Top 100 Be Rational Quotes
#1. In times of crisis human beings don't have it in them to be rational.
Larry McMurtry
#2. Love wasn't meant to be rational. It was meant to be experienced and felt.
S.L. Naeole
#3. Division may be rational or irrational. Dominance either seems or is justified. Difference is.
Catharine A. MacKinnon
#5. It is hate that makes people kill, Mr Catchpool, not love. Never love. Please be rational.
Sophie Hannah
#6. Moral education, which ought never, in any circumstances, to be rational.
Aldous Huxley
#7. North Korea. Not only does North Korean have nuclear weapons, but their leadership appears to not be rational.
Ted Lieu
#8. We should give chaos pride of place once a year or so, designating occasions on which we can be briefly exempted from the two greatest pressures of secular adult life: having to be rational and having to be faithful.
Alain De Botton
#9. Today, architecture is invention. It isn't enough to just be rational - It must also be beautiful.
Oscar Niemeyer
#10. While men define themselves by deeds, women simply "are" beauty, grace, faith and goodness. Men tend to be rational and objective, women subjective, intuitive and emotional.
Henry Makow
#11. Investment must be rational; if you can't understand it, don't do it.
Warren Buffett
#12. It is easier to rationalize than it is to be rational.
Warren Buffett
#13. It considered trying to explain their error to them, but what would be the use? They would only go away with hurt feelings. You can't always expect people, or squirrels, to be rational.
Thomas M. Disch
#14. To be rational is so glorious a thing, that two-legged creatures generally content themselves with the title.
John Locke
#15. When a person is in emotional pain, it's hard to be rational and to think of a good solution. Nevertheless, many of the coping strategies used by people with overwhelming emotions only serve to make their problems worse.
Matthew McKay
#16. I think the idea that the hedge fund manager gets lower taxes than the taxi driver or the physics professor is insane. The legislators who leave that policy in place are derelict in their duties to be rational and fair. There are plenty of them in both political parties. It's totally outrageous.
Charlie Munger
#17. If you're going to worry about anything, Gideon, it should be me . Because I can't be rational when it comes to you. I'm crazy about you. Literally. I can't think about a future without you - it freaks me out.
Sylvia Day
#18. What our leaders and pundits never let slip is that the terrorists - whatever else they might be - might also be rational human beings; which is to say that in their own minds they have a rational justification for their actions.
William Blum
#19. Why couldn't love be rational like everything else? What right did it have to bulldoze through your reasoning and leave you spinning?
Victoria Connelly
#20. Your daily choices and actions should be rational and productive
Sunday Adelaja
#21. It might not be rational, but I am terrified of getting stuck in an elevator with a bear.
Dana Gould
#22. We need women who are so strong they can be gentle, so educated they can be humble, so fierce they can be compassionate, so passionate they can be rational, and so disciplined they can be free.
Kavita Ramdas
#23. When even the dictators of today appeal to reason, they mean that they possess the most tanks. They were rational enough to build them; others should be rational enough to yield to them.
Max Horkheimer
#24. Any approach to scientific inference which seeks to legitimize it and answer in reponse to complex uncertainty is, for me, a totalitarian parody of a would-be rational learning process.
Adrian Smith
#26. I try to be rational and suppress the hope that this is for real, but hope has a way of closing its eyes to reason and it just keeps growing.
Tammara Webber
#27. But it was important to be rational at all times, not just when calm.
Brandon Sanderson
#28. Man's struggle to be rational about himself, about his relationship to his own society and to other peoples and nations involves a constant search for understanding among all peoples and all cultures-a search that can only be effective when learning is pursued on a worldwide basis.
J. William Fulbright
#29. If we don't pray according to the needs of the heart, we repress our deepest longings. Our prayers may not be rational, and we may be quite aware of that, but if we repress our needs, then those unsaid prayers will fester.
Madeleine L'Engle
#30. If you want to feel good, be rational.
