Top 100 Be Irrational Quotes
#1. To use the intelligence in any other than the habitual way is not to use the intelligence; it is to be irrational, to rave like a madman.
Aldous Huxley
#2. I still believe that any country understands that if they use nuclear weapons, they will be wiped out of existence. They could be irrational in many ways, but I don't think they're irrational to the point that they're ready to annihilate their own country.
Mohamed ElBaradei
#3. If you simply announce that things are irrational, then that alone doesn't get you very far. You have to replace rational agents with some concrete notion of what it means to be irrational.
Lars Peter Hansen
#4. There's a difference between religion and faith," Chandi said, "Religion means you've accepted a set of beliefs even if those beliefs would appear to be irrational to anyone who doesn't buy into them. Faith means you've chosen to accept something that you've given yourself the chance to question.
Allen Steele
#5. We are said to be irrational slaves to our whims and appetites, addicted to sex, smoking, and electronic gadgets.
Anonymous
#6. Dare to be irrational! - keep free from formulas, open to any fresh impulse, fluid.
Edward Weston
#7. You must strive to multiply bread so that it suffices for the tables of mankind, and not rather favor an artificial control of birth, which would be irrational, in order to diminish the number of guests at the banquet of life.
Pope Paul VI
#8. It's right to say that people fall in love. We don't glide, slip, or stumble into it. Instead we tumble head first from the moment we decide to step off the edge of a cliff with someone and see whether we'll fly together. Love might be irrational, but we make the choice to risk everything.
Martin Pistorius
#9. In the '90s it was irrational exuberance. Now it may be irrational doom and gloom.
Robert Reich
#10. If nothing else, Prophet prided himself on his ability to be irrational. Everyone was always raving about how being cool, calm, and collected was the best way to be. Prophet found the exact opposite worked most of the time. Tommy
S.E. Jakes
#11. We accept that people are irrational for good Darwinian reasons. But I don't think we should be so pessimistic as to think that therefore we're forever condemned to be irrational.
Richard Dawkins
#12. It is even possible that laws which have not their origin in the mind may be irrational, and we can never succeed in formulating them.
Arthur Eddington
#13. Every person defines reality in his own way. And every person figures that anybody who doesn't agree with him has got to be irrational.
Kristen D. Randle
#15. We can choose to be truthful even when the choice means personal loss. We can choose to undertake a great action - unselfish, courageous, daringly creative - that looks unreasonable and irrational to the eye of the Ego.
Ilchi Lee
#16. Emotions generally led to irrational and stupid actions. In this game, they were likely to be fatal. He regained his composure and became logical, rational, disconnected.
Roger Weston
#17. Emotions are subject to change, they make one irrational instead of logical, and are impossible to predict. Fear, anger, frustration. Lust, jealousy, hate. And yes, even love, are to be avoided.
Tiffany Snow
#18. I predicted that if control of drugs were administered by law enforcement agencies, the result would be a black market more irrational and widespread than that of alcohol prohibition and the growth of enormous police-state repressive bureaucracy. And who, indeed, wanted that?
Timothy Leary
#19. Division may be rational or irrational. Dominance either seems or is justified. Difference is.
Catharine A. MacKinnon
#20. Would a watermelon in the midst of a chase sequence not be, in its own organic way, emblematic of our entire misunderstood enterprise? At once totally logical and perfectly irrational?
W. D. Richter
#21. In case you're short on definitions, here's one. Insanity: 'Destroying the very things that sustain us.' And if we're so short-sighted so as to make such preposterous choices, then it's not all that preposterous to believe that shortly our end will be in sight.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
#22. A life based on reason will always require to be balanced by an occasional bout of violent and irrational emotion, for the instinctual drives must be satisfied.
Cyril Connolly
#23. But if they were afraid of lemon meringue pie, this would be an irrational fear, because lemon meringue pie is delicious and has never hurt a soul.
Lemony Snicket
#24. The market can move for irrational reasons, and you have to be prepared for that, ... you need to make big bets when the odds are in your favor
not big enough to ruin you, but big enough to make a difference.
Bill Gross
#25. Be free from grief not through insensibility like the irrational animals, nor through want of thought like the foolish, but like a man of virtue by having reason as the consolation of grief.
Epictetus
#26. He knew some fear should be respected, as it can keep you out of real
danger. But he realized most of his fears were irrational and had kept him
from changing when he needed to.
Spencer Johnson
#27. O ye people, earth-born folk, ye who have given yourselves to drunkenness and sleep and ignorance of God, be sober now,cease from your surfeit, cease to be glamored by irrational sleep!
