Vine to Glass”, p.60, Univ of California Press

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• I have yet to meet the famous Rational Economic Man theorists describe. Real people have always done inexplicable things from time to time, and they show no sign of stopping.

  Charles S. Sanford, Jr.

  Real, Men, People

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• Comedy mocks the vanity of visions of rational control. The person who can joke amidst a confrontation with evil, like the quick-witted Spider-Man, must be reconciled to the permanent imperfections of a corrupted world populated by fallen creatures.

  Peter Leithart

  Men, Vanity, Evil

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• I am once more seated under my own vine and fig tree ... and hope to spend the remainder of my days in peaceful retirement, making political pursuits yield to the more rational amusement of cultivating the earth.

  George Washington

  Hope, Peace, Retirement

  George Washington, John Clement Fitzpatrick, David Maydole Matteson (1796). “The Writings of George Washington from the Original Manuscript Sources, 1745-1799”

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• It is not enough to have a talented designer; the management must be inspired too. The creative process is very disorganised; the production process has to be very rational.

  Bernard Arnault

  Design, Creative, Management

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• Gourmandise is an impassioned, rational, and habitual preference for all objects which flatter the sense of taste.

  Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin

  Food, Taste, Culinary

  "A Handbook of Gastronomy".

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• Man can sin against nature in two ways. First, when he sins against his specific rational nature, acting contrary to reason. In this sense, we can say that every sin is a sin against man's nature, because it is against man's right reason.

  Thomas Aquinas

  Christian, Men, Two

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• There was only one catch and that was Catch22, which specified that a concern for one's safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind. Orr was crazy and could be grounded. All he had to do was ask, and as soon as he did, he would no longer be crazy and would have to fly more missions. Orr would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn't, but if he was sane he had to fly them. If he flew them he was crazy and didn't have to; but if he didn't want to he was sane and had to.

  Joseph Heller

  Crazy, Real, Safety

  Catch-22 ch. 5 (1961).

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