#irrationality

We do not admire, we hardly excuse, the fanatic who wrecks this world for love of the other. But what are we to say of the fanatic who wrecks this world out of hatred of the other? He sacrifices the very existence of humanity to the non-existence of God. He offers his victims not to the altar, but merely to assert the idleness of the altar and the emptiness of the throne. He is ready to ruin even that primary ethic by which all things live, for his strange and eternal vengeance upon some one who never lived at all. ↗

— G.K. Chesterton

#fanatic #irrationality #secularism #love

Violence and irrationality were so long and thoroughly cultivated among the Irish, and so perfectly ingrained into their nature, that modern civilization has as yet been unable to extract the virus. ↗

— Thomas Mellon

#been #civilization #cultivated #extract #ingrained

Felix had gone to live in a lotus land of his imagination. Where what is desired is dreamed of as already happened, where obstacles dissolve under the weight of desire, and where reality has vanished entirely. ↗

— Iain Pears

#cloud-cuckoo-land #desires #dreams #futility #imagination

Many great ideas, great love stories, and great achievements are born from a healthy irrationality. ↗

— Steve Maraboli

#healthy #ideas #irrationality #love #love-stories

The search for Nirvana, like the search for Utopia or the end of history or the classless society, is ultimately a futile and dangerous one. It involves, if it does not necessitate, the sleep of reason. There is no escape from anxiety and struggle. ↗

— Christopher Hitchens

#class #irrationality #nirvana #reason #society

All men are, at times, influenced by inexplicable sentiments. Ideas haunt them in spite of all their efforts to discard them. Prepossessions are entertained, for which their reason is unable to discover any adequate cause. The strength of a belief, when it is destitute of any rational foundation, seems, of itself, to furnish a new ground for credulity. We first admit a powerful persuasion, and then, from reflecting on the insufficiency of the ground on which it is built, instead of being prompted to dismiss it, we become more forcibly attached to it. ↗

— Charles Brockden Brown

#obsession #perversity #men

Reality is, you know, the tip of an iceberg of irrationality that we've managed to drag ourselves up onto for a few panting moments before we slip back into the sea of the unreal. ↗

— Terence McKenna

#rationality #reality #science #ufos #unreality

Faith is, at one and the same time, absolutely necessary and altogether impossible. ↗

— Stanisław Lem

#irrationality #religion #faith

Memory is a crazy woman that hoards colored rags and throws away food. ↗

— Austin O'Malley

#irrationality #memory #food

Intelligence is not limited to neural networks, Merrill. Indeed, half of human intelligence resides in our bodies outside our skulls…The genius of the irrational…This is the body’s intelligence, not the mind’s. Every living cell possess it…[the] indomitable will to survive. ↗

— David Marusek

#gut-instinct #intelligence #irrationality #mentars #sentience