Hermes Trismegistus
#28. I am never excited to play through a song all the way, because it can reveal more flaws that mean more work. For some reason, I always have an irrational fear that the song will never be finished.
Robert Lopez
#29. For the Stoics, then, our judgments about the world are all that we can control, but also all that we need to control in order to be happy; tranquility results from replacing our irrational judgments with rational ones
Oliver Burkeman
#30. The paralyzing fear of being lost is fed solely by the irrational fear that we will never be found.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
#31. Perhaps the nearest one could get to a common characteristic of poststructuralism would be a radical suspicion of reason, order and certainty as governing principles of knowledge and existence...the absurd and the irrational can no longer be distinguished from the real and the rational
Margaret Maclure
#32. Alas, some of those crackpots will only be eliminated by something lethal, such as a firing squad. The best we can do unless you want to invoke such lethal force is the segregation - the quarantine, perhaps - of those that pollute the hive mind with their irrational gibberings
Andrew Williams
#33. He had learned a long time ago that some things were worth being afraid of. And some things were not. Things that he had done before and survived did not justify fear. To be afraid of a survivable thing was irrational.
Lee Child
#34. For kids like me, being called childish can be a frequent occurrence. Every time we make irrational demands, exhibit irresponsible behavior, or display any other signs of being normal American citizens, we are called childish.
Adora Svitak
#35. This was a man who'd fought long and hard to keep me, even when I was bent on self-destructing us. This was a man who understood I could be difficult and stubborn and a little bit irrational (okay, maybe a freaking lot irrational), and still loved me.
Samantha Young
#36. Of the irrational part of the soul again one division appears to be common to all living things, and of a vegetative nature.
Aristotle.
#37. From the first extortion he had accepted, from the first directive he had obeyed, he had given them cause to believe that reality was a thing to be cheated, that one could demand the irrational and someone somehow would provide it.
Ayn Rand
#38. There also appears to be another element in the soul, which, though irrational, yet in a manner participates in rational principle.
Aristotle.
#39. I have huge admiration for people who think like the effective altruist, who try to rationally think about how they can change the world for the better, and who try not to be swayed by irrational considerations, such as skin color or whether or not someone lives in the same neighborhood.
Paul Bloom
#40. I haven't changed my mind. That's the point! I want to spend my life with you even though it's totally irrational. And you have short earlobes. Socially and genetically there's no reason for me to be attracted to you. The only logical conclusion is that I must be in love with you.
Graeme Simsion
#41. If we want to be able to pick up the pieces of our lives and go on living, we have to get over the irrational
feeling that every misfortune is our fault, the direct result of our mistakes or misbehavior. We are really not that powerful. Not everything
that happens in the world is our doin
Harold S. Kushner
#42. It's not an irrational decision, I've been thinking about this for quite a while and maybe it'll be good for me [on his career break
Ronnie O'Sullivan
#43. [T]he superstitions to be feared in the present day are much less religious than political; and of all the forms of idolatry I know none more irrational and ignoble than this blind worship of mere numbers. - William Lecky, Democracy and Liberty
Bryan Caplan
#44. People are stubborn and stupid. They're irrational. they're destructive. that's the point, isn't it? That's the whole reason for the cure. People will no longer destroy their own lives. They won't be capable of it.
Lauren Oliver
#45. I've always felt I had to do things because they were expected of me, or more important, to make people like me. The hell with it! I think from now on I'm going to just be me - rich or poor, good or bad, rational or irrational, logical or illogical, famous or infamous.
Carl R. Rogers
#46. Science for me is very close to art. Scientific discovery is an irrational act. It's an intuition which turns out to be reality at the end of it-and I see no difference between a scientist developing a marvellous discovery and an artist making a painting.
Carlo Rubbia
#47. The point is that religion puts a value on irrationality, which makes it the perfect tool for promoting irrational beliefs like misogyny. Other ideologies can be challenged with evidence and reason, but religion is allowed a pass by most people. And that's why it's especially dangerous.
Amanda Marcotte
#48. Since all life is futility, then the decision to exist must be the most irrational of all.
Emile M. Cioran
#49. The notion must be put aside that emotions are irrational and we must see emotions for their true function. This will not rob the emotional content, it will merely explain it. Some things when more deeply explained provide greater sources of personal and corporate pleasure, not less.
Leviak B. Kelly
#50. If worldviews or metanarratives can be compared to lenses, which of them brings things into the sharpest focus? This is not an irrational retreat from reason. Rather, it is about grasping a deeper order of things which is more easily accessed by the imagination than by reason.
Alister E. McGrath
#51. Idiosyncratic belief systems which are shared by only a few adherents are likely to be regarded as delusional. Belief systems which may be just as irrational but which are shared by millions are called world religions.
