Irrational Quotes

1. "That sensation of a void within which never left us, that irrational longing to hark back to the past or else to speed up the march of time, and those keen shafts of memory that stung like fire."
Author: Albert Camus

2. "Man stands face to face with the irrational. He feels within him his longing for happiness and for reason. The absurd is born of this confrontation between the human need and the unreasonable silence of the world."
Author: Albert Camus

3. "If something is irrational, that means it won't work. It's usually unrealistic."
Author: Albert Ellis

4. "We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way."
Author: Aldous Huxley

5. "I meet his eyes and he arches his eyebrows. He knows. He knows I don't really like Deepak. He knows I've been intending to break up with him for the last two months. He knows I would rather be with him. He knows all my deepest darkest secrets. That psychic velvet voiced God! Okay, I'm being irrational. He just raised his eyebrows. It's nothing. Maybe it's a habit. He probably raises his eyebrows hourly."
Author: Anjali Kirpalani

6. "Dad,Please accept this money to fix the broken window. I'm sure it's already fixed, considering Lydia's house pride and her phobia about unconditioned air, butDear Al,I can't begin to explain my actions at Lydia's – I mean yours and Lydia's house. When I get to Charleston, I never imagined that you would haveDear Dad and Lydia,I apologize to both of you for my irrational behavior. I know it's all my fault, but if you would have listened to ONE THING I had to say, I might not haveDear Dad's new family,I hope you'll all be very happy being blond together. May people speak only in inside voices for the rest of your lives.P.S. Lydia, you wedding dress makes your arms look fat."
Author: Ann Brashares

7. "As repressed sadists are supposed to become policemen or butchers, so those with an irrational fear of life become publishers."
Author: Cyril Connolly

8. "Nor would I even begin to try to describe what she looks like as she's telling the story, reliving it, she's naked, hair spilling all down her back, sitting meditatively cross-legged amid the wrecked bedding and smoking ultralight Merits from which she keeps removing the filters because she claims they're full of additives and unsafe—unsafe as she's sitting there chain-smoking, which was so patently irrational that I couldn't even bring—yes and some kind of blister on her Achilles tendon, from the sandals, leaning with her upper body to follow the oscillation of the fan so she's moving in and out of a wash of moon from the window whose angle of incidence itself alters as the moon moves up and across the window—all I can tell you is she was lovely. The bottoms of her feet dirty, almost black. The moon so full it looks engorged."
Author: David Foster Wallace

9. "If other people do not understand our behavior—so what? Their request that we must only do what they understand is an attempt to dictate to us. If this is being "asocial" or "irrational" in their eyes, so be it. Mostly they resent our freedom and our courage to be ourselves. We owe nobody an explanation or an accounting, as long as our acts do not hurt or infringe on them. How many lives have been ruined by this need to "explain," which usually implies that the explanation be "understood," i.e. approved. Let your deeds be judged, and from your deeds, your real intentions, but know that a free person owes an explanation only to himself—to his reason and his conscience—and to the few who may have a justified claim for explanation."
Author: Erich Fromm

10. "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."
Author: Frances Hardinge

11. "Mr. Blatchford attacks Christianity because he is mad on one Christian virtue: the merely mystical and almost irrational virtue of charity. He has a strange idea that he will make it easier to forgive sins by saying that there are no sins to forgive. Mr. Blatchford is not only an early Christian, he is the only early Christian who really ought to have been eaten by lions."
Author: G.K. Chesterton

12. "So let's hear another one of your irrational fears."Mia grasped me by the arms and pulled herself in to my chest, like she was burrowing her body into mine. "I'm scared of losing you," she said in the faintest of voices."
Author: Gayle Forman

13. "It is my firm conviction that man has nothing to gain, emotionally or otherwise, by adhering to a falsehood, regardless of how comfortable or sacred that falsehood may appear. Anyone who claims, on the one hand, that he is concerned with human welfare, and who demands, on the other hand, that man must suspend or renounce the use of his reason, is contradicting himself. There can be no knowledge of what is good for man apart from knowledge of reality and human nature, and there is no manner in which this knowledge can be acquired except through reason. To advocate irrationality is to advocate that which is destructive to human life."
Author: George H. Smith

14. "You're an actor, are you? Well, all that means is: you are irresponsible, irrational, romantic, and incapable of handling an adult emotion or a universal concept without first reducing it to something personal, material, sensational - and probably sexual!"
Author: George Herman

15. "The majority of men prefer delusion to truth. It soothes. It is easy to grasp. Above all, it fits more snugly than the truth into a universe of false appearances—of complex and irrational phenomena, defectively grasped. But though an idea that is true is thus not likely to prevail, an idea that is attacked enjoys a great advantage. The evidence behind it is now supported by sympathy, the sporting instinct, sentimentality—and sentimentality is as powerful as an army with banners. One never hears of a martyr in history whose notions are seriously disputed today. The forgotten ideas are those of the men who put them forward soberly and quietly, hoping fatuously that they would conquer by the force of their truth; these are the ideas that we now struggle to rediscover."
Author: H.L. Mencken

