Artists are those people who sit at the intersection between the known and unknown, the rational and irrational, coming to terms with some of the confusing histories we, as artists, deal with.
For people of color – especially African Americans – the idea that racist cops might frame members of their community is no abstract notion, let alone an exercise in irrational conspiracy theorizing. Rather, it speaks to a social reality about which blacks are acutely aware.
Superstition is the irrational belief that an object or behavior has the power to influence an outcome, when there’s no logical connection between them. Most of us aren’t superstitious – but most of us are a ‘littlestitious.’
When hypocrisy is a character trait, it also affects one’s thinking, because it consists in the negation of all the aspects of reality that one finds disagreeable, irrational or repugnant.
I still believe that any country understands that if they use nuclear weapons, they will be wiped out of existence. They could be irrational in many ways, but I don’t think they’re irrational to the point that they’re ready to annihilate their own country.
I’m irrational about all things creative, and I’m always late!
If I’m thinking about work, it’s easier to block the irrational thoughts out of my mind.
I think life’s an irrational obsession.
You have to think an awful lot about your motivations or people’s behavioral intentions or what their body language can indicate or what’s really going on or what makes people sometimes do, sometimes, the irrational things they do.
I don’t have any irrational fears. Obviously, if I was walking through the outback, and I saw a snake, I wouldn’t go up and stroke it, but I wouldn’t run screaming from it, either.
For centuries many of the world’s distinguished philosophers have assaulted Christianity as being irrational, superstitious and absurd.
Bin Laden does reprehensible activities, and we should surely take care of that by killing him as soon as we can. But he’s not an irrational man. He’s a very worthy enemy. He’s an enemy to worry about.
Rational anxiety is when you’re aware of the source of your anxiety. Like, if I have to host an award show or talk to millions of people on the radio, I’m going to feel anxious, and I know why. Irrational anxiety is when I’m leaving CVS, and there’s a car behind me, and I’m wondering if he’s following me home.
I have an irrational fear that something bad is going to happen to me when I’m drinking out of a water fountain. I have no idea why.
You must strive to multiply bread so that it suffices for the tables of mankind, and not rather favor an artificial control of birth, which would be irrational, in order to diminish the number of guests at the banquet of life.
It is no more irrational for the mind to take the word of the Eternal Word than for the eye to use light and for the ear to welcome sound.
If you simply announce that things are irrational, then that alone doesn’t get you very far. You have to replace rational agents with some concrete notion of what it means to be irrational.
I actually have a very real, irrational fear of zombies.
It is economically irrational to exclude large environmental costs from the balance sheets of the producers and the consumers. You are only kidding yourself if you export those costs on to society as a whole.
I often worry that my idea of personhood is nostalgic, irrational, inaccurate.
It is not to be forgotten that what we call rational grounds for our beliefs are often extremely irrational attempts to justify our instincts.
My job is making irrational people do rational things.
For kids like me, being called childish can be a frequent occurrence. Every time we make irrational demands, exhibit irresponsible behavior, or display any other signs of being normal American citizens, we are called childish.
What we need to understand is, one, that there are market failures; and two, that there are things like asset bubbles and irrational exuberance. There are periods of booms, bubbles, and manias. These things, if left to themselves, can lead to crashes, to busts, to panics.
Among irrational animals the love of the offspring and of the parents for each other is extraordinary because God, who created them, compensated for the deficiency of reason by the superiority of their senses.
Your first company is like your first baby.You have this unconditional, irrational love.
Why are women always described as ‘desperate,’ while men are just… irrational?
The ending of irrational fantasies is always going to come as a rude jolt.
Art is so wonderfully irrational, exuberantly pointless, but necessary all the same. Pointless and yet necessary, that’s hard for a puritan to understand.
It really does not matter whether one believes a mystical entity created the universe 5,000 or 10,000 million years ago – both are equally irrational, unsubstantiated claims of no fundamental validity.
Strong moral arguments exist for why we should often try to ignore stereotypes or override them. But we shouldn’t assume they represent some irrational quirk of the unconscious mind. In fact, they’re largely the consequence of the mind’s attempt to make a rational decision.
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.
If something is irrational, that means it won’t work. It’s usually unrealistic.
What lingers from the parent’s individual past, unresolved or incomplete, often becomes part of her or his irrational parenting.
I think great artists have no time to waste with having disproportionate egos and irrational requests. They’re too focused on their work to actually lose themselves in hysterical spirals where they become monsters or tyrants.
Often, when you look at history, at least through the lens that many of us have looked at history – high school and college courses – a lot of the color gets bled out of it. You’re left with a time period that does not look as strange and irrational as the time you’re actually living through.
It is true that from a behavioral economics perspective we are fallible, easily confused, not that smart, and often irrational. We are more like Homer Simpson than Superman. So from this perspective it is rather depressing. But at the same time there is also a silver lining. There are free lunches!
It is even possible that laws which have not their origin in the mind may be irrational, and we can never succeed in formulating them.
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