Anthony Storr
#52. As hatred is defined as intense dislike, what is wrong with inciting intense dislike of a religion, if the activities or teachings of that religion are so outrageous, irrational or abusive of human rights that they deserve to be intensely disliked?
Rowan Atkinson
#53. If human beings are in general too irrational and selfish to work out the challenges of social organization in a productive and positive manner, then they are far too irrational and selfish to be given the monopolistic violence of state power, or vote for their leaders.
Stefan Molyneux
#54. If the transmigration of a soul takes place into a rational being, it simply becomes the soul of that body. But if the soul migrates into a brute beast, it follows the body outside, as a guardian spirit follows a man. For there could never be a rational soul in an irrational being.
Sallust
#55. Nothing could be more irrational than the idea that something comes from nothing.
R.C. Sproul
#56. Grace is the offer of God's ceaseless presence and irrational love that cannot be stopped.
John Ortberg
#57. Don't be in temper, to leave so quickly, that I may be dying. But all too soon, the leaves and debris will gather elsewhere.
Anthony Liccione
#58. Frenchmen tend to be alike, because they are all soldiers; Prussians because they are all something else, probably policemen; even Americans are all something, though it is not easy to say what it is; it goes with hawk-like eyes and an irrational eagerness. Perhaps it is savages.
G.K. Chesterton
#59. The love song must be born into the realm of the irrational, absurd, the distracted, the melancholic, the obsessive, the insane for the love song is the noise of love itself and love is, of course, a form of madness.
Nick Cave
#60. Unless all that we take to be knowledge is an illusion, we must hold that in thinking we are not reading rationality into an irrational universe, but responding to a rationality with which the universe has always been saturated.
Mary Midgley
#61. Even Grace still imagined there might be words, the words that could reach Dora and that had so far, unaccountably, not been hit upon. Only Caro recognized that Dora's condition was exactly that: a condition, an irrational state requiring professional, or divine, intervention.
Shirley Hazzard
#62. The reasoning man who rejects the superstitions of simpletons necessarily becomes their enemy; he must expect as much and be prepared to laugh at the consequences.
Marquis De Sade
#63. When you deal with irrational animals, with things and circumstances, be generous and straightforward. You are rational; they are not.
Marcus Aurelius
#64. It's possible that aliens are
building blancmange fortresses on a distant planet millions of light
years away. It could be true even though we have no evidence it is happening. It's completely irrational to say it is not happening when you can't be at least reasonably sure.
Lewis N. Roe
#65. Changing irrational beliefs can impact multiple areas of life. It doesn't matter how many times you repeat affirmations for success but if you don't change your core beliefs, the changes will be temporary.
Hina Hashmi
#66. I said that the world is absurd, but I was too hasty. This world in itself is not reasonable, that is all that can be said. But what is absurd is the confrontation of this irrational and the wild longing for clarity whose call echoes in the human heart.
Albert Camus
#67. Virginia, forgive me. I didn't mean to be so rude. It's just my cycle coming on. Once a month I get very irrational and angry, and I want to pick a fight with anyone who comes near me.
Kathryn Wesley
#68. There's no evidence whatsoever that men are more rational than women. Both sexes seem to be equally irrational.
Albert Ellis
#69. Its very variety, subtlety, and utterly irrational, idiomatic complexity makes it possible to say things in English which simply cannot be said in any other language.
Robert A. Heinlein
#70. We have to be the people who stand up and say look, vigilance is good and prudence is good. But a kind of irrational fear that leads itself to demagogic rhetoric is something that we have to say no - no, we're not going to go there.
Russell D. Moore
#71. And that is when I knew. I knew that what I was feeling was love. It had to be. Because it was all-encompassing and irrational, yet at the same time it felt so perfect and true.
Tillie Cole
#72. To be sure, they have had the occasional success, but there is little chance that North America will develop a functional land ethic until it finds a way to overcome its irrational addiction to profit.
Thomas King
#73. The scars left from the child's defeat in the fight against irrational authority are to be found at the bottom of every neurosis.
Erich Fromm
#74. The very ritual practices that the New Atheists dismiss as costly, inefficient and irrational turn out to be a solution to one of the hardest problems humans face: cooperation without kinship
Jonathan Haidt
#75. In order to develop normally, a child requires progressively more complex joint activity with one or more adults who have an irrational emotional relationship with the child. Somebody's got to be crazy about that kid. That's number one. First, last and always.
