Rationality Quotes - Page 4

• Reality trumps rationality.

  Derek R. Audette

  Life, Reality, Trump

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• In general, we’re least aware of what our minds do best.

  Marvin Minsky

  Mind

  Marvin Minsky (1988). “Society Of Mind”, p.29, Simon and Schuster

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• It is not the slumber of reason that engenders monsters, but vigilant and insomniac rationality

  Gilles Deleuze

  Monsters, Slumber, Reason

  Gilles Deleuze, FeÌl?ix Guattari (2004). “Anti-Oedipus”, p.122, A&C Black

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• The single greatest world transformation would simply be the embrace of global reasonableness and pluralistic tolerance the global embrace of egoic-rationality (on the way to centauric vision-logic).

  Ken Wilber

  Tolerance, Vision, World

  Ken Wilber (2001). “Sex, Ecology, Spirituality: The Spirit of Evolution, Second Edition”, p.206, Shambhala Publications

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• People who have cut their teeth on philosophical problems of rationality, knowledge, perception, free will and other minds are well placed to think better about problems of evidence, decision making, responsibility and ethics that life throws up.

  Simon Blackburn

  Philosophical, Responsibility, Cutting

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• In a society where rationality has ruled so long, the church frequently fails to see that in forsaking the weekly pursuit of the transcendent, we have given up the only ground that was uniquely ours in this world. In attempting to make the church something that can attract and add value to secular mind-sets, we have turned our backs on our one true proposition - transcendence.

  James MacDonald

  Long, Mind, Church

  James MacDonald (2012). “Vertical Church: What Every Heart Longs for. What Every Church Can Be.”, p.34, David C Cook

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• By the way, the point between rationality and what we would call the irrational is a very difficult point to establish. There’s no specific line, as you know.

  Leo Ornstein

  Lines, Way, Difficult

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• What I affirm is the intuition that where God's presence is no longer a tenable supposition and where His absence is no longer a felt, indeed overwhelming weight, certain dimensions of thought and creativity are no longer attainable. And I would vary Yeats's axiom so as to say: no man can read fully, can answer answeringly to the aesthetic, whose "nerve and blood" are at peace in sceptical rationality, are now at home in immanence and verification. We must read as if.

  George Steiner

  Home, Creativity, Men

  George Steiner (2010). “Real Presences: Is There Anything in What We Say?”, p.264, Faber & Faber

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• In healthy individuals, emotions don't distort rationality, they enhance it!

  Andy Hargreaves

  Leadership, Learning, Healthy

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• There is light in the world, and it is us!

  Eliezer Yudkowsky

  Light, World

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• No vital Christianity is possible unless at least three aspects of it are developed. These are the inner life of devotion, the outer life of service, and the intellectual life of rationality.

  D. Elton Trueblood

  Christian, Intellectual, Three

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• How much rationality and higher protection there is in such self-deception, and how much falseness I still require in order to allow myself again and again the luxury of my sincerity.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Self, Order, Luxury

  Friedrich Nietzsche (2012). “Human, All-Too-Human: Parts One and Two”, p.8, Courier Corporation

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• The absurd, with its rupture of rationality-of conventional ways of seeing the world-is in fact an accurate and a productive way of understanding the world.

  William Kentridge

  Understanding, World, Rupture

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• It is a wonderful thing to see a first-rate philosopher at prayer. Tough-minded thinking and tenderhearted reverence are friends, not enemies. We have for too long separated the head from the heart, and we are the lesser for it. We love God with the mind and we love God with the heart. In reality, we are descending with the mind into the heart and there standing before God in ceaseless wonder and endless praise. As the mind and the heart work in concert, a kind of loving rationality pervades all we say and do. This brings unity to us and glory to God.

  Soren Kierkegaard

  Prayer, Heart, Reality

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• Why do we not exhaust the heritage of the ages, spiritual and material for our immediate pleasure, and let posterity go hang? So far as simple rationality is concerned, self-interest can advance no argument against the appetite of present possessors. Yet within some of us, a voice that is not the demand of self-interest or pure rationality says that we have no right to give ourselves enjoyment at the expense of our ancestors' memory and our descendants' prospects. We hold our present advantages only in trust.

  Russell Kirk

  Spiritual, Memories, Simple

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• No reason can be given for the nature of God, because that nature is the ground of rationality.

  Alfred North Whitehead

  God, Reason, Given

  Alfred North Whitehead (1997). “Science and the Modern World”, p.178, Simon and Schuster

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• There is always some madness in love.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Love, Crush, Sexy

  Friedrich Nietzsche (1977). “The Portable Nietzsche”, p.99, Penguin

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• For those who do not make the transition to a matured, more spiritual self-will reason will indeed be no more than rationalization. Here is a prodigious parallel: just as in antiquity the dysdaimonic personality could not appreciate how his mentality was bound in by his characterological (banausic, doulic) biases, so in modernity the facile or abstractivist rationalist cannot comprehend how his "rationality" merely slavishly subserves his appetites, delusions, preconceptions, ideologies, etc.

  Kenny Smith

  Spiritual, Philosophy, Self

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• The hope for the twentieth century rests on recognition that war and depression are man-made, and needless. They can be avoided in the future by turning from the nineteenth-century characteristics just mentioned (materialism, selfishness, false values, hypocrisy, and secret vices) and going back to other characteristics that our Western Society has always regarded as virtues: generosity, compassion, cooperation, rationality, and foresight, and finding a increased role in human life for love, spirituality, charity, and self discipline.

  Carroll Quigley

  War, Compassion, Men

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• Anger may bring extra energy, but it eclipses the best part of our brain: its rationality. The energy of anger is almost always unreliable.

  Dalai Lama

  Brain, Energy, May

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• Sam Harris fearlessly describes a moral and intellectual emergency precipitated by religious fantasies--misguided beliefs that create suffering, that rationalize violence, that have endangered our nation and our future. His argument for the morality, the honesty, and the humility of atheism is galvanizing. It is a relief that someone has spoken so frankly, with such passion yet such rationality. Now when the subject arises, as it inevitably does, I can simply say: Read Sam Harris’ Letter to a Christian Nation.

  Janna Levin

  Christian, Religious, Honesty

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• The term "rational" and its variants (rationality, rationalism) are used in a lot of contexts in economic debate, both positively and negatively, but nearly always sloppily or dishonestly. A specimen I've seen on more occasions than I can count is the line (usually presented with a sense of witty originality) "if you are opposed to economic rationalism, you must be in favor of economic irrationalism"... I've come to the conclusion that the word "rational" has no meaning that cannot better be conveyed by some alternative term and that the best advice is probably to avoid it altogether.

  John Quiggin

  Witty, Advice, Alternatives

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• Rationality will not save us.

  Robert McNamara

  Thinking

  Robert S. McNamara (2004). “Official Teacher's Guide for The Fog of War: An Errol Morris Film”

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• Capitalism demands the best of every man - his rationality - and rewards him accordingly. It leaves every man free to choose the work he likes, to specialize in it, to trade his product for the products of others, and to go as far on the road of achievement as his ability and ambition will carry him.

  Ayn Rand

  Ambition, Men, Liberty

  Ayn Rand (1963). “For the New Intellectual: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand (50th Anniversary Edition)”, p.21, Penguin

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• Nothing sedates rationality like large doses of effortless money.

  Warren Buffett

  Investing Money, Buffets, Effortless

  Warren Buffett (2009). “Warren Buffett on Business: Principles from the Sage of Omaha”, p.163, John Wiley & Sons

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