16. "It feels weird, being out in the real world again. Around people just living their lives like normal. Their presence is oppressive. The very fact that the world is going on as usual, like nothing ever happened, makes me want to scream. I know it's irrational to expect everything to grind to a halt because of June, but still. A wave of anxiety builds in my chest, my head pounding so loud it drowns out the noise of people talking and tapping away on their laptops."
Author: Hannah Harrington

17. "Fashion somehow, for me, is purely and happily irrational."
Author: Hedi Slimane

18. "...he feels an irrational dislike taking root, and he tries to dismiss it, because he prefers his dislikes rational, but after all, these circumstances are extreme..."
Author: Hilary Mantel

19. "When an experiment was to begin, all women were excluded for fear their irrational natures would influence the result, and an air of fervent concentration descended."
Author: Iain Pears

20. "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."
Author: Jennifer E. Smith

21. "There was quite a lot of competitiveness about it, with everybody wanting to beat not only cancer itself, but also the other people in the room. Like, I realize that this is irrational, but when they tell you that you have, say, a 20 percent chance of living five years, the math kicks in and you figure that's one in five . . . so you look around and think, as any healthy person would: I gotta outlast four of these bastards."
Author: John Green

22. "So that, in effect, religion, which should most distinguish us from beasts, and ought most peculiarly to elevate us, as rational creatures, above brutes, is that wherein men often appear most irrational, and more senseless than beasts themselves."
Author: John Locke

23. "Humans cannot live without illusions. For the men and women of today, an irrational faith in progress may be the only antidote to nihilism. Without the hope that the future will be better than the past, they could not go on."
Author: John Nicholas Gray

24. "Superstition is foolish, childish, primitive and irrational - but how much does it cost you to knock on wood?"
Author: Judith Viorst

25. "I don't know where dreams come from. Sometimes I wonder if they're genetic memories, or messages from something divine. Warnings perhaps. Maybe we do come with an instruction booklet but we're too dense to read it, because we've dismissed it as the irrational waste product of the ‘rational' mind. Sometimes I think all the answers we need are buried in our slumbering subconscious, int he dreaming. The booklet right there, and ever night when we lay our heads down on the pillow it flips open. The wise read it, heed it. The rest of us try as hard as we can upon awakening to forget any disturbing revelations we might have found there."
Author: Karen Marie Moning

26. "Once a restless or frayed mood has turned to anger, or violence, or psychosis, Richard, like most, finds it very difficult to see it as illness, rather than being willful, angry, irrational or simply tiresome."
Author: Kay Redfield Jamison

27. "This crazy, blind beating of wings caused by man-made light... this irrational connection between spiders, moths and light. If a law appeared without reason, like this, what would one believe in?"
Author: Kōbō Abe

28. "But then she remembered something else, just a flash: looking up at Damon's face in the woods and feeling such—such excitement, such affinity with him. As if he understood the flame that burned inside her as nobody else ever could. As if together they could do anything they liked, conquer the world or destroy it; as if they were better than anyone else who had ever lived.I was out of my mind, irrational, she told herself, but that little flash of memory wouldn't go away.And then she remembered something else: how Damon had acted later that night, how he'd kept her safe, even been gentle with her.Stefan was looking at her, and his expression had changed from belligerence to bitter anger and fear. Part of her wanted to reassure him completely, to throw her arms around him and tell him that she was his and always would be and that nothing else mattered. Not the town, not Damon, not anything.But she wasn't doing it."
Author: L.J. Smith

29. "People are stubborn and stupid. They're irrational. they're destructive. that's the point, isn't it? That's the whole reason for the cure. People will no longer destroy their own lives. They won't be capable of it."
Author: Lauren Oliver

30. "By the way, the point between rationality and what we would call the irrational is a very difficult point to establish. There's no specific line, as you know."
Author: Leo Ornstein

31. "An individual can be hurt in countless ways by other men's irrationality, dishonesty, injustice. Above all, he can be disappointed, perhaps grievously, by the vices of a person he had once trusted or loved. But as long as his property is not expropriated and he remains unmolested physically, the damage he sustains is essentially spiritual, not physical; in such a case, the victim alone has the power and the responsibility of healing his wounds. He remains free: free to think, to learn from his experiences, to look elsewhere for human relationships; he remains free to start afresh and to pursue his happiness."
Author: Leonard Peikoff

32. "Identity. That's my elephant. The thought came with certainty, without the question mark on the end this time. Not fame, exactly, though recognition was some kind of important cement for it. But what you were was what you did. And I did more, oh yes. If a hunger for identity were translated into, say, a hunger for food, he'd be a more fantastic glutton than Mark ever dreamed of being. Is it irrational, to want to be so much, to want so hard it hurts? And how much, then, was enough?"
Author: Lois McMaster Bujold

