Irrational Quotes - Page 7

• There was quite a lot of competitiveness about it, with everybody wanting to beat not only cancer itself, but also the other people in the room. Like, I realize that this is irrational, but when they tell you that you have, say, a 20 percent chance of living five years, the math kicks in and you figure that’s one in five . . . so you look around and think, as any healthy person would: I gotta outlast four of these bastards.

  John Green

  Real, Cancer, Math

  John Green (2008). “Looking for Alaska”, p.213, Penguin

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• "This isn't over," I said. "After everything we've been through, you don't get the right to brush me off. I'm not letting you off that easily." I wasn't sure if it was a threat, my last stab at defiance, or irrational words spoken straight from my splintered heart. "I want to protect you," Patch said quietly. He stood so close. All strength and heat and silent power. I couldn't escape him, now or ever. He'd always be there, consuming my every thought, my heart locked in his hands. I was drawn to him by forces I couldn't control, let alone escape. "But you didn't".

  Becca Fitzpatrick

  Heart, Hands, Want

  "Silence". Book by Becca Fitzpatrick, www.mtv.com. October 4, 2011.

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• Many students of dreams, from Plato to [Sigmund] Freud, hold that the sleeping person,deprived of contact with the outside world, regresses temporarily to an irrational primitive mental state.

  Erich Fromm

  Dream, Plato, Sleep

  Source: www.scribd.com

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• So let's hear another one of your irrational fears. Mia grasped me by the arms and pulled herself in to my chest, like she was burrowing her body into mine. "I'm scared of losing you," she said in the faintest of voices." I pushed her away so I could see her face and kissed the top of her forehead. "I said 'irrational' fears. Because that's not gonna happen.

  Gayle Forman

  Voice, Mia, Irrational Fear

  Gayle Forman (2011). “Where She Went”, p.87, Penguin

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• He was making her feel small and absurdly petulant and, worse yet, she suspected he was right. She always suspected he was right. For a brief irrational moment, she wished she could walk away from him. Then she wished, more rationally, that she could love him without needing him. Need gave him power without his trying; need was the choicelessness she often felt around him.

  Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

  Trying, Needs, Moments

  FaceBook post by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie from Aug 04, 2011

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• If there are dollars to be made, you destroy the environment. The reason is elementary. The people who are going to be harmed by this are your grandchildren and they don't have any votes in the market. Their interests are worth zero. Anybody that pays attention to their grandchildren's interests is being irrational. Because what you're supposed to do is maximize your own interests, measured by wealth, right now. Nothing else matters. So destroying the environment and militarizing outer space are rational policies, but within a framework of institutional lunacy.

  Noam Chomsky

  Zero, Grandchildren, Space

  Source: www.madre.org

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• Trump was the logical outcome of the Republican's irrational, racialized backlash to Obama that had utterly come to dominate the party's thinking.

  Jonathan Chait

  Party, Thinking, Outcomes

  Source: www.macleans.ca

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• I didn't ask you to catch me!" "You're so delightful when you're irrational. Of course I'm going to catch you." He slid a hand behind her nape and kissed her again. "It's what I do.

  Shana Abe

  Hands, Catch Me, Behinds

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• ... there is no shame in not knowing. The problem arises when irrational thought and attendant behavior fill the vacuum left by ignorance.

  Neil deGrasse Tyson

  Ignorance, Knowing, Mind Blowing

  Neil Degrasse Tyson (2010). “The Sky Is Not the Limit: Adventures of an Urban Astrophysicist”, p.38, Prometheus Books

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• It was odd, she thought, how if one was alone, one leant to inanimate things; trees, streams, flowers; felt they expressed one; felt they became one; felt they knew one, in a sense were one; felt an irrational tenderness thus (she looked at that long steady light) as for oneself.

  Virginia Woolf

  Flower, Light, Long

  Virginia Woolf (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)”, p.1031, Delphi Classics

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• I have no phobias. Phobias are irrational. My fears are rational and CAREFULLY CULTIVATED, like roses.

  Maureen Johnson

  Rose, Rational, Phobia

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• Patriotism is as fierce as a fever, pitiless as the grave, blind as a stone, and irrational as a headless hen.

  Ambrose Bierce

  Patriotism, Fever, Stones

  Ambrose Bierce (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Ambrose Bierce (Illustrated)”, p.2230, Delphi Classics

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• You tell them what a happy ending consists of, which is always individual success. You tell them that nothing irrational exists in this world, which is a lie. You tell them that conflict only exists only to be neatly resolved, and that everyone who is poor wants to be rich, and everyone who is ill wants to get better, and everyone who gets involved in crime comes to a bad end, and that love should be pure. You tell them that despite all this they are special, that the world revolves around them.

