Top 100 Irrational Quotes
#1. What we need to understand is, one, that there are market failures; and two, that there are things like asset bubbles and irrational exuberance. There are periods of booms, bubbles, and manias. These things, if left to themselves, can lead to crashes, to busts, to panics.
Nouriel Roubini
#2. 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
#3. He feels an irrational dislike taking root, and he tries to dismiss it, because he prefers his dislikes rational, but after all, these circumstances are extreme ...
Hilary Mantel
#4. At that moment, she cannot think of a more reckless, irrational thing than choosing to become a parent.
Khaled Hosseini
#5. I knew all the time I was going to get through the war. It was completely irrational, a silly idea, but I was not going to lie down and get myself killed. I was going to get out of it.
Abraham Pais
#6. 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
#7. My dad likes to tease me over this. We weren't there at Fenway, and it wasn't a consequential game, but Trot Nixon let a ball go through his legs, and from that moment on, I hated Trot Nixon. Really irrational. Based in nothing. But did not like him.
Katie Nolan
#8. There are no tragedies in life, only violent coup d'etats on the state of irrational optimism
Dean Cavanagh
#9. The wind shifts like this:
Like a human without illusions,
Who still feels irrational things within her.
Wallace Stevens
#11. Though philosophers like to define poetry as irrational fancy, for us it is practical, humorous, reasonable way of being ourselves.
Robert Graves
#12. Stripping away the irrational, the illogical, and the impossible, I am left with atheism. I can live with that.
Mark Twain
#13. This relative freedom of a hero does not violate the strict specificity of the construction, just as the specificity of a mathematical formula is not violated by the presence of irrational or transfinite quantities.
Mikhail Bakhtin
#14. In Scripture, faith involves placing trust in what you have reason to believe is true. Faith is not a blind, irrational leap into the dark. So faith and reason cooperate on a biblical view of faith. They are not intrinsically hostile.
J.P. Moreland
#15. Everyone declares that love is irrational, and yet everytime this statement is proven correct, they profess amazement. They seem to assume that love will make an exception in their case. It never does.
Jessica Zafra
#16. No matter how educated you are, no matter how irrational it seems, you will follow a glimmer of hope. The National Socialist German Workers Party, it was that ray of light. Nothing else was working to fix Germany
Jodi Picoult
#17. ... Science... denude(s) all religious beliefs... denigrating them as irrational forms of superstition or myth regardless of their intrinsic rationality or value.
Nicholas Gane
#18. There were many, many fine reasons not to go, but attempting to climb Everest is an intrinsically irrational act - a triumph of desire over sensibility. Any person who would seriously consider it is almost by definition beyond the sway of reasoned argument.
Jon Krakauer
#19. Many people give the appearance of progress by shedding the prejudices and irrational postulates of one generation only to acquire those of the next.
T. S. Eliot
#20. It is a strange fancy to suppose that science can bring reason to an irrational world, when all it can ever do is give another twist to a normal madness.
John N. Gray
#21. I've realized now that hope almost never goes together with reason. It's something quite irrational and instinctive.
Vasily Grossman
#22. 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
#23. The parts of my new job that filled me with abject and irrational fear, that twisted me into all kinds of knots, were the raw emotions of those left alive. It was the living who were the great unknown.
Scot Gardner
#24. Power on the one side, fear on the other, are always the buttresses on which irrational authority is built.
Erich Fromm
#25. For once, I wished I wasn't so broken, so Rhian had a best friend who was strong and not afraid to love, to hold up as an example of what was possible. Instead, I was her excuse that she wasn't being irrational. I was her enabler.
Samantha Young
#26. 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
#27. For some reason I've always had an irrational love for New York. There's no reason that you would necessarily like it on paper. It's very expensive.
Woody Allen
#28. The Greeks were the first intellectualists. In a world where the irrational had played the chief role, they came forward as the protagonists of the mind.
Edith Hamilton
#29. Division may be rational or irrational. Dominance either seems or is justified. Difference is.
Catharine A. MacKinnon
#30. WHAT IS IT about FREE! that's so enticing? Why do we have an irrational urge to jump for a FREE! item, even when it's not what we really want?
Dan Ariely
#31. Rational thinking is good, but irrational thinking creates wonders.
