Irrationally Quotes

You want me to be rational. The most rational thing is the machine. Go to the machines. All their separate parts work together. But I live with no purpose, irrationally. ~ Jonas Mekas

I never seemed to like the spring for what it was; I always loved it for what it might have been. In the head. In the heart of hearts. It is in my ability, I think, to love something fully only if I am naturally, compulsively, irrationally drawn to it. ~ Anne Sexton

One of the many difficult things about women was that they tended to pick the most unsuitable times to tell you something they considered to be important, and then became irrationally upset when you failed to remember it. ~ Ruth Downie

The Mind is not talking to us but by means of us. Its narrative passes through us and its sorrow infuses us irrationally. As Plato discerned, there is a streak of the irrational in the World Soul. ~ Philip K. Dick

Evidentialism, the view that holds that a belief is rationally justified or acceptable only if it is held on the basis of good evidence, has been rejected by many in the field of epistemology, in which such questions are probed deeply, and this rejection is for good reasons. The fact is that for all our talk about evidence, most of us would have a difficult time producing evidence for many of the things we believe and take for granted. We have neither the time nor the resources to track down such evidence, so we simply accept most of our beliefs on the word of others or because we heard them in news reports or documentaries, read them in books, or received them from other sources of information. Are we acting irrationally for holding beliefs in this way? It hardly seems so. ~ Paul Chamberlain

Irrationally, Mosca felt she should have inherited her father's intimate knowledge of Mandelion. His throwaway comments about the city should have magically meshed in her mind, giving her a faultless instinct for finding her way around. ~ Frances Hardinge

Mental illnesses are so strange. A physical problem we can understand. But when the mind works irrationally, well, by its very definition, the rational mind cannot truly relate. ~ Harlan Coben

Bruce Wayne's childhood experience of losing his parents during a random back-alley mugging remains the primary origin story for the Batman character, but other than irrationally (or, more accurately: insanely) motivating his desire to fight crime, the trauma seems to have had little discernable effect on his character. ~ Dan Hassler-Forest

Love makes people irrational, so write irrationally great characters in love. ~ Erik Christian

Integration proceeds by just the opposite route: a deliberate heightening of every organic function; a release of impulses from circumstances that irrationally thwarted them; richer and more complex patterns of activity; an esthetic heightening of anticipated realizations; a steady lengthening of the future; a faith in cosmic perspectives. ~ Lewis Mumford

You have a big heart. I would never trade your mammoth, irrationally generous heart for a smaller, more frugal one. I love every square kilometer of it." A laugh tumbled from my lips and I lowered to the couch. "Really? It's that big?" "It should have its own zip code. And it's my third favorite thing about you. ~ Penny Reid

Human nature is still, to a very great extent, regarded irrationally because it is pleasant to regard people as objects of praise and blame. ~ Bertrand Russell

Like other kinds of intelligence, the storyteller's is partly
natural, partly trained. It is composed of several qualities, most
of which, in normal people, are signs of either immaturity or
incivility: wit (a tendency to make irreverent connections);
obstinacy and a tendency toward churlishness (a refusal to
believe what all sensible people know is true); childishness (an
apparent lack of mental focus and serious life purpose, a fondness
for daydreaming and telling pointless lies, a lack of proper
respect, mischievousness, an unseemly propensity for crying
over nothing); a marked tendency toward oral or anal fixation
or both (the oral manifested by excessive eating, drinking,
smoking, and chattering; the anal by nervous cleanliness and
neatness coupled with a weird fascination with dirty jokes);
remarkable powers of eidetic recall, or visual memory (a usual
feature of early adolescence and mental retardation); a strange
admixture of shameless playfulness and embarrassing earnestness,
the latter often heightened by irrationally intense feelings
for or against religion; patience like a cat's; a criminal streak of
cunning; psychological instability; recklessness, impulsiveness,
and improvidence; and finally, an inexplicable and incurable
addiction to stories, written or oral, bad or good. ~ John Gardner

Einstein was arguing against quantum theory just as irrationally as his opponents had argued against relativity theory. Einstein remained adamant (he remained adamant to the end of his life where quantum theory was concerned). ~ Richard Rhodes

You're not messing about in Iain's garden, are you?" I felt irrationally guilty. "I just pulled a few weeds." "I warned her," Vivien said, in self-defense, "but she didn't listen." "Well," Geoff gave me a faintly pitying look, "what's done is done. We'll make sure you have a proper funeral, at any rate. ~ Susanna Kearsley

I had to overcome many things, many people telling me no. If you want it, and you believe in it, you have to do it. And I know it's silly, and I know I'm kind of irrationally optimistic, but you have to be and you can't really have another plan, because you're going to fall back on it. ~ Crystal Reed

