Rational Quotes - Page 8

• The importance of insomnia is so colossal that I am tempted to define man as the animal who cannot sleep. Why call him a rational animal when other animals are equally reasonable? But there is not another animal in the entire creation that wants to sleep yet cannot.

  Emile M. Cioran

  Sleep, Animal, Insomnia

  "This column will change your life: Can't sleep, don't sleep" by Oliver Burkeman, www.theguardian.com. May 21, 2010.

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• If we had a better understanding of the ways we think about enemies, we might be able to think of more rational ways of settling conflict.

  Sam Keen

  Hero, Thinking, Understanding

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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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• It is part of the pholosophic dullness of our time that there are millions of rational monsters walking about on their hind legs, observing the world through pairs of flexible little lenses, periodically supplying themselves with energy by pushing organic substances through holes in their faces, who see nothing fabulous whatever about themselves.

  Martin Gardner

  Monsters, Energy, Lenses

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• Poetry leads us to the unstructured sources of our beings, to the unknown, and returns us to our rational, structured selves refreshed. Having once experienced the mystery, plenitude, contradiction, and composure of a work of art, we afterward have a built-in resistance to the slogans and propaganda of oversimplification that have often contributed to the destruction of human life. Poetry is a verbal means to a nonverbal source. It is a motion to no-motion, to the still point of contemplation and deep realization.

  A. R. Ammons

  Art, Mean, Self

  A. R. Ammons (1996). “Set in motion: essays, interviews, and dialogues”, Univ of Michigan Pr

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• Listen, I mean that from my knowledge of the world that I see around me, I think that it is much more likely that the reports of flying saucers are the results of the known irrational characteristics of terrestrial intelligence than of the unknown rational efforts of extra-terrestrial intelligence.

  Richard P. Feynman

  Mean, Thinking, Effort

  "The Character of Physical Law". Book by Richard P. Feynman, 1965.

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• When one analyzes the pre-conscious step to concepts, one always finds ideas which consist of 'symbolic images.' The first step to thinking is a painted vision of these inner pictures whose origin cannot be reduced only and firstly to the sensual perception but which are produced by an 'instinct to imagining' and which are re-produced by different individuals independently, i.e. collectively... But the archaic image is also the necessary predisposition and the source of a scientific attitude. To a total recognition belong also those images out of which have grown the rational concepts.

  Wolfgang Pauli

  Attitude, Thinking, Ideas

  Letter to Markus Fierz, 1948.

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• It is impossible for any rational creature to be happy without acting all for God. God Himself could not make him happy any other way... There is nothing in the world worth living for but doing good and finishing God's work, doing the work that Christ did. I see nothing else in the world that can yield any satisfaction besides living to God, pleasing Him, and doing his whole will.

  David Brainerd

  Yield, Acting, Finishing

  David Brainerd (1818). “The Life of the Rev. David Brainerd, Missionary to the Indians: From the Honourable Society in Scotland for Propagating Christian Knowledge; who Died at Northampton in New England, Oct. 9, 1747 ...”, p.242

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• It is remarkable that God began this work among the Indians at a time when I had the least hope, and to my apprehension the least rational prospect of success.

  David Brainerd

  Missionary, Remarkable, Apprehension

  David Brainerd (1829). “Life of the Rev. David Brainerd, Missionary to the American Indians”, p.480

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• God is in all things, but so far as God is Divine and so far as He is rational, God is nowhere so properly as in the soul - in the innermost of the soul

  Meister Eckhart

  Soul, Divine, All Things

  Eckhart (Meister) (1963). “Treatises and sermons of Meister Eckhart”

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• The truth is that Christian theology, like every other theology, is not only opposed to the scientific spirit; it is also opposed to all other attempts at rational thinking.

  H. L. Mencken

  Christian, Thinking, Spirit

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• When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to assume that their president, hostile to the principles that formed the nation and determined to act with malice toward its inhabitants by suppressing their rights and enabling its enemies to prosper in their attempts to destroy it, must be confronted, a rational response for the nation is to encumber itself no more with such a president and reject his authority and the acolytes who carry out his wishes.

