Rational Quotes - Page 29

• Rational argument can be defeated by refusing to argue rationally.

  Steven Weinberg

  Science, Arguing, Argument

  9 Copy quote

• Beware of being too rational. In the country of the insane, the integrated man doesn't become king. He gets lynched.

  Aldous Huxley

  Country, Kings, Truth

  Aldous Huxley (2009). “Island”, p.72, Random House

  66 Copy quote

  Show source

• All the dancer's gestures are signs of things, and the dance called rational, because it aptly signifies and displays something over and above the pleasure of the senses.

  Saint Augustine

  Dance, Dancing, Gestures

  7 Copy quote

• Dancing is at once rational & healthful: it gives animal spirits; it is the natural amusement of young people, & such it has been from the days of Moses.

  William Cobbett

  Dance, Animal, People

  William Cobbett (2006). “Advice to Young Men”, p.33, Cosimo, Inc.

  10 Copy quote

  Show source

• Yoga is a science, and not a vague dreamy drifting or imagining. It is an applied science, a systematized collection of laws applied to bring about a definite end. It takes up the laws of psychology, applicable to the unfolding of the whole consciousness of man on every plane, in every world, and applies those rationally in a particular case. This rational application of the laws of unfolding consciousness acts exactly on the same principles that you see applied around you every day in other departments of science.

  Annie Besant

  Success, Yoga, Men

  Annie Besant (2017). “The Nature and Practice of Yoga”, BookRix

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• Regardless of the method, the act of worship must be in spirit and truth-from our rational consciousness and consistent with the rest of our lives (see John 4:24). We don't have to be great singers or musicians to worship God. But we do need to be in a personal relationship with Him and live with the truth of His greatness reflecting through all we are becoming and all we do.

  Darlene Zschech

  Greatness, Musician, Needs

  51 Copy quote

• What else can I do, a lame old man, but sing hymns to God? If I were a nightingale, I would do the nightingale's part; if I were a swan, I would do as a swan. But now I am a rational creature, and I ought to praise God. This is my work. I do it, nor will I desert my post, so long as I am allowed to keep it. And I ask you to join me in this same song.

  Epictetus

  Song, Men, Swans

  7 Copy quote

• The void in our society has been produced by the absence of values... we have no widespread belief in the value of participation. The rational system has made us fear standing out in any serious way.

  John Ralston Saul

  Vision, Our Society, Way

  John Ralston Saul (2013). “Voltaire's Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West”, p.584, Simon and Schuster

  16 Copy quote

  Show source

• Reality and truth are not products of rational or linear thinking. They are derived from absolute wisdom as it manifests itself spontaneously, coming from the light of the Spirit.

  Nirmala Srivastava

  Love, Wisdom, Yoga

  4 Copy quote

• For you deal here above all with human life, and human life is sacred; no one may dare make an attempt upon it. Respect for life, even with regard to the great problem of the birth rate, must find here in your Assembly its highest affirmation and its most rational defense. Your task is to ensure that there is enough bread on the tables of mankind, and not to encourage an artificial control of births, which would be irrational, in order to diminish the number of guests at the banquet of life.

  Pope Paul VI

  Numbers, Order, Birth Rate

  7 Copy quote

• The knowledge exists by which universal happiness can be secured; the chief obstacle to its utilization for that purpose is the teaching of religion. Religion prevents our children from having a rational education; religion prevents us from removing the fundamental causes of war; religion prevents us from teaching the ethic of scientific cooperation in place of the old fierce doctrines of sin and punishment. It is possible that mankind is on the threshold of a golden age; but, if so, it will be necessary first to slay the dragon that guards the door, and this dragon is religion.

  Bertrand Russell

  Children, War, Teaching

  "Why I Am Not a Christian".

  44 Copy quote

  Show source

• The true method of discovery is like the flight of an aeroplane. It starts from the ground of particular observation; it makes a flight in the thin air of imaginative generalization; and it again lands for renewed observation rendered acute by rational interpretation.

  Alfred North Whitehead

  Airplane, Science, Discovery

  Alfred North Whitehead (2010). “Process and Reality”, p.5, Simon and Schuster

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• What counts as rational argumentation is as historically determined and as context-dependent, as what counts as good French.

  Richard Rorty

  Determined, Good French, Argumentation

  "Richard Rorty. What made him a crucial American philosopher?" by Stephen Metcalf, www.slate.com. June 18, 2007.