Ayn Rand
#31. We are irrational animals trained to be rational.
Ben Tolosa
#32. With men he can be rational and unaffected, but when he has ladies to please, every feature works.
Jane Austen
#33. My motrher says friendship should be slowly and carefully cultivated, like a rose garden, like a romance in a story. That every reason you care about someone should be rational.
She says I care too quickly.
But friendship has never been somenting I could do halfway
Betsy Cornwell
#34. Before you judge me too harshly, consider your own deepest fears - real or imagined. Actually, all fear is born of the imagination, which means that the danger we fear doesn't need to be rational or even real to be potent.
Richard Paul Evans
#35. From a rational standpoint, it might be expected that man should be far more willing to express financial confidence in his skills rather than risking his earnings on the mindless meanderings of chance. Experience, however, has strongly indicated the reverse proposition to hold true.
Richard Arnold Epstein
#36. Responsible: (1) Liable to be held to account for discharging one's duty; (2) Able to make moral or rational decisions on one's own and therefore answerable for one's behavior; (3) Able to be trusted or depended upon; reliable.
Erika Andersen
#37. A large plural society cannot be governed without recognizing that, transcending its plural interests, there is a rational order with a superior common law.
Walter Lippmann
#38. Men tend to try to struggle to be more rational and reduce things to simplicity more and are more impatient with ambiguity than women are.
John Crowley
#39. 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
#40. Strings of coincidence can strengthen us in the determination to follow our deepest intuitions even when they run counter to conventional wisdom and logic and cannot be subjected to rational explanation.
Robert Moss
#41. Your first mistake might be assuming that people are rational.
Your second mistake could be assuming that people are eager for change.
And the marketer's third mistake is assuming that once someone knows things the way you know them, they will choose what you chose.
Seth Godin
#42. Everything must be organized in the most rational way. The state won't accept excessive prices.
Vladimir Putin
#43. Do not think of knocking out another person's brains because he differs in opinion from you. It would be as rational to knock yourself on the head because you differ from yourself ten years ago.
Horace Mann
#44. Would men but generously snap our chains, and be content with rational fellowship instead of slavish obedience, they would find us more observant daughters, more affectionate sisters, more faithful wives, more reasonable mothers - in a word, better citizens
Mary Wollstonecraft
#45. It is far more rational to suppose that the courts were designed to be an intermediate body between the people and the legislature, in order, among other things, to keep the latter within the limits assigned to their authority.
Alexander Hamilton
#46. I consider creativity to be a more non-rational, subconscious thing. You have a relationship to your creativity - you can feed it with content, with some rational prodding and sleep and things like that, but the mechanisms by which your creativity work are largely unknown.
Ze Frank
#47. You cannot be a rational subject without veto-control on the level of mental action.
Thomas Metzinger
#48. Rational egoism is the only morality that is for human life; thus, it is the only morality that is actually moral. Those who choose to be rationally self-interested thereby make the most of their life - and they are morally good because of it.
Craig Biddle
#49. Man, and in general every rational being, exists as an end in himself, not merely as a means for arbitrary use by this or that will: he must in all his actions, whether they are directed to himself or to other rational beings, always be viewed at the same time as an end.
Immanuel Kant
#50. Discernment can be described as the ability to find the root of the matter, and it relies on intuition as well as rational thought.
John C. Maxwell
#51. If there be such a distinguishing excellency in divine things, tis rational to suppose that there may be such a thing as seeing it.
Jonathan Edwards
#52. Human decision-making is complex. On our own, our tendency to yield to short-term temptations, and even to addictions, may be too strong for our rational, long-term planning.
Peter Singer
#53. In questions of law or of fact conscience is very often confounded with opinion. No man's conscience can tell him the rights of another man; they must be known by rational investigation or historical inquiry.
Samuel Johnson
#54. The writing of an assay-type poem or a poem investigating perspective isn't an exercise of rational or strategic mind. Poems for me are acts of small or large desperation. They grapple with surfaces too steep to walk in any other way, yet which have to be traveled.
