The last level of metaphor in the Alice books is this: that life, viewed rationally and without illusion, appears to be a nonsense tale told by an idiot mathematician. At the heart of things science finds only a mad, never-ending quadrille of Mock Turtle Waves and Gryphon Particles. For a moment the waves and particles dance in grotesque, inconceivably complex patterns capable of reflecting on their own absurdity.
We expect others to act rationally even though we are irrational.
I have a reverence for medicine because I hero-worshiped my father [a former doctor], and because I admire doctors, I admire study, empiricism and rational thought. I don't study, empiricize or think rationally myself - but I admire it in others.
To see a man slip on a banana skin is to see a rationally structured system suddenly translated into a whirling machine.
That's something that rationally and logically I can't try to figure out, how somebody "transitions" so rapidly and so drastically, but I don't worry about it now.
We won't dispassionately investigate or rationally debate which drugs do what damage and whether or how much of that damage is the result of criminalization. We'd rather work ourselves into a screaming fit of puritanism and then go home and take a pill.
In order to succeed, you have to live dangerously. . as long as the danger is rationally accepted and as long as the rewards far outweigh the risk.
When you make people angry, they act in accordance with their baser instincts, often violently and irrationally. When you inspire people, they act in accordance with their higher instincts, sensibly and rationally. Also, anger is transient, whereas inspiration sometimes has a life-long effect.
Nature was tough, it could be dangerous, but unlike Dr. Cable or shay, or peris-unlike people in general-it made sense. The problems it threw at you could be solved rationally.
The people who are voting for Trump are not voting rationally.
I place an enormous premium on loyalty. If someone betrays me, I can forgive them rationally, but emotionally I have found it impossible to do so.
Government is the art of the momentary feasible, of the least bad attainable, and not of the rationally most desirable.
But if our sex would but well consider and rationally ponder, they will perceive and find that it is neither words nor place that can advance them, but worth and merit.
While most people can talk rationally about kernel design and portability, the issue of free-ness is 100% emotional.
It's a very wise thing for people to rationally sit down and look at what the risks are not only on a daily basis, on a weekly basis, on a monthly basis, on a yearly basis, on a lifetime basis, and then plan one's life accordingly.
The rules of friendship are tacit, unconscious; they are not rational. In business, though, you have to think rationally.
Despite all that I know rationally, and everything that I can put into words, I can say that I have difficulty giving up the notion of the nobility of art.
Most writers I know move back and forth between the rational and the intuitive, though there are some who approach writing very rationally, and others who claim not to think their work through.
We must choose for others as we have reason to believe they would choose for themselves if they were at the age of reason and deciding rationally.
Serious poetry deals with the fundamental conflicts that cannot be logically resolved: we can state the conflicts rationally, but reason does not relieve us of them.