I was always one of these people who is irrationally moved by stupid pop songs. ~ Will Sheff

Don't be upset. Don't listen to me. I only meant that I am jealous of a dark, unconscious element, something irrational, unfathomable. I am jealous of your toilet articles, of the drops of sweat on your skin, of the germs in the air you breathe which could get into your blood and poison you. And I am jealous of Komarovsky, as if he were an infectious disease. Someday he will take you away, just as certainly as death will someday separate us. I know this must seem obscure and confused, but I can't say it more clearly. I love you madly, irrationally, infinitely. ~ Boris Pasternak

When you are irrationally irrational you may find that life is magical. ~ Debasish Mridha

I feel ... very protective of you. Irrationally so? Yeah, maybe. But it's just the way it has to be. I promise you, once you realize all I want to give you, you'll like it. Hell you'll love it. This is us, and this is permanent. ~ L. H. Cosway

Irrationally, I think, Will You Marry Me? Four words. I Want a Divorce. Four words. I would like time to count the letters as well, but there is not time. ~ Suzanne Finnamore

Page 117 Sam says "You learn to live with it, with them. Because they do stay with you, even if they're not living, breathing people anymore. It's not the same crushing grief you felt at first, the kind that swamps you and makes you want to cry in the wrong places and irrationally angry with all the idiots who are still alive when the person you love is dead. It's just something you learn to accommodate. Like adapting around a hole. I don't know. It's like you become ... a doughnut instead of a bun." page 117 ~ Jojo Moyes

If you have to ask someone to change, to tell you they love you, to bring wine to dinner, to call you when they land, you can't afford to be with them. It's not worth the price, even though, just like the Tiffany catalog, no one tells you what the price is. You set it yourself, and if you're lucky it's reasonable. You have a sense of when you're about to go bankrupt. Your own sense of self-worth takes the wheel and says, Enough of this shit. Stop making excuses. No one's that busy at work. No one's allergic to whipped cream. There are too cell phones in Sweden. But most people don't get lucky. They get human. They get crushes. This means you irrationally mortgage what little logic you own to pay for this one thing. This relationship is an impulse buy, and you'll figure out if it's worth it later. ~ Sloane Crosley

I am, I must confess, an obsessive and superstitious letter-writer. When I am troubled I will write any long letter rather than make a telephone call. This is perhaps because I invest letters with magical power. To desiderate something in a letter is, I often irrationally feel, tantamount to bringing it about. A letter is a barrier, a reprieve, a charm against the world, an almost infallible method of acting at a distance. (And, it must be admitted, of passing the buck.) It is a way of bidding time to stop. ~ Iris Murdoch

When faced with a seemingly insurmountable problem... your only option is to act swiftly, some might even say irrationally. Removing the most dangerous elements first... and methodically attacking each subsequent challenge in a separate, but deliberate manner. ~ Jeph Loeb

I'm interested in pitches that have compelling people and ideas at the core - and a good news peg certainly doesn't hurt. We look for stories that are solutions-oriented, but not irrationally upbeat, from writers with a strong voice. For LadyJournos, where I'm curating not editing. ~ Ann Friedman

Flowers make me irrationally happy. ~ Alexa Von Tobel

In fact, all the additional knowledge gained by an irrationally constituted society may but enlarge and enhance the powers of death and destruction. ~ Paul A. Baran

Orwell was the sort of man who was full of grievances. He was very loyal. Once he got to know you, he was extremely loyal. He hated passionately and irrationally. ~ George Woodcock

Clearly, we have entered a world very different from the world of modernity as previously described. The subject/object distinction has broken down. In this world, foundationalism is a washout;49 the old distinction between fact and opinion is disappearing from view. The quest for certainty, precision, and ahistorical knowledge of objective truth is judged impossible. "Truth" is not an objective entity; the classic dikes between fact and opinion are springing leaks. Of course, not all the tenets of modernity have been sacrificed. Irrationally, philosophical naturalism (for most advocates of this radical hermeneutics), still holds sway; moreover, I must still say something about the place of science in this new model. But some variation of what once held the status of a minority report advanced only by a few intellectuals is now adopted almost everywhere. ~ D. A. Carson

Nuclear power must be dealt with irrationally ... Nuclear plants are carcinogens. Let's get that story out ... Their lies will catch up to them. We need endless Chernobyl reminders. ~ Ralph Nader

The possibility that stock value in aggregate can become irrationally high is contrary to the hard-form "efficient market" theory that many of you once learned as gospel from your mistaken professors of yore. Your mistaken professors were too much influenced by "rational man" models of human behavior from economics and too little by "foolish man" models from psychology and real-world experience. ~ Charlie Munger

