Rational Quotes - Page 39

• There is nothing wanting to make all rational and disinterested people in the world of one religion, but that they should talk together every day.

  Alexander Pope

  People, Religion, Together

  Alexander Pope, Alexander Chalmers (1807). “A Supplementary Volume to the Works of Alexander Pope, Esq: Containing Pieces of Poetry, Not Inserted in Warburton's and Warton's Editions : and a Collection of Letters, Now First Published”, p.128

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• True generosity is a duty as indispensably necessary as those imposed upon us by the law. It is a rule imposed upon us by reason, which should be the sovereign law of a rational being.

  Oliver Goldsmith

  Law, Generosity, Sovereign

  Oliver Goldsmith (1854). “The works of Oliver Goldsmith, ed. by P. Cunningham”, p.165

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• There are three means of believing--by inspiration, by reason, and by custom. Christianity, which is the only rational institution, does yet admit none for its sons who do not believe by inspiration. Nor does it injure reason or custom, or debar them of their proper force; on the contrary, it directs us to open our minds by the proofs of the former, and to confirm our minds by the authority of the latter.

  Blaise Pascal

  Faith, Inspiration, Believe

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• Speed as a drug disorganizes the personality; speed as the goal of information dissemination commits a subtler crime. People are mainlining our words. We rarely read of the rational alternatives, only of the commands that all must change or else. This is a prescription for public panic.

  Gail Sheehy

  People, Goal, Personality

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• I no longer idolize reason. I have come to accept that ninety percent of what we do is irrational and that we spend what little rational thought we have in justifying our irrationality.

  Rita Mae Brown

  Littles, Reason, Accepting

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• Guilt was never a rational thing; it distorts all the faculties of the human mind, it perverts them, it leaves a man no longer in the free use of his reason, it puts him into confusion.

  Edmund Burke

  Men, Confusion, Mind

  William Pitt (Earl of Chatham), Edmund Burke, Thomas Erskine Baron Erskine, Jean Gabriel Peltier (1834). “Celebrated Speeches of Chatham, Burke, and Erskine: To which is Added the Arguement of Mr. Mackintosh in the Case of Peltier”, p.298

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• The desire for magic cannot be eradicated. Even the most supposedly rational people attempt to practice magic in love and war. We simultaneously possess the most primitive of brain stems and the most sophisticated of cortices. The imperatives of each coexist uneasily.

  Erica Jong

  War, Practice, People

  Erica Jong (2007). “What Do Women Want?: Essays by Erica Jong”, p.40, Penguin

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• Conversation in its happiest development is a link, equally exquisite and adequate, between mind and mind, a system by which men approach one another with sympathy and enjoyment, a field for the finest amenities of civilization, for the keenest and most intelligent display of social activity. It is also our solace, our inspiration, and our most rational pleasure. It is a duty we owe to one another; it is our common debt to humanity.

  Agnes Repplier

  Inspiration, Intelligent, Men

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• Our science is like a store filled with the most subtle intellectual devices for solving the most complex problems, and yet we are almost incapable of applying the elementary principles of rational thought.

  Simone Weil

  Science, Intellectual, Principles

  Simone Weil (2015). “Selected Essays, 1934-1943: Historical, Political, and Moral Writings”, p.156, Wipf and Stock Publishers

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• A rational process is a moral process.

  Ayn Rand

  Morality, Reason, Process

  Ayn Rand (1963). “For the New Intellectual: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand (50th Anniversary Edition)”, p.102, Penguin

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• The love of study, a passion which derives fresh vigor from enjoyment, supplies each day, each hour, with a perpetual source of independent and rational pleasure.

  Edward Gibbon

  Passion, Independent, Vigor

  Edward Gibbon (1796). “Miscellaneous Works of Edw. Gibbon: With Memoirs of His Life and Writings, Composed by Himself”, p.194

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• Any artist must expect to work amid the total, rational indifference of everybody else to their work, for years, perhaps for life.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Artist, Years, Indifference

  Ursula K. Le Guin (1997). “Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places”, p.233, Grove Press

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• Reason is not the sole basis of moral virtue in man. His social impulses are more deeply rooted than his rational life.

