Irrational Quotes

“Conspiracy adepts love story-tellers who want to exorcise their fear, mixing rational and irrational elements to construct a plausible narrative for people craving a meaningful decoding and a breathtaking clarification. ("What after bowling alone?" )”
― Erik Pevernagie

“It is so easy at times for a lonely individual to begin fantasizing about what the people outside are saying about him and, in result, irrationally and fearfully, and sometimes angrily, fancy himself a villain.”
― Criss Jami, Healology

“Invalidating someone else is not merely disagreeing with something that the other person said. It is a process in which individuals communicate to another that the opinions and emotions of the target are invalid, irrational, selfish, uncaring, stupid, most likely insane, and wrong, wrong, wrong. Invalidators let it be known directly or indirectly that their targets views and feelings do not count for anything to anybody at any time or in any way.”
― David M. Allen

“The logic behind patriotism is a mystery. At least a man who believes that his own family or clan is superior to all others is familiar with more than 0.000003% of the people involved.”
― Criss Jami, Killosophy

“If a man could pass through Paradise in a dream, and have a flower presented to him as a pledge that his soul had really been there, and if he found that flower in his hand when he awoke - Aye! and what then?”
― Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Anima Poetae from the Unpublished Note-Books of Samuel Taylor Coleridge

“They did it for love, and sometimes love makes us do the irrational .. even the inexcusable.”
― Melissa de la Cruz, The Van Alen Legacy

“Behind every flinch is a fear or an anxiety - sometimes rational, sometimes not. Without the fear, there is no flinch. But wiping out the fear isn't what's important - facing it is.”
― Julien Smith, The Flinch

“We are forced to fall back on fatalism as an explanation of irrational events (that is to say, events the reasonableness of which we do not understand).”
― Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

“It's a bit like sympathetic magic in a way: the usual Western presumption that 'primitive' rituals mimic what they desire to achieve--that phallic objects might be believed to increase male potency and playacting rainfall might somehow bring it about. I am suspicious of such obvious connections and I suspect that the connections among things, people, and processes can be equally irrational. I sense the world might be more dreamlike, metaphorical, and poetic than we currently believe--but just as irrational as sympathetic magic when looked at in a typically scientific way. I wouldn't be surprised if poetry--poetry in the broadest sense, in the sense of a world filled with metaphor, rhyme, and recurring patterns, shapes, and designs--is how the world works. The world isn't logical, it's a song.”
― David Byrne, Bicycle Diaries

“The woman looked at her heart in all of its fragments. Its voice was clear and true as it reminded her of the injustices done to it. Nothing so forlorn and broken could lie to her — could it? However, the woman was not a rational woman, and did not heed the beings’ warning. “Strip my humanity away, that I may never again walk in the race of men,” was her one wish.”
― Esther Dalseno, Drown

“Our rationality is a visitor.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“Central to the Jain view of the predicament of the soul is the distinctive Jain theory of karma....We act and experience the results of our acts; that is, we consume (and must consume) the fruit (phal) of our actions (karmas)....The accumulations of karma on the soul are responsible for the soul's bondage. This is because they cover the soul and occlude its true nature, which is omniscient bliss. The keys to liberation, therefore, are two. First, one must avoid the accumulation of future karma. Violent actions are particularly potent sources of karmic accumulation, and this is the foundation of the tradition's extraordinary emphasis on non-violence. Second, one must eliminate the karma already adhering to the soul...The behavior of men and women who are not Jains creates the most damage. The meat eaters of this world, the fighters of wars, the butchers, the choppers of trees, and so on, leave a vast trail of carnage wherever they go.”
― Lawrence A. Babb, Absent Lord: Ascetics and Kings in a Jain Ritual Culture (Comparative Studies in Religion and Society)

“Jain teachings do not stand or fall on rational arguments; rather, the sole and sufficient guarantee of their validity is the Tirthankar's omniscience. These teachings are not only regarded as unconditionally true; they are also enunciated for one specific purpose and for no other reason. That purpose is the attainment of liberation from the world's bondage.”
― Lawrence A. Babb, Absent Lord: Ascetics and Kings in a Jain Ritual Culture (Comparative Studies in Religion and Society)

“An accurate picture of the odds is important when you’re choosing a path. But once you’ve already made your choice, then you should switch into irrational optimism for the execution phase.”
― Annie Duke, How to Decide: Simple Tools for Making Better Choices

“It’s irrational to think that a cake baked without sugar will come out of the oven tasting sweet. In life and business, bake your values in from the start. Value your time, don't time your values.”
― Richie Norton, Anti-Time Management: Reclaim Your Time and Revolutionize Your Results with the Power of Time Tipping

“Hatred is as powerful an intoxicant as love.”
― @Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“They agree only on the point that the most important aspect is reason. For one entire evening they play around with the metaphor of the light of reason that illuminates everything equally and dispassionately. Gertruda remarks immediately and intelligently that wherever something’s brightly lit, there is also a shadow, a darkening. The more powerful the light, the deeper, the more intense the shadow. That’s true, that’s a little bit disturbing; they stop talking for a while.”
― Olga Tokarczuk, The Books of Jacob

“Ascetics are completely dependent on the laity for the most basic necessities of life, including nourishment. The transaction in which ascetics are fed is probably the most important lay-ascetic interaction. ... Fundamental to this transaction is the idea that the food taken by an ascetic can never be prepared on his or her behalf. This has the effect of insulating the ascetic from the violence that went into the food's production and preparation; these things were not done at his or her instigation. The sin is that of the preparer of the food, but presumably, it is offset by the merit (punya) generated by feeding the ascetic.”
― Lawrence A. Babb, Absent Lord: Ascetics and Kings in a Jain Ritual Culture (Comparative Studies in Religion and Society)

