Famous quotes containing the word rational:
“... how can a rational being be ennobled by any thing that is not obtained by its own exertions?”
—Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–1797)
“Since the Greeks, Western man has believed that Being, all Being, is intelligible, that there is a reason for everything ... and that the cosmos is, finally, intelligible. The Oriental, on the other hand, has accepted his existence within a universe that would appear to be meaningless, to the rational Western mind, and has lived with this meaninglessness. Hence the artistic form that seems natural to the Oriental is one that is just as formless or formal, as irrational, as life itself.”
—William Barrett (b. 1913)
“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 Henry Huxley (1825–95)