  David Shapiro

  Rights, People, Enemy

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• We like democracy because why? The pathologies of the U.S. version are so obvious in the aftermath of the latest averted crisis that we need to ask ourselves whether it’s worth it - and why electoral democracy hasn’t self-destructed before. Should Tunisians or Egyptians opt for the Chinese model, where rational autocrats may restrict rights, but no one threatens to blow up world markets in the name of an 18th-century tax protest?

  Noah Feldman

  Blow, Rights, Self

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• People take it for granted that the physical world is both ordered and intelligible. The underlying order in nature - the laws of physics - are simply accepted as given, as brute facts. Nobody asks where they came from; at least not in polite company. However, even the most atheistic scientist accepts as an act of faith that the universe is not absurd, that there is a rational basis to physical existence manifested as law-like order in nature that is at least partly comprehensible to us. So science can proceed only if the scientist adopts an essentially theological worldview.

  Paul Davies

  Order, Law, People

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• Modern liberalism, for most liberals is not a consciously understood set of rational beliefs, but a bundle of unexamined prejudices and conjoined sentiments. The basic ideas and beliefs seem more satisfactory when they are not made fully explicit, when they merely lurk rather obscurely in the background, coloring the rhetoric and adding a certain emotive glow.

  James Burnham

  Emotional, Glowing, Color

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• I find it hard to understand why those who demand Unitary Education by the State do not also demand a Unitary Press by the State... Either the State is infallible, in which case we could not do better than to submit to it the entire domain of intelligent thought, or it is not, in which case it is no more rational to hand over education to it than the press.

  Frederic Bastiat

  Intelligent, Hands, Political

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• Man is said to be a rational creature; but should it not rather be said, that man is a creature capable of being rational, as we say a parrot is a creature capable of speech?

  Fulke Greville, 1st Baron Brooke

  Men, Speech, Parrots

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• The why is what makes journalism an adult game. The why is what makes policy coherent and useful. The why is what transforms bureaucrats and foot soldiers and political leaders into viable instruments of rational and affirmative change. The why is everything and without it, the very suggestion of human progress becomes a cosmic joke.

  David Simon

  Games, Feet, Leader

  "The escalating breakdown of urban society across the US" by David Simon, www.theguardian.com. September 5, 2008.

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• They are nonhuman persons. They are not food. If animals matter morally at all, there is one and only one rational response: go vegan. Everything else is just participation in animal exploitation.

  Gary L. Francione

  Animal, Matter, Vegan

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• Since a rational man's ambition is unlimited, since his pursuit and achievement of values is a life-long process — and the higher the values, the harder the struggle — he needs a moment, an hour or some period of time in which he can experience the sense of his completed task, the sense of living in a universe where his values have been successfully achieved.

  Ayn Rand

  Life, Moving, Struggle

  "The Objectivist".

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• The neural processes underlying that which we call creativity have nothing to do with rationality. That is to say, if we look at how the brain generates creativity, we will see that it is not a rational process at all; creativity is not born out of reasoning.

  Rodolfo Llinas

  Creativity, Brain, Looks

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• This is why rational people - anti-religionists - must end their timidity and come out of their closet and assert themselves.

  Bill Maher

  People, Religion, Atheism

  "Religulous". www.imdb.com. 2008.

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• Some people can never learn to ski powder snow without exerting tremendous effort and strength because they allow their rational, left-brain hemisphere to control the entire situation.

  Dolores LaChapelle

  People, Snow, Effort

  Dolores Lachapelle (1984). “Earth Wisdom”, Finn Hill Art

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• At the root of all the varied manifestations of dancing, lies the common impulse to resort to movement to externalize emotional states which we cannot extemalize by rational means.

  Jamake Highwater

  Dance, Lying, Mean

  "Dance: Rituals of Experience".

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• If the people of this religion [Islam] are asked about the proof for the soundness of their religion, they flare up, get angry and spill the blood of whoever confronts them with this question. They forbid rational speculation, and strive to kill their adversaries. This is why truth became thoroughly silenced and concealed.

  Muhammad ibn Abu Bakr

  Flare Up, Blood, People

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