“Можно обладать тысячью ученых ступеней, но человек по природе своей всегда верил и будет верить в существование чего-то, не поддающегося рациональному объяснению.”
― Kōji Suzuki, The Ring 1

“The fascinating thing about fear is that it feeds on itself. Simply instill it at the right moment and then let it grow. Very quickly, it turns into panic and irrationality. People end up shooting themselves in the foot … they're then ripe for the picking…”
― Debuhme, A Taste for Blood

“Irrationalität ist die Abwesenheit des Geistes, aber die bewusste Anwesenheit jedes Gefühls.”
― Laura Chouette

“When will and reason strive to correct by force or even to strike out a bad channel of personal evolution- bad probably because it is necessarily so -- "truth" then makes its appearance like an ambassador that is as necessary and incontestable as an object, and unsuspected because there is no "egoistic" intention behind it.
Does this mean that nothing devised by the individual has any credibility? His will is suspect, because it is intentional; geometry and algebra are suspect, because they are the grocer's scales; the reasoning instinct, and utility, are objects of scorn on account of their profound uselessness; and even the unconscious is not to be trusted because it serves as a storage cellar for the conscious mind. What is not confirmed by chance has no validity.
One would like to think a projection screen exists that extends between the ego and the outside world, upon which the subconscious projects the image of its predominant excitation, but which is only visible to the conscious mind (and objectively communicable) in the case where "the other side," the outside world, projects the same image on the screen at the same time, and if these two congruent images are superimposed.
It is in varying percentages of efficacy that intuition on the one hand, and chance from the outside world on the other, share in such examples of convergence. There remains a degree of question of varying magnitude, which can became surprisingly large-as in the case above-if, in this particular instance, the individual's contribution-his part of the interpretation-is reduced to zero. This is when a vertiginous interpretation of the universe seems to be felt as if the universe was a double of the super ego, a superior, thinking entity.”
― Hans Bellmer, Little Anatomy of the Physical Unconscious: Or, The Anatomy of the Image

“In an irrational situation, rationality dictates an irrational response”
― Ryan Gelpke, We Tragic Few

“How does one answer a question that, in its very formulation, defies belief?”
― Ryan Gelpke, We Tragic Few

“A rant is the product of someone attempting to defend the belief that a round peg is a square hole and a square hole is a round peg in order to defend the opinion that each fit the other and can be used interchangeably. But this requires that we explain that all of the damaged holes and broken pegs are neither.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough

“But was I purposely pushing the envelope and happy-dancing over the line in hopes of being found unworthy and stripped of my status?

That was... that would be incredibly irrational.

I could be quite irrational.

Like when I saw a spider, I behaved as if it were the size of a horse with the cold calculation of an assassin. That was irrational.”
― Jennifer L. Armentrout, From Blood and Ash

“Your hormones must be clouding your rational thoughts.'

'My hormones are always clouding my rational thoughts, thank you very much.”
― Jennifer L. Armentrout, From Blood and Ash

“The individual journey that people take down the funnel of misbelief reflects a societal journey into mistrust. No matter where you are on the political spectrum, and no matter where you are in the world (with the possible exception of Scandinavia), it is hard to escape the ways in which our society's level of trust is decreasing, with alarming consequences.”
― Dan Ariely, Misbelief: What Makes Rational People Believe Irrational Things

“A fool’s argument must constantly be fed by increasingly absurd rationalizations in order to maintain some disintegrating shred of legitimacy. And at some point the argument will have run its course to the degree that no amount of feeding will be able to sustain it. And at that point, the fool is forced to declare that the death of the argument was the very thing that legitimized its existence. And in the end, the only thing that’s legitimized is the fact that the person who builds their life on a bunch of dead arguments is, in fact, a legitimate fool.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough

“A Universal Fact

The problem before us now is this: if the reality behind the UFO phenomenon is both physical and psychic in nature, and if it manipulates space and time in ways our scientific concepts are inadequate to describe, is there any reason for its effects to be limited to our culture or to our generation? We have already established that no country has had the special privilege of these manifestations. Yet we must carry the argument further: if the UFO phenomenon is not tied to social conditions specific to our time, or to specific technological achievements, then it may represent a universal fact. It may have been with us, in one form or another, as long as the human race has existed on this planet.

Something happened in classical times that is inadequately explained by historical theories. The suggestion that the same thing might be happening again should make us extremely interested in bringing every possible light to bear on this problem. Beginning in the second century B.C. and continuing until the fall of the Roman Empire, the intellectual elites of the Mediterranean world, raised in a spirit of scientific rationalism, were confronted and eventually defeated by irrational element similar to that contained in modern apparitions of unexplained phenomena, an element that is amplified by their summary rejection by our own science. It accompanied the collapse of ancient civilizations.

Commenting on this parallel, French science writer Aime Michel proposes the following scene.

Consider one of the Alexandrian thinkers, a man like Ptolemaeus, the second-century astronomer thoroughly schooled in the rational methods of Archimedes, Euclid, and Aristotle. And imagine him reading the Apocalypse, various writings about Armageddon. How would he react to such an experience? He would merely shrug, says Aime Michel: "It would never occur to him to place the slightest credence in such a compendium of what must regard as insanities. Such a scene must have taken place thousands of times at the end of classical antiquity. And we know that every time there was the same rejection, the same shrugging, because we have no record of any critical examination of the doctrines, ideas, and claims of the counterculture that expressed itself through the Apocalypse. This counterculture was too absurd to retain the attention of a reader of Plato. A short time – a very short time – elapsed, the counterculture triumphed, and Plato was forgotten for a thousand years. Could it happen again?"

Only a thorough examination of the ancient records can save us from the effects of such cultural myopia.”
― Jacques F. Vallée, Dimensions: A Casebook of Alien Contact