33. "Among all the modes by which love is brought into being, among all the agents which disseminate that blessed bane, there are few so efficacious as this gust of feverish agitation that sweeps over us from time to time. For then the die is cast, the person whose company we enjoy at that moment is the person we shall henceforward love. It is not even necessary for that person to have attracted us, up till then, more than or even as much as others. All that was needed was that our predilection should become exclusive. And that condition is fulfilled when — in this moment of deprivation — the quest for the pleasures we enjoyed in his or her company is suddenly replaced by an anxious, torturing need, whose object is the person alone, an absurd, irrational need which the laws of this world make it impossible to satisfy and difficult to assuage — the insensate, agonising need to possess exclusively."
Author: Marcel Proust

34. "Such terrifying powers we possess, but what a sorry lot of gods some men are. And the worst of it is not the cruelty but the arrogance, the sheer hubris of those who bring only violence and fear into the animal world, as if it needed any more of either. Their lives entail enough frights and tribulations without the modern fire-makers, now armed with perfected, inescapable weapons, traipsing along for more fun and thrills at their expense even as so many of them die away. It is our fellow creatures' lot in the universe, the place assigned them in creation, to be completely at our mercy, the fiercest wolf or tiger defenseless against the most cowardly man. And to me it has always seemed not only ungenerous and shabby but a kind of supreme snobbery to deal cavalierly with them, as if their little share of the earth's happiness and grief were inconsequential, meaningless, beneath a man's attention, trumped by any and all designs he might have on them, however base, irrational, or wicked."
Author: Matthew Scully

35. "It is the mission of the twentieth century to elucidate the irrational."
Author: Maurice Merleau Ponty

36. "It was futile to attack with reason the stout wall of irrational feelings that, as is known, is the stuff of which the female mind is made."
Author: Milan Kundera

37. "Do stories, apart from happening, being, have something to say? For all my skepticism, some trace of irrational superstition did survive in me, the strange conviction, for example, that everything in life that happens to me also has a sense, that it means something, that life speaks to us about itself through its story, that it gradually reveals a secret, that it takes the form of a rebus whose message must be deciphered, that the stories we live compromise the mythology of our lives and in that mythology lies the key to truth and mystery. Is it an illusion? Possibly, even probably, but I can't rid myself of the need continually to decipher my own life."
Author: Milan Kundera

38. "... there is no shame in not knowing. The problem arises when irrational thought and attendant behavior fill the vacuum left by ignorance."
Author: Neil DeGrasse Tyson

39. "In the real world irrational things happened, impossible coincidences happened, because probability required that coincidences rarely, but not never, occur."
Author: Orson Scott Card

40. "The lesson of Left Behind is a warning to repent the sin of critical thinking, which the fundamentalist, eager for people to embrace the Gospel of irrational nonsense, equates with "intellectual pride."
Author: Robert M. Price

41. "To criticize a person for their race is manifestly irrational and ridiculous, but to criticize their religion, that is a right. That is a freedom."
Author: Rowan Atkinson

42. "Racists are irrational and illogical in their attempts to justify their prejudices."
Author: Sargent Shriver

43. "I think life's an irrational obsession."
Author: Sean Penn

44. "Love is irrational, I reminded myself. The more you loved someone, the less sense anything made."
Author: Stephenie Meyer

45. "We face a conflict between civilisation and culture, which used to be on the same side. Civilisation means rational reflection, material wellbeing, individual autonomy and ironic self-doubt; culture means a form of life that is customary, collective, passionate, spontaneous, unreflective and irrational."
Author: Terry Eagleton

46. "Many of her thoughts were perfect syllogisms; unluckily they always remained thoughts. Only a few were irrational assumptions; but, unfortunately, they were the ones which most frequently grew into deeds"
Author: Thomas Hardy

47. "I have irrational fears, and they all go back to losing my father as a kid. I've never gotten over it."
Author: Tim Allen

48. "A cemetery?" I chuckle, but the pitch is a bit higher than I expected. "At night? With a full moon? Um ... did you see any, uh, zombies, you, while you were there?"Shiko blinks at me a few times. "No"I slump in relief. "Thank God. I mean, I don't want to be the first to die. The funny guy always dies first, for shock value, you know. Rourke would get killed next, because it's be a heroic sacrifice or something." I motion to Shiko. "You'd live, though, unless you had sex."... Shiko has the look of an addled kitten, complete with head tilt. Rourke sighs and leans toward her, embarrassed. 'You'll have to excuse him. According to his mother he has an irrational fear of something called the zombie apocalypse.""It's not irrational!"
Author: Vaughn R. Demont

49. "I, therefore, for one, cannot see my way to accepting the agnostic rules for truth-seeking, or wilfully agree to keep my willing nature out of the game. I cannot do so for this plain reason, that a rule of thinking which would absolutely prevent me from acknowledging certain kinds of truth if those kinds of truth were really there, would be an irrational rule."
Author: William James

50. "It reminds me of that old joke- you know, a guy walks into a psychiatrist's office and says, hey doc, my brother's crazy! He thinks he's a chicken. Then the doc says, why don't you turn him in? Then the guy says, I would but I need the eggs. I guess that's how I feel about relationships. They're totally crazy, irrational, and absurd, but we keep going through it because we need the eggs."
Author: Woody Allen

Irrational Quotes Pictures