I attacked those Western playwrights who use their influence and affluence to preach to the world the nihilistic doctrine that life is pointless and irrationally destructive, and that there is nothing we can do about it. Until everyone is fed, clothed, housed and taught, until human beings have equal leisure to contemplate the overwhelming fact of mortality, we should not (I argued) indulge in the luxury of privileged despair. ~ Kenneth Tynan

To commit to the present moment is to accept our inability to control the future and accept that many of our fears and reactions are just what they are, thoughts and emotions that are irrationally internalized. We will never be completely void of the temptations to look into the future when we are in the present; however, one must come to the understanding that by looking too far off into the future, we taint the future by creating an artificial expectation of what the future should hold, and are emotionally drained when it holds something else. Focus on the present, and you will come to have more control over the future naturally. ~ Forrest Curran

Our society at large has lost its ability to distinguish between opinion and fact, and between a threat and an opinion. This is due to the fact that many people are focused on making their opinions into facts - which causes them to react irrationally when others express different opinions, which they perceive as a threat to their personal reality. ~ Zita Steele

If you have a very commanding argument that you cannot refute, not to accept the argument is to act irrationally. ~ Robert F. Almeder

I act irrationally, I defy the odds, I engage when others would run. I look for trouble, I seek chaos, it is a burden. ~ Rosie O'Donnell

It's only natural for the girl you're crushing on to be in love with someone else. Since you're in love with her, she sparkles in your eyes. That's why people fall so irrationally in love. ~ Myself

There are times in relationships, when we blow it. In spite of our best intentions, we wrong others. Our jealousy makes us feel inferior. Our own wounds cause us to act irrationally. Our insecurities lead us to say hurtful things.
And so, we find ourselves acting out. In short, we cloud our lives with muddy water. We trash around the pond of our emotions until things are just too messed up to figure out how to fix them.
It is in the times of muddy water that we learn how to wait it out. We have to wait until the mud settles. We must wait until we can clearly see where the water of our lives ends and the mud of misplaced emotions begin.
Have the patience to wait until the mud settles. Be still until the water is clear. In clear water, words come. Right actions reveal them selves and healing appears.
From the Devotional A Word in Season ~ Stella Payton

What do you call an electorate that seems prone to acting out irrationally, is full of inchoate rage, and is constantly throwing fits and tantrums? You call it teenaged. ~ Graydon Carter

Many innovations fail because consumers irrationally overvalue the old while companies irrationally overvalue the new. ~ Nir Eyal

All I'm arguing for really is that we should have a conversation where the best ideas really thrive, where there's no taboo against criticizing bad ideas, and where everyone who shows up, in order to get their ideas entertained, has to meet some obvious burdens of intellectual rigor and self-criticism and honesty - and when people fail to do that, we are free to stop listening to them. What religion has had up until this moment is a different set of rules that apply only to it, which is you have to respect my religious certainty even though I'm telling you I arrived at it irrationally. ~ Sam Harris

Because as far as she was concerned, there was no in-between: She wanted all or nothing, illogically, irrationally, even though something inside her knew that nothing would be too hard, and all was impossible. ~ Jennifer E. Smith

You learn to live with it, with them. Because they do stay with you, even if they're not living, breathing people any more.
It's not the same crushing grief you felt at first, the kind that swamps you, and makes you want to cry in the wrong places, and get irrationally angry with all the idiots who are still alive when the person you love is dead.
It's just something you learn to accommodate.
Like adapting around a hole. I don't know. It's like you become ... a doughnut instead of a bun ~ Jojo Moyes

In principle, junk bonds are basically useful, but they are used excessively and irrationally, notably in takeovers. ~ Maurice Allais

No one actually needs another person or another person's love to survive. Love is when we have irrationally convinced ourselves that we do. ~ Gabrielle Zevin

This proletarianization of the lower salaried bourgeoisie is accompanied by an excess in the opposite direction: the irrationally high pay of top managers and bankers, a level of remuneration that is economically irrational since, as investigations in the US have demonstrated, it tends to be inversely proportional to the company's success. ~ Slavoj Zizek

I saw his eyes close and figured he'd probably be asleep immediately. I felt irrationally envious of him - someone who could just drift off, someone whose thoughts didn't keep him up. Someone like I'd once been. ~ Anonymous

The great scientist dares to differ from accepted 'facts' - think irrationally - let the artist do likewise. ~ Edward Weston