  Scarlett Thomas

  Lying, Special, Get Better

  Scarlett Thomas (2010). “Our Tragic Universe”, p.88, Canongate Books

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• Don't be upset. Don't listen to me. I only meant that I am jealous of a dark, unconscious element, something irrational, unfathomable. I am jealous of your toilet articles, of the drops of sweat on your skin, of the germs in the air you breathe which could get into your blood and poison you. And I am jealous of Komarovsky, as if he were an infectious disease. Someday he will take you away, just as certainly as death will someday separate us. I know this must seem obscure and confused, but I can't say it more clearly. I love you madly, irrationally, infinitely.

  Boris Pasternak

  Confused, Love You, Jealous

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• I sense the world might be more dreamlike, metaphorical, and poetic than we currently believe--but just as irrational as sympathetic magic when looked at in a typically scientific way. I wouldn't be surprised if poetry--poetry in the broadest sense, in the sense of a world filled with metaphor, rhyme, and recurring patterns, shapes, and designs--is how the world works. The world isn't logical, it's a song.

  David Byrne

  Song, Believe, Design

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• I'm telling you, [ real people] are not mad at Al-Qaeda. They are not mad at ISIS. They are not mad at [Omar] Mateen. Mateen is a victim just like they are. They are a victim of this country. These angry, irrational Looney Tunes on social media - be it people who are commenting or originally posting - these people think they're victims of this country, too. They have been taught that!

  Rush Limbaugh

  Country, Real, Thinking

  Source: www.rushlimbaugh.com

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• To feel our character, our personality, and our personal, hard-won history fade from being is to be exposed to whatever lies beneath these comforting, operational conveniences. What remains when the conscious and functioning self has been erased is mankind's fundamental condition – irrational, violent, guilt-wracked, despairing, and mad.

  Peter Straub

  Lying, Character, Self

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• Love is irrational, I reminded myself. The more you loved someone, the less sense anything made.

  Stephenie Meyer

  Love Is, New Moon, Made

  Stephenie Meyer (2009). “New Moon”, p.193, Hachette UK

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• We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is to learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.

  Aldous Huxley

  Art, Way, Reason

  "Island".

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• To be sane, he held, was either to be sedated by melancholy or activated by hysteria, two responses which were 'always and equally warranted for those of sound insight'. All others were irrational, merely symptoms of imaginations left idle, of memories out of work. And above these mundane responses, the only elevation allowable, the only valid transcendence, was a sardonic one: a bliss that annihilated the universe with jeers of dark joy, a mindful ecstasy. Anything else in the way of 'mysticism' was a sign of deviation or distraction, and a heresy to the obvious. (“The Medusa”)

  Thomas Ligotti

  Memories, Dark, Hysteria

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• In all the universe, your mother is the only thing that truly scares me, especially where you’re concerned. I don’t ever want to be on her dark side. (Adron) Ha ha. And need I remind you my mother wasn’t the one screaming at the pool when you got shoved in. (Devyn) Yeah, all right, so we both have screwed-up, irrational mothers. (Adron)

  Sherrilyn Kenyon

  Mother, Dark, Scare

  Sherrilyn Kenyon (2009). “Born of Ice: The League: Nemesis Rising”, p.5, St. Martin's Paperbacks

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• In fact a man in love or one consumed with hatred creates symbols for himself, as a superstitious man does, from a passion of conferring uniqueness on things or persons. A man who knows nothing of symbols is one of Dante's sluggards. This is why art mirrors itself in primitive rites or strong passions, seeking for symbols, revolving round the primitive taste for savagery, for what is irrational (blood and sex).

  Cesare Pavese

  Art, Strong, Sex

  Cesare Pavese (2017). “This Business of Living: Diaries 1935-1950”, p.286, Routledge

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• I believe that if the silent majority were to protest against those who believe in irrational blind faith - who want to go backwards instead of forward, who are for tradition not innovation, who oppose individualism and plurality of thought - then the world would become a truly civilized world in which to live.

  Taslima Nasrin

  Believe, Innovation, Majority

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• Unfortunately, money is more often misused and abused than used intelligently. Most people haven't figured out how to use money wisely to truly enhance their lives. Most, it seems, act rationally with their money only when they can't dream up any more irrational ways to spend it. To be sure, financial insanity has developed its own big following including you and me.

  Ernie J Zelinski

  Inspirational, Dream, People

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• Artists are people who are subject to irrational convictions of the sacred. Baudelaire said that an artist is a child who has acquired adult capacities and discipline. Art education should help build those capacities and that discipline without messing over the child.

  Peter Schjeldahl

  Art, Children, Discipline

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