"Irrationality" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... dogmatic theology, and of casuistical morality, under the New. As Man gradually shifts the centre of gravity of his being from the religious to the secular side of his life, this puerile element in religion—the element of ultra-formalism, of irrationality, of unreality—tends, like a morbid growth, to draw to itself the vital energies of what was once a healthy organism but is now degenerating into a "body of death." If, in these days of absorbing secular ...
— What Is and What Might Be - A Study of Education in General and Elementary Education in Particular • Edmond Holmes
... not the practice of the moral virtues of temperance and fortitude. Temperance makes a man strong against the temptations to irrationality and swinishness that come of the bodily appetites. But happiness lies, not in deliverance from what would degrade man to the level of the brutes, but in something which shall raise man to the highest level of human nature. Fortitude, again, is not exercised ...
— Moral Philosophy • Joseph Rickaby, S. J.
... ANIMAL NOT YET PROPERLY ADAPTED TO HIS ENVIRONMENT, the rare exception. But worse still. The higher the type a man represents, the greater is the improbability that he will SUCCEED; the accidental, the law of irrationality in the general constitution of mankind, manifests itself most terribly in its destructive effect on the higher orders of men, the conditions of whose lives are delicate, diverse, and difficult to determine. What, then, is the attitude of the two greatest religions ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... times of Alexander the Great, and was the contemporary of Demetrius Phalereus. He was instructed in philosophy by Theophrastus, but his own opinions inclined him to that of Epicurus, and he boasted in an epigram, "that if Themistocles freed his country from slavery, Epicurus freed it from irrationality." He was fond of the choicest sensual enjoyments: Phaedrus, in an unfinished tale, describes him to us as even in his exterior, an effeminate voluptuary; and his amour with the courtesan Glycera is notorious. The Epicurean philosophy, which placed the supreme happiness of life in the benevolent ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... Aristotelian logic. The followers of Herbart, bound to Aristotle, on the other hand, set in relief those judgments which they called narrative, which are of a character altogether different from other logical judgments. Finally, the linguists insisted upon the irrationality of the word, in relation to the concept. But a conscious, sure, and radical movement of reform can find no base or starting-point, save in the ...
— Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic • Benedetto Croce
... led the way back to the sitting-room. He set the candle on the shelf, and gave a strange, beseeching glance around the room at his books. It was as if he besought, with the irrationality of grief, those only friends he fairly ...
— Madelon - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... to that perverse frenzy which impels a man to acts and utterances most wildly at conflict with reason. His sense of the monstrous irrationality to which he was committed completed what was begun in him by the ...
— New Grub Street • George Gissing
... first woman ordained by the Universalist Church, the Rev. Olympia Brown, who struck the keynote of her address in saying: "When we are vexed by the seeming irrationality of some of our Congressmen, may we not explain it as due to the fact that they are thinking of the kind of men who elected them? The United States debars intelligent American women from voting and says to the riffraff of Europe, 'Come over and help govern us.' It is an ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume V • Ida Husted Harper
... the same manner, through all the minor matters of morals, so that we cannot imagine courage existing except in conjunction with fear, or magnanimity existing except in conjunction with some temptation to meanness. If Pope and his followers caught this echo of natural irrationality, they were not any the more artificial. Their antitheses were fully in harmony with existence, which is itself ...
— Varied Types • G. K. Chesterton |