If there's no ethically correct solution, act irrationally. ~ Sergei Lukyanenko

If you can create a weapon that causes enough fear the fear itself can cause damage that's as paralyzing and destructive as any physical device like a bomb or a laser gun. Fear can make decent people behave irrationally and violently. ~ Patricia Cornwell

Arrogant S.O.B.s run the world. A performer can never have too much self-confidence. The best in every field are likely to strike most people as irrationally confident, but that's how they got to the top. ~ John Eliot

This no-land was exactly the place in which my self was pushed and started to float without points of reference, and at the same time to resist the forced choice of only one identity and the erosion of my plural cultural belonging. More then ever before, certainly more than at any other time of my geographical and cultural dislocation due to the experience of migration, I was convinced of the necessity to reinforce my pertinence not to the single reality, but to a multiplicity of spaces. As never before, I kept remembering irrationally the shape of my country still entire and unbroken, without the scars of the new borders drawn on a mainly historically incorrect 'ethnic basis'. My imagined country was visible only from the window of a plane flying over the Balkans, as only from the air are the new states' borders and walls of ethnic separation invisible. In my stubborn conviction I was keeping all the scattered pieces together as a mental map of my non-existent homeland. ~ Melita Richter Malabotta

No woman had ever made his wolf pace restlessly. No woman had ever made him feel an inexplicable desire to behave irrationally, all for the sake of making her smile. No woman had ever made him want to be a better man, one who would spill blood to protect what he loved. No woman had ever incited the hunter in him. No woman had ever denied him. Except one. ~ Dannika Dark

And as we kissed, really kissed, something inside me was smashed, like a splitting atom, erupting with all the force of a shattering nucleus. And yet I was strangely at peace, too. It was like I'd found my place in the universe, in the chaos, and Lucius and I could go along locked together throughout time without end, like pi, existing infinitely, irrationally, spinning through time. ~ Beth Fantaskey

In our wide world there is but one altogether fatal personage, the dunce,
he that speaks irrationally, that sees not, and yet thinks he sees. ~ Thomas Carlyle

We all do that to ourselves. Explain irrationally the rational. We make up stories in our heads instead of looking at the facts. We force persecution on ourselves when there is none. ~ Kunal Nayyar

Picture who you were 10 years ago. You were a different person. Different goals. Different ideas. Different human. We irrationally believe we will be the same way we are today in 10 years. You won't. You'll be a totally new human. Who do you want to be? Whoever it is, do it on purpose. Intentionally. ~ Richie Norton

How crazy craziness makes everyone, how irrationally afraid. The madness hidden in each of us, called to, identified, aroused like a lust. And against that the jaw sets. The more I fear my own insanity the more I must punish yours ... ~ Kate Millett

The scientific spirit is of more value than its products, and irrationally held truths may be more harmful than reasoned errors. ~ Thomas Henry Huxley

Faith is irrational, which is why those who exercise it are rewarded irrationally. ~ Matshona Dhliwayo

I was about to tell him he was wrong to dwell on it, because it really didn't matter. But he cut me off and urged me one last time, drawing himself up to his full height and asking me if I believed in God. I said no. He sat down indignantly. He said it was impossible; all men believed in God, even those who turn their backs on him. That was his belief, and if he were ever to doubt it, his life would become meaningless. "Do you want my life to be meaningless?" he shouted. As far as I could see, it didn't have anything to do with me, and I told him so. But from across the table he had already thrust the crucifix in my face and was screaming irrationally, "I am a Christian. I ask Him to forgive you for sins. How can you not believe that He suffered for you?" I was struck by how sincere he seemed, but I had had enough. It was getting hotter and hotter. As always, whenever I want to get rid of someone I'm not really listening to, I made it appear as if I agreed. To my surprise, he acted triumphant. "You see, you see!" he said. "You do believe, don't you, and you're going to place your trust in Him, aren't you?" Obviously, I again said no. He fell back in his chair. ~ Albert Camus

Getting control of stuff makes people feel like they have more control over their lives - maybe irrationally, but it's one of these psychological truths. ~ Gretchen Rubin

If it were evenly distributed," said Rodman, "the example of justice in the world might lead at last to a sane world policy. As it is, there is world despair and fury over the selfish fortune of a few, and all behave irrationally in revenge. ~ Isaac Asimov

Every child needs at least one adult who is irrationally crazy about him or her. ~ Urie Bronfenbrenner

There may be occasions when it is best to behave irrationally, but whether there are should be decided rationally. ~ I. J. Good

I began to study marijuana in 1967 ... I had not yet learned that there is something very special about illicit drugs. If they don't always make the drug user behave irrationally, they certainly cause many non-users to behave that way. ~ Lester Grinspoon