Debasish Mridha
#32. Engaging irrational people with rational arguments is irrational.
Grant McLachlan
#33. I'm embarrassed to admit that I'm still scared of the dark. I have to have a light on all night. It's completely irrational, and my son is the same. I just hate the dark.
Louise Nurding
#34. What happens if fully rational politicians compete for the support of irrational voters - specifically, voters with irrational beliefs about the effects of various policies? It is a recipe for mendacity.
Bryan Caplan
#35. Writing fiction is fundamentally an irrational act.
Dale Peck
#36. The insane have achieved political respectability while the sane act too good for it all. The irrational celebrate while the rational act bored and above-it-all.
Maureen Dowd
#37. Patriotism is as fierce as a fever, pitiless as the grave, blind as a stone, and irrational as a headless hen.
Ambrose Bierce
#38. I would think that you are more fluent with the rational. It has its appeal. But the irrational permits a greater exercise of ... shall we say, power.
Alan Lightman
#39. Love: I recognize the emotion for what it is, an irrational self-destructive impulse, which is disguised as joy.
Nikola Tesla
#40. 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
#41. Superstition is foolish, childish, primitive and irrational, but how much does it cost you to knock on wood?
Judith Viorst
#42. I think life's an irrational obsession.
Sean Penn
#43. I started in business journalism from the outside, so when I started writing about markets and business, I was struck by the fact that markets seemed to work well even though people are often irrational, lack good information and are not perfect in the way they think about decisions.
James Surowiecki
#44. For too long we have placed an irrational burden upon our oceans by demanding only a narrow selection of species, which has led to unsustainable fishing and economic practices. If we instead ask the ocean what it is willing to supply, we engage in an inherently more sustainable relationship.
Barton Seaver
#45. They did it for love, and sometimes love makes us do the irrational .. even the inexcusable.
Melissa De La Cruz
#46. 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. Mourning something that never was - my dashed hopes, my dashed dreams, and my soured expectations.
E.L. James
#47. 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
#48. 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
#49. I believe our concept of romantic love is irrational, impossible to fulfill and the cause of many broken homes. No human being can maintain that rarefied atmosphere of 'true love'.
Rita Mae Brown
#50. For people of color - especially African Americans - the idea that racist cops might frame members of their community is no abstract notion, let alone an exercise in irrational conspiracy theorizing. Rather, it speaks to a social reality about which blacks are acutely aware.
Tim Wise
#51. 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
#52. There are irrational fears. If you see a woman wearing a hijab and fear is your first thought, something's really wrong.
Hamza Yusuf
#53. He found insanity no excuse, however, for irrational behavior.
Brandon Sanderson
#54. All people, whatever they are doing, no matter how crazy or irrational it seems ... it is how they need to act - from their perspective.
Nikki Sex
#55. Art is magic, not logic. This craze for the logical spirit in irrational shape is part of the present harmful mania for uniformity ...
Edith Sitwell
#56. 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
#57. 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
#58. 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
#59. Great art is as irrational as great music. It is mad with its own loveliness.
George Jean Nathan
#60. 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
#61. Most of the time it is a good job and a good honour to fight against people's values, because most of the time people's values are irrational and absurd!
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#62. The irrational, the human nostalgia, and the absurd that is born of their encounter - these are the three characters in the drama that must necessarily end with all the logic of which an existence is capable
Albert Camus
#63. We must not demonstrate any arrogance, and we must refrain from any irrational or undemocratic behavior.
Chen Shui-bian
#64. Customers perceive service in their own unique, idiosyncratic, emotional, irrational, end-of-the-day, and totally human terms. Perception is all there is!
Tom Peters
#65. There is no such thing as a rational world and a separate irrational world, but only one world containing both.
Robert Musil
#66. Having a child is surely the most beautifully irrational act that two people in love can commit.
Bill Cosby
#67. Through humour, we see in what seems rational, the irrational; in what seems important, the unimportant
Charlie Chaplin
#68. I feel that the time is always right to do what is right. Where progress for the Negro in America is concerned, there is a tragic misconception of time among whites. They seem to cherish a strange, irrational notion that something in the very flow of time will cure all ills.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#69. Racism is not simply about one man's irrational hatred of another but his self-hatred, doubting his own moral goodness and purpose.
