Quotes on Rationality

He is very fond of me, almost too fond. I could do with less caressing and more rationality. I should like to be less of a pet and more of a friend, if I might choose; but I won't complain of that: I am only afraid his affection loses in depth where it gains in ardour. I sometimes liken it to a fire of dry twigs and branches compared with one of solid coal, very bright and hot; but if it should burn itself out and leave nothing but ashes behind.

To be clever in argument is not rationality but rationalization.

I don't know if you realize this, but anger is anger. It has no mind. It has no rationality. It's mad, and it just wants to destroy.

I mean, I think it's a two-way relationship: I think you should not have too much faith in your own rationality. You should not have too much faith in the rationality of, you know, anybody else either. We all learn together about the way the world is, and I think it's a sort of antidote to wishful thinking of all kinds.

Not to be absolutely certain is, I think, one of the essential things in rationality.

No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical.

A man has free choice to the extent that he is rational.

What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.

The end point of rationality is to demonstrate the limits of rationality.

I ask the fundamental question of rationality: Why do you believe what you believe? What do you think you know and how do you think you know it?

I think looking back to my own childhood, the fact that so many of the stories I read allowed the possibility of frogs turning into princes, whether that has a sort of insidious affect on rationality, I'm not sure. Perhaps it's something for research.

A man demonstrates his rationality, not by a commitment to fixed ideas, stereotyped procedures, or immutable concepts, but by the manner in which, and the occasions on which, he changes those ideas, procedures, and concepts.

To know one's own desires, their meaning and their costs requires the highest human virtue: rationality.

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

Definition, rationality, and structure are ways of seeing, but they become prisons when they blank out other ways of seeing.

There are two atheisms of which one is a purification of the notion of God.

Mr. Edison worked endlessly on a problem, using the method of elimination. If a person asked him if he were discouraged because so many attempts proved unavailing, he would say, "No, I am not discouraged, because every wrong attempt discarded is another step forward.".

The utilitarian behaves sensibly in all that is required for preservation but never takes account of the fact that he must die... His whole life is absorbed in avoiding death, which is inevitable, and therefore he might be thought to be the most irrational of men, if rationality has anything to do with understanding ends or comprehending the human situation as such.

There's something in us that is very much attracted to madness. Everyone who looks off the edge of a tall building has felt at least a faint, morbid urge to jump. And anyone who has ever put a loaded pistol up to his head... All right, my point is this: even the most well-adjusted person is holding onto his or her sanity by a greased rope. I really believe that. The rationality circuits are shoddily built into the human animal.

Truth is much too complicated to allow anything but approximations.

To confess your fallibility and then do nothing about it is not humble; it is boasting of your modesty.