Urie Bronfenbrenner
#76. I believe in numbers. The ones you can see and the ones you can't. The real and the imaginary, the rational and the irrational, and every point on lines that go on forever. Numbers have never let me down. They don't waffle. They don't lie. They don't pretend to be what they're not. They're timeless.
Amy Harmon
#77. When you're anxious, don't immediately trust your automatic thoughts because oftentimes these thoughts are irrational. Thoughts are not facts. They're just thoughts and sometimes don't need to be given so much importance.
John Tsilimparis
#78. People are generally irrational, unreasonable and selfish. They deserve to be loved, anyway.
Mother Teresa
#79. The irrational may be attractive in the abstract, but not in cab drives, dinner guests, or elderly relatives.
Mason Cooley
#80. It can be of no practical use to know that Pi is irrational, but if we can know, it surely would be intolerable not to know.
Edward Charles Titchmarsh
#81. You must never stop dreaming. Face reality, yes. But don't stop with the way things are; dream of things as they ought to be. Dream of peace. Peace is rational and reasonable. War is irrational in this age and unwinnable.
Jesse Jackson
#82. We should be agnostic about those things for which there is no evidence. We should not hold beliefs merely because they gratify our desires for afterlife, immortality, heaven, hell, etc.
Julian Huxley
#83. Well, fuck, Brandt whispered. All that rational thinking had to be thrown out the window. This was why he liked irrational thinking so much better. It took less effort and the conclusions you came to were harder to refute.
Abigail Roux
#84. Love, it seems, fits perfectly into no one of these molds for it may be all at once; a state of ecstasy, a state of joy, a state of disillusionment, a rational state or an irrational state
Leo Buscaglia
#85. I'll mess up sometimes. I'll cry for no reason, burn food because I'm lost in another world while reading, snap at you because I'm having a bad day, and be completely irrational at times, but I'll love you, always. You make me so happy, so needed.
Melody Anne
#86. Wherever and whenever a woman is harassed, abused and exploited there could be found a religion or some kind of irrational belief and suppression of reason among the minds of men or women who were responsible for the exploitation.
Thiruman Archunan
#87. I'm not sure most of the people that get caught up in the middle of a bubble can be described as irrational. It seems pretty rational to buy a house and flip it in the next few weeks at a profit when that's been happening for along time.
Paul Samuelson
#88. One of the grandest creations of the New South was a mythical concept of an Old South. What people take to be an epoch was a matter of mere decades of pretension and an exercise in irrational nostalgia.
Paul Theroux
#89. One should believe only what can be chosen to be true or just. Irrational (or unjustified) beliefs should be avoided because they can have disastrous practical consequences.
Mario Bunge
#90. Religion is always an irrational enterprise, no matter how ennobling it may be to the human spirit.
Lawrence Wright
#91. Marriage was too vital an economic and political institution to be entered into solely on the basis of something as irrational as love," writes Coontz.
Aziz Ansari
#92. The atheist realizes that there must not only be an acceptance of his right to hold his opinion, but that ultimately his is the job to turn his culture from religion, to eliminate those irrational ideas which have held the human race in intellectual slavery.
Madalyn Murray O'Hair
#93. To irrational principles, one cannot be loyal. Ideas that are not derived from reality cannot be consistently practiced in reality.
as quoted by Leonard Peikoff in Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand
#94. Drawing up my knees, I fold in on myself. I want to make myself as small as possible. Perhaps this nonsensical pain will be smaller the smaller I am. Placing my head on my knees, I let the irrational tears fall unrestrained. I am crying over the loss of something I never had. How ridiculous.
E.L. James
#95. Reason may catnap for a time, but the irrational is more often comatose. In the end it will be the irrational that is forever caged in dreams, while reason gains the day.
Salman Rushdie
#96. Just as it would be madness to settle on medical treatment for the body of a person by taking an opinion poll of the neighbors, so it is irrational to prescribe for the body politic by polling the opinions of the people at large.
Plato
#97. If the spiritual values of human existence at its highest term of development and achievement do not endure, amidst all the changes and chances of this mortal universe, there seems to be no stable or coherent meaning in existence. Then the universe is irrational
indeed it is no universe at all.
Joseph Alexander Leighton
#98. Remember, the opposite of rational is not always irrational, but it can also be transrational or bigger than the rational mind can process; things like love, death, suffering, God, and infinity are transrational experiences. Both myth and mature religion understand this.
Richard Rohr
#99. I think it would be very foolish not to take the irrational seriously.
Jeanette Winterson
#100. The claim to know that no god exists is just irrational. The non-existence of any god has no evidence, let alone proof. To know something for certain there must be proof. To hold to a belief there must be evidence. Until
then, the only actual reasonable position is agnosticism.
Lewis N. Roe