  31 Copy quote

  Show source

• At the constitutional level where we work, 90 percent of any decision is emotional. The rational part of us supplies the reasons for supporting our predilections.

  William O. Douglas

  Emotional, Thinking, Decision

  7 Copy quote

• I am perfectly convinced that I have both seen, and heard in a manner which should make unbelief impossible, things called spiritual which cannot be taken by a rational being to be capable of explanation by imposture, coincidence, or mistake.

  Augustus De Morgan

  Spiritual, Mistake, Taken

  Augustus De Morgan (1863). “From Matter to Spirit: The Result of Ten Years'experience in Spirit Manifestations. Intended as a Guide to Enquirers”, London, Longman, Green, Longman, Roberts, & Green

  16 Copy quote

  Show source

• The genuine values in America arose from rational thought and breaking with tradition, not from blind allegiance to dirt and cloth.

  Stefan Molyneux

  America, Dirt, Blind

  Twitter post from Dec 16, 2016

  9 Copy quote

  Show source

• But now the world breaks in on us, the world is shocked, the world looks upon our idyll as madness. The world maintains that no rational man or woman would have chosen this way of life - therefore, it is madness. Alone I confront them and tell them that nothing could be saner or truer! What do people really know about life? We fall in line, follow the pattern established by our mentors. Everything is based on assumptions; even time, space, motion, matter are nothing but supposition. The world has no new knowledge to impart; it merely accepts what is there.

  Knut Hamsun

  Fall, Men, Space

  21 Copy quote

• Theology is a serious quest for the true knowledge of God, undertaken in response to His self-revelation, illumined by Christian tradition, manifesting a rational inner coherence, issuing in ethical conduct, resonating with the contemporary world and concerned for the greater glory of God.

  John Stott

  Christian, Self, World

  4 Copy quote

• Today's environment is beginning to threaten today's organizations, finding them seriously deficient in their nervous system design... The degree of coordination, perception, rational adaptation, etc., which will appear in the next generation of human organizations will drive our present organizational forms, with their clumsy nervous systems, into extinction.

  Douglas Engelbart

  Organization, Design, Perception

  14 Copy quote

• To go out of your mind once a day is tremendously important, because by going out of your mind you come to your senses. And if you stay in your mind all of the time, you are over rational, in other words you are like a very rigid bridge which because it has no give; no craziness in it, is going to be blown down by the first hurricane.

  Alan Watts

  Bridges, Giving, Mind

  44 Copy quote

• When I was a very young author, I knew I needed to build myself a tower outside of Europe. Like when you're a hunter, and build towers to watch the animals move. I knew I would never understand the world without that perspective. I came to Africa for that rational reason, although I love Mozambique now.

  Henning Mankell

  Moving, Animal, Europe

  "All along the watchtower" by Nick Hasted, www.theguardian.com. January 11, 2002.

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• ...(I)ndividual selfhood is expressed in the self's capacity for self-transcendence and not in its rational capacity for conceptual and analytic procedures.

  Reinhold Niebuhr

  Self, Spirituality, Transcendence

  Reinhold Niebuhr (1996). “The Nature and Destiny of Man: A Christian Interpretation : Human Nature”, p.25, Westminster John Knox Press

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• The rational herdsman concludes that the only sensible course for him to pursue is to add another animal to his herd. And another; and another . . . But this is the conclusion reached by each and every rational herdsman sharing a commons. Therein is the tragedy. Each man is locked into a system that compels him to increase his herd without limit — in a world that is limited. Ruin is the destination toward which all men rush, each pursuing his own best interest in a society that believes in the freedom of the commons. Freedom in a commons brings ruin to all.

  Garrett Hardin

  Believe, Men, Animal

  "The Tragedy of the Commons," Science, 13 Dec. 1968

  22 Copy quote

  Show source

• Western civilisation needs a complete overhaul or it will fall apart one day or another. It has realised the most complete perversion of any rational order of things. Reign of matter, of gold, of machine, of number, it no longer possesses breath, or liberty, or light.

  Julius Evola

  Fall, Light, Order

  212 Copy quote

• The Holy Grail of universal coverage in the United States may remain out of reach unless, through rational collective action overriding some individual self-interest, we can reduce per capita costs.

  Donald Berwick

  Self, Holy Grail, United States

  "The Triple Aim: Care, Health, And Cost" by Donald Berwick, Thomas W. Nolan and John Whittington in "Health Affairs", Volume 27, No. 3 (pp. 759-769), May/June 2008.

  13 Copy quote

  Show source