Irrational Quotes

Nothing is perfect. Life is messy. Relationships are complex. Outcomes are uncertain. People are irrational.
Hugh Mackay

Life, Nothing, Perfect

Having a child is surely the most beautifully irrational act that two people in love can commit.
Bill Cosby

Love, Two, Child

It is by no means an irrational fancy that, in a future existence, we shall look upon what we think our present existence, as a dream.
Edgar Allan Poe

Future, Dream, Means

Nothing defines humans better than their willingness to do irrational things in the pursuit of phenomenally unlikely payoffs. This is the principle behind lotteries, dating, and religion.
Scott Adams

Religion, Dating, Nothing

There's no evidence whatsoever that men are more rational than women. Both sexes seem to be equally irrational.
Albert Ellis

Women, Men, Both

Great art is as irrational as great music. It is mad with its own loveliness.
George Jean Nathan

Music, Great, Art

What lingers from the parent's individual past, unresolved or incomplete, often becomes part of her or his irrational parenting.
Virginia Satir

Parenting, Past, Her

The irrational in the human has something about it altogether repulsive and terrible, as we see in the maniac, the miser, the drunkard or the ape.
George Santayana

Human, Terrible, Drunkard

It is not to be forgotten that what we call rational grounds for our beliefs are often extremely irrational attempts to justify our instincts.
Thomas Huxley

Often, Call, Forgotten

If something is irrational, that means it won't work. It's usually unrealistic.
Albert Ellis

Work, Means, Won

Since all life is futility, then the decision to exist must be the most irrational of all.
Emile M. Cioran

Life, Decision, Since

Bin Laden does reprehensible activities, and we should surely take care of that by killing him as soon as we can. But he's not an irrational man. He's a very worthy enemy. He's an enemy to worry about.
Michael Scheuer

Care, Enemy, Him

Fear of serious injury alone cannot justify oppression of free speech and assembly. Men feared witches and burnt women. It is the function of speech to free men from the bondage of irrational fears.
Louis D. Brandeis

Women, Men, Fear

I have been primarily interested in how and why ordinary people do unusual things, things that seem alien to their natures. Why do good people sometimes act evil? Why do smart people sometimes do dumb or irrational things?
Philip Zimbardo

Good, Smart, Evil

Nine-tenths of tactics are certain, and taught in books: but the irrational tenth is like the kingfisher flashing across the pool, and that is the test of generals.
T. E. Lawrence

Books, Test, Taught

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

Life, Control, Rather

The fact that logic cannot satisfy us awakens an almost insatiable hunger for the irrational.
A. N. Wilson

Cannot, Fact, Almost

The more I work with the body, keeping my assumptions in a temporary state of reservation, the more I appreciate and sympathize with a given disease. The body no longer appears as a sick or irrational demon, but as a process with its own inner logic and wisdom.
George MacDonald

Work, Wisdom, Sick

Poetry involves the mysteries of the irrational perceived through rational words.
Vladimir Nabokov

Poetry, Words, Through

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

Poetry, Deep, Body

The more irrational of us are worried about the millennium ending - as if a date would really matter.
Sting

Matter, Ending, Date

I think life's an irrational obsession.
Sean Penn

Life, Obsession

I think it would be very foolish not to take the irrational seriously.
Jeanette Winterson

Seriously, Foolish

To criticize a person for their race is manifestly irrational and ridiculous, but to criticize their religion, that is a right. That is a freedom.
Rowan Atkinson

Religion, Freedom, Person

I see no reason to have my shirts ironed. It's irrational.
Barry Commoner

Racists are irrational and illogical in their attempts to justify their prejudices.
Sargent Shriver

Justify, Prejudices, Racists

As repressed sadists are supposed to become policemen or butchers so those with an irrational fear of life become publishers.
Cyril Connolly

Life, Fear, Become

You have to think an awful lot about your motivations or people's behavioral intentions or what their body language can indicate or what's really going on or what makes people sometimes do, sometimes, the irrational things they do.
Ron Silver

Sometimes, Makes, Body

Today mythical thinking has fallen into disrepute; we often dismiss it as irrational and self-indulgent. But the imagination is also the faculty that has enabled scientists to bring new knowledge to light and to invent technology that has made us immeasurably more effective.
Karen Armstrong

Knowledge, Technology, Today

I have irrational fears, and they all go back to losing my father as a kid. I've never gotten over it.
Tim Allen

Father, Losing, Kid

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