  Reinhold Niebuhr

  Men, Moral, Virtue

  Reinhold Niebuhr (2013). “Moral Man and Immoral Society: A Study in Ethics and Politics”, p.26, Westminster John Knox Press

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• only that which is deeply felt can change us. Rational arguments alone cannot penetrate the layers of fear and conditioning that comprise our crippling belief system.

  Marilyn Ferguson

  Feelings, Layers, Belief

  Marilyn Ferguson (1987). “The Aquarian Conspiracy: Personal and Social Transformation in the 1980s”, Tarcher

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• We shouldn't even need the word 'atheism'. If people didn't invent ridiculous imaginary gods, rational people wouldn't have to deny them.

  Ricky Gervais

  People, Religion, Atheism

  Twitter post from Mar 3, 2012

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• Physicists use 'God' as a metaphor more often than other scientists-- especially in popular writing, but in the technical literature as well. Of course, this is just a metaphor for order at the heart of confusion. A rational or aesthetic pattern underlying reality is far from a theistic God.

  Taner Edis

  Writing, Heart, Reality

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• No rational order of divine intelligence unites species. The natural ties are genealogical along contingent pathways of history.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Order, Ties, Religion

  Stephen Jay Gould (1995). “Dinosaur in a haystack: reflections in natural history”, Harmony

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• Man, being not only a religious, but also a social being, requires for the promotion of his rational happiness religious institutions, which, while they give a proper direction to devotion, at the same time make a wise and profitable improvement of his social feelings.

  Hosea Ballou

  Wise, Religious, Men

  Hosea Ballou (1832). “Select sermons: delivered on various occasions from important passages of Scripture”, p.216

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• Sanity is a matter of culture and convention. If it's a crazy culture you live in, then you have to be irrational to want to conform. A completely rational person would recognize that the culture was crazy and refuse to conform. But by not conforming, he is the one who would be judged crazy by that particular society.

  Margaret Millar

  Crazy, Would Be, Culture

  Margaret Millar (2016). “A Stranger in My Grave”, p.45, Soho Press

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• Words can enhance experience, but they can also take so much away. We see an insect and at once we abstract certain characteristics and classify it - a fly. And in that very cognitive exercise, part of the wonder is gone. Once we have labeled the things around us we do not bother to look at them so carefully. Words are part of our rational selves, and to abandon them for a while is to give freer reign to our intuitive selves.

  Jane Goodall

  Exercise, Self, Giving

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• Feelings take you into uncharted territory from time to time it's true, but you almost always benefit from the journey one way or the other. We tend to think of the rational as a higher order, but it is the emotional that marks our lives.

  Merle Shain

  Journey, Emotional, Thinking

  Merle Shain (1973). “Some Men Are More Perfect Than Others”

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• I believe that the subconscious always knows what is best. It is our conditional, vastly overrated rational mind which screws everything up.

  Robyn Davidson

  Believe, Thinking, Mind

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• The best possible solutions come only from a combination of a rational analysis based on the nature of things, and imaginative reintegration of all the different items into a new pattern, using non-linear brain power

  Kenichi Ohmae

  Brain, Different, Analysis

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• The word 'tolerance' once meant we all have the right to argue rationally for our deepest convictions in the public arena. Now it means those convictions are not even subject to rational debate.

  Nancy Pearcey

  Mean, Tolerance, Arena

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• A guest should be permitted to graze, as it were, in the pastures of his host's kindness, left even to his own devices, like a rational being, and handsomely neglected.

  Louise Imogen Guiney

  Kindness, Past, Guests

  Louise Imogen Guiney (1885). “Goose-quill Papers”

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