Michael R. French
#70. As for the screening process, we already do that for adoptive/foster parents. Why do we cling to the irrational belief that biological parents are necessarily competent parents - in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary?
Anonymous
#71. Who is more irrational, the guy who believes in a God he can't see, or a guy who's offended by a God he doesn't believe in?
Brad Stine
#72. If one's patriotism is merely instinctive it is irrational and irresponsible, and consequently a danger to one's country.
Paul Monroe
#73. 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
#74. A magical universe was so terrifying because it was so irrational. There was no cause and effect anywhere.
Edith Hamilton
#75. But he had a niggling horror Lily might expire if he wasn't there watching over her. He knew it was irrational. But the feeling was overwhelming.
Grace Walton
#76. Poetry is a form of necessary speech ... I have sought to restore the aura of sacred practice that accompanies true poetic creation, to honor both the rational and the irrational elements of poetry.
Edward Hirsch
#77. The poetry of a people comes from the deep recesses of the unconscious, the irrational and the collective body of our ancestral memories.
Margaret Walker
#78. Maybe he should have kept quiet about if he knew they couldn't stand it.
Is that what you do?
Caryl Churchill
#79. Those who fail to see that population growth and climate change are two sides of the same coin are either ignorant or hiding from the truth. These two huge environmental problems are inseparable and to discuss one while ignoring the other is irrational.
James Lovelock
#80. A rational reaction against irrational excesses and vagaries of skepticism may * * * readily degenerate into the rival folly of credulity.
William E. Gladstone
#81. I used to always prefer to text, and in fact got indignant when people called. This was totally irrational.
Matt Mullenweg
#82. It's hard to confine an irrational woman in a rational pattern, so I had no idea really what was in her mind.
Leslie Ford
#83. Every discovery contains an irrational element or a creative intuition.
Karl Popper
#84. So that, in effect, religion, which should most distinguish us from beasts, and ought most peculiarly to elevate us, as rational creatures, above brutes, is that wherein men often appear most irrational, and more senseless than beasts themselves.
John Locke
#85. People are irrational. What I want to do is let's take the irrational aspects out of it and let's just break this down. And you and I, let's go and see if we can't master this thing, a few steps at a time without giving up your day job, without having to give up your whole life.
Tony Robbins
#86. Fear and anger are a threat to justice. They can infect a community, a state, or a nation, and make us blind, irrational, and dangerous.
Bryan Stevenson
#87. 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
#88. Often, when you look at history, at least through the lens that many of us have looked at history - high school and college courses - a lot of the color gets bled out of it. You're left with a time period that does not look as strange and irrational as the time you're actually living through.
Karen Joy Fowler
#89. Strong moral arguments exist for why we should often try to ignore stereotypes or override them. But we shouldn't assume they represent some irrational quirk of the unconscious mind. In fact, they're largely the consequence of the mind's attempt to make a rational decision.
Paul Bloom
#90. It seems like topsy-turvyland to make reason serve the irrational. Yet that is just what it has always done, and ought always to do.
Walter Lippmann
#91. Forced to define 'irrational subconscious,' I would say that it is a small padded room inside all of us, where the only furnishing is a small card table, and the only thing on the card table is a revolver loaded with flexible bullets.
Stephen King
#92. 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
#93. What we understand is that society must allow room for the irrational, in healthy balance with the rational.
Robin Robertson
#94. It was an irrational fear. But when had fear ever been rational?
Veronica Rossi
#95. People with OCD including myself, realize that their seemingly uncontrollable behavior is irrational, but they feel unable to stop it.
Abhijit Naskar
#96. They say it's a dangerous experiment to include dreams (actual dreams or otherwise) in the fiction you write. Only a handful of writers - and I'm talking the most talented - are able to pull off the irrational synthesis you find in dreams.
Haruki Murakami
#98. I was still rather young, and I hadn't thought it through, how irrational, how unpredictable is the attraction between people, how fatal its current.
Magda Szabo
#99. You can't stay here any more. My fears have been irrational and they've forced me to make unwise decisions and accept the unacceptable.
Dorothy Koomson
#100. These 3 topics will always generate 100+ comments of irrational/ridiculous people: Taxes, tipping, and spending on weddings.
Ramit Sethi
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