Jane Hirshfield
#55. Suddenly, madness was everywhere, and I was determined to learn about the impact it had on the way society evolves. I've always believed society to be a fundamentally rational thing, but what if it isn't? What if it is built on insanity?
Jon Ronson
#56. ...we'd be okay. Not perfect, not entirely healthy, not even rational where our love for one another was concerned. Just okay. Merely sufficient, at best. But there'd be only acceptance - never shame - in being two divine failures as we emerged from slumber, perfectly flawed, and wide awake.
AngstGoddess003
#57. If women are supposed to be less rational and more emotional at the beginning of our menstrual cycle when the female hormone is at its lowest level, then why isn't it logical to say that, in those few days, women behave the most like the way men behave all month long?
Gloria Steinem
#58. 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
#59. what was rational about a midlife crisis? Weren't they always a little absurd? They were beginning the next phase of their lives together. She was not afraid of it. Let it come, she thought. He'll be in good hands.
Matthew Thomas
#60. Man is a rational animal. But that does not mean that he is a reasonable animal. It means only that he has reason, and therefore can misuse it. If he had not reason, he could not be unreasonable. But he has, and is.
Frank Sheed
#61. The future cannot be predicted, but futures can be invented. It was man's ability to invent which has made human society what it is. The mental processes of inventions are still mysterious. They are rational but not logical, that is to say, not deductive.
Dennis Gabor
#62. That rational voice was right to be frightened. There's something in us that is very much attracted to madness. Everyone who looks off the edge of a tall building has felt a faint, morbid urge to jump.
Stephen King
#63. But it is strange how many rational beings believe the ultimate truths of the universe to be reducible to patterns on a blackboard.
Frederick Pollock
#64. Even rational, data-driven scientists could be sent into prolonged states of hysteria when presented with evidence that their favorite foods might be killing them.
T. Colin Campbell
#65. We were made to be neither cerebral men nor visceral men, but Men. Not beasts nor angels but Men - things at once rational and animal.
C.S. Lewis
#66. A man may be hard to persuade by rational argument while he is easily swayed by a display of passion, even if it is feigned.
Yukio Mishima
#67. Rational optimism is required of anyone who hopes to be a survivor,
Dean Koontz
#68. For they have no conception how a rational creature can be compelled, but only advised, or exhorted; because no person can disobey reason, without giving up his claim to be a rational creature.
Jonathan Swift
#69. I believe, or sense, that the universe has not been constructed from a purely mechanical, logical, rational point of view, but there is a magic afoot in the universe, that God can be looked at as a kind of a magician in which we get to perform tricks ourselves, without knowing that we're doing so.
Fred Alan Wolf
#70. To be engrossed by something outside ourselves is a powerful antidote for the rational mind, the mind that so frequently has its head up its own ass.
Anne Lamott
#71. What's really great about Buddhism is its rational, informal quality. Coming from my experience of growing up a Catholic, I found Buddhism to be refreshingly easygoing and forgiving.
Matt Dillon
#72. We are so accustomed to the apparently rational nature of our world that we can scarcely imagine anything happening that cannot be explained by common sense. The primitive man confronted by a shock of this kind would not doubt his sanity; he would think of fetishes, spirits or gods
Carl Jung
#73. You're damn right we need a rational code of morality and ethics. But not much progress can be made in that direction while we've still got a majority ranting about gods, devils, souls, and absolute morality, and using an ancient book written by ignorant nomads as a guide.
Doug Graham
#74. This tendency to defend a belief structure is true in all cases, even the rational. Never underestimate our ability to convince ourselves of what we wish to be true, especially if we have invested time and money in our beliefs.
Gudjon Bergmann
#75. If you don't act now, the day is not far, that this beautiful planet of yours, which you call home, shall be turned into a dry barren wasteland by the blood-sucking fundamentalists.
