Rational Quotes - Page 18

• 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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• So far as discipline is concerned, freedom means not its absence but the use of higher and more rational forms as contrasted with those that are lower or less rational. A free discipline controls the individual by appealing to his reason and conscience, and therefore to his self-respect; while an unfree control works upon some lower phase of the mind, and so tends to degrade him. It is freedom to be disciplined in as rational a manner as you are fit for.

  Charles Horton Cooley

  Mean, Self, Discipline

  Charles Horton Cooley (2017). “Human Nature and the Social Order”, p.370, Routledge

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• China should be developing through the various foreign investments it receives. I hope for its level-headed and rational understanding that anything to discourage that is a disservice to itself.

  Yoshihiko Noda

  Understanding, Levels, Investment

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• The Founding Fathers worried that some common impulse of passion might lead many to subvert the rights of the few. It's a rational fear, one that is played out endlessly.

  David Harsanyi

  Father, Passion, Rights

  "Right blogs on guns: 'We win'" by Kevin Cirilli, www.politico.com. April 18, 2013.

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• Knowing where things are, and why, is essential to rational decision making

  Jack Dangermond

  Knowing, Decision, Essentials

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• No matter how high are one's estimates of human stupidity, one is repeatedly and recurrently startled by the fact that:a) people whom one had once judged rational and intelligent turn out to be unashamedly stupid.b) day after day, with unceasing monotony, one is harassed in one's activities by stupid individuals who appear suddenly and unexpectedly in the most inconvenient places and at the most improbable moments.

  Carlo M. Cipolla

  Stupid, Intelligent, People

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• There is nothing in life so irrational, that good sense and chance may not set it to rights; nothing so rational, that folly and chance may not utterly confound it.

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  Rights, May, Chance

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• The argument from design is ultimately an appeal to miraculous causes, i.e., causes that do not, and cannot, occur in the natural course of events. This is why an explanation via design is not a legitimate alternative to scientific and other naturalistic modes of explanation. To refer to a miraculous cause is to refer to something that is inherently unknowable, and this sanctuary of ignorance explains nothing at all. However much it may soothe the imagination of the ignorant, it does nothing to satisfy the understanding of a rational person.

  George H. Smith

  Ignorance, Imagination, Design

  George H. Smith (2000). “Why Atheism?”, Pyr Books

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• There is no substantive, rational defense; I mean, the other side doesn't have a case.

  Fred Phelps

  Mean, Scary, Defense

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• When I was a kid, I thought that if everyone looked up the way I did then everyone would want to study the universe just like me - how could they not? This naiveté is what tells me that my interest was more a calling than a rational comparative assessment about what to be when I grew up.

  Neil deGrasse Tyson

  Kids, Assessment, Calling

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• That the world is not the embodiment of an eternal rationality can be conclusively proved by the fact that the piece of the worldthat we know--I mean our human reason--is not so very rational. And if it is not eternally and completely wise and rational, then the rest of the world will not be either; here the conclusion a minori ad majus, a parte ad totum applies, and does so with decisive force.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Wise, Mean, Doe

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• ... the happiness of a people is the only rational object of government, and the only object for which a people, free to choose, can have a government at all.

  Frances Wright

  Happiness, Government, People

  Frances Wright (1829). “Course of popular lectures; with 3 addresses on various public occasions, and a reply to the charges against the French reformers of 1789”, p.122

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• Since philosophy is the exploration of the rational, it is for that very reason the apprehension of the present and the actual, not the erection of a beyond, supposed to exist, God knows where, or rather which exists, and we can perfectly well say where, namely in the error of a one-sided, empty, ratiocination.

  Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

  Philosophy, Philosophical, Reality

  Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1958). “Philosophy of right”

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• What is rational is actual and what is actual is rational. On this conviction the plain man like the philosopher takes his stand,and from it philosophy starts in its study of the universe of mind as well as the universe of nature.

  Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

  Philosophy, Philosophical, Reality

  Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1958). “Philosophy of right”

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• The reason that truth is stranger than fiction is that fiction has to have a rational thread running through it in order to be believable, whereas reality may be totally irrational.

  Sydney J. Harris

  Running, Truth, Honesty

  Sydney J. Harris (1986). “Clearing the ground”, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• [I]n Great-Britain it is said that their constitution relies on the house of commons for honesty, and the lords for wisdom; whichwould be a rational reliance if honesty were to be bought with money, and if wisdom were hereditary.

  Thomas Jefferson

  Honesty, Government, House

  Thomas Jefferson, Richard Holland Johnston, Thomas Jefferson Memorial Association of the United States “The Writings of Thomas Jefferson”

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• Man is a rational animal—so at least I have been told. … Aristotle, so far as I know, was the first man to proclaim explicitly that man is a rational animal. His reason for this view was … that some people can do sums. … It is in virtue of the intellect that man is a rational animal. The intellect is shown in various ways, but most emphatically by mastery of arithmetic. The Greek system of numerals was very bad, so that the multiplication table was quite difficult, and complicated calculations could only be made by very clever people.

  Bertrand Russell

  Clever, Animal, Men

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• After I went to bed I had a curious fancy as to dreams. In sleep the doors of the mind are shut, and thoughts come jumping in at the windows. They tumble headlong, and therefore are so disorderly and strange. Sometimes they are stout and light on their feet, and then they are rational dreams.

  James Boswell

  Dream, Sleep, Thoughtful

  James Boswell (2001). “Boswell's Edinburgh Journals 1767-1786”, Mercat Press Books

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• A successful trader is rational, analytical, able to control emotions, practical, and profit oriented.

  Monroe Trout

  Successful, Able, Emotion

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• Since the Greeks, Western man has believed that Being, all Being, is intelligible, that there is a reason for everythingand that the cosmos is, finally, intelligible. The Oriental, on the other hand, has accepted his existence within a universe that would appear to be meaningless, to the rational Western mind, and has lived with this meaninglessness. Hence the artistic form that seems natural to the Oriental is one that is just as formless or formal, as irrational, as life itself.

  William Barrett

  Men, Hands, Greek

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• Plato--who may have understood better what forms the mind of man than do some of our contemporaries who want their children exposed only to "real" people and everyday events--knew what intellectual experience made for true humanity. He suggested that the future citizens of his ideal republic begin their literary education with the telling of myths, rather than with mere facts or so-called rational teachings.

  Bruno Bettelheim

  Education, Plato, Children

  Bruno Bettelheim (1976). “The uses of enchantment: the meaning and importance of fairy tales”, Knopf

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