Abhijit Naskar
#76. It wasn't idealism that made me, from the beginning, want a more secure and rational society. It was an intellectual judgment, to which I still hold. When I was young its name was socialism. We can be deflected by names. But the need was absolute, and is still absolute.
Raymond Williams
#77. Why was the judgement of the disapproving so valuable? Who said that their good opinions tended to be any more rational than those of generally pleasant people?
Shannon Hale
#78. Beauty is an ultimate value - something that we pursue for its own sake, and for the pursuit of which no further reason need be given. Beauty should therefore be compared to truth and goodness, one member of a trio of ultimate values which justify our rational inclinations.
Roger Scruton
#79. Every sane person has to find every day some manner of accommodating the impossible, some way of covering up for the failures of the rational world. This might actually be a reasonable definition of sanity.
Robert Boswell
#80. I think we're going back to the way things use to be, before a bunch of European intellectuals in tights decided to draw a line between what's rational and what's not. I don't think our ancestors thought the distinction was necessary.
(pg 370)
G. Willow Wilson
#81. No crime can ever be defended on rational grounds.
Livy
#82. While the constitution continues to be read, and its principles known, the states, must, by every rational man, be considered as essential component parts of the union; and therefore the idea of sacrificing the former to the latter is totally inadmissible.
Alexander Hamilton
#83. Those who think themselves to be civilized are not always particularly intelligent, or rational.
Sara Donati
#84. Intellectual men who quickly wolf down whatever nourishment is necessary for their bodies with a kind of disdain, may be very rational and have a noble intelligence, but they are not men of taste.
Charles-Augustin De Coulomb
#85. Analytic and romantic understanding should be united at a basic level. Reassimilate the passions from which the rational mind fled.
Robert M. Pirsig
#86. We can at least try to understand our own motives, passions, and prejudices, so as to be conscious of what we are doing when we apeal to those of others. This is very difficult, because our own prejudice and emotional bias always seems to us so rational.
T. S. Eliot
#87. Is life less thrilling if your neighbors are rational, if they don't bomb your power stations whenever they feel you need to be admonished? Is it less rousing if they don't rattle your windows and nerves with indiscriminate sonic booms just because they can?
Rabih Alameddine
#88. Nonsense which it would be shameful for a reasonable being to write, speak or hear spoken can be sung or listened to by that same rational being with pleasure and even with a kind of intellectual conviction.
Aldous Huxley
#89. A god or revelation capable of proof or rational verification by an autonomous man would be worthless.
Greg L. Bahnsen
#90. Even the most brilliant and rational person, in the heat of passion, seems to be absolutely and completely divorced from the person he thought he was.
Dan Ariely
#91. Most men either compromise or drop their greatest talents and start running after, what they perceive to be, a more reasonable success, and somewhere in between they end up with a discontented settlement. Safety is indeed stability, but it is not progression.
Criss Jami
#92. Poor thing. If she wasn't being thrown into trees or attacked by his kin, she was being mystically flung to the ground by his old, terrifying great-great-aunt.
It was really going to be impossible to talk to Braith in a rational, calm manner after all this.
G.A. Aiken
#93. The Bible is clear: Truth exists. It can be known. And when we ground our beliefs in it, we are rational.
Patty Houser
#94. 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
#95. A rational human being of the civilized world would be like the swan that can draw the milk from a mixture of milk and water, leaving aside the water.
Abhijit Naskar
#96. At best the principles that economists have supposed the choices of rational individuals to satisfy can be presented as guidelines for us to consider when we make our decisions.
John Rawls
#97. Courts of law, and all the paraphernalia and folly of law cannot be found in a rational state of society.
Robert Owen
#98. The paralyzing fear of being lost is fed solely by the irrational fear that we will never be found.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
#99. Be as beneficent as the sun or the sea, but if your rights as a rational being are trenched on, die on the first inch of your territory.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#100. 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
