Rationalistic Quotes & Sayings

Their monument sticks like a fishbone in the city's throat. — Robert Lowell

To prove religious faith by human reason is rationalistic claptrap. — Jostein Gaarder

The closer we are to God, to divine attributes - such as absolute truth, goodness, and beauty - the more we wonder. When we separate ourselves from truth, goodness, and beauty, we lose wonder and become cynical. The Enlightenment was basically the narrowing of our vision to a purely scientific, empirical, rationalistic worldview, screwing down the manhole covers on us so we became squinting underground creatures. — Peter Kreeft

By being impatient, matters are damaged and great works cannot be done — Yamamoto Tsunetomo

To reject solutionism is to transcend the narrow-minded rationalistic mindset that recasts every instance of an efficiency deficit [ ... ] as an obstacle that needs to be overcome. — Evgeny Morozov

For it is not true that some Christians believe in divine sovereignty while others hold an opposite view. What is true is that all Christians believe in divine sovereignty, but some are not aware that they do, and mistakenly imagine and insist that they reject it. What causes this odd state of affairs? The root cause is the same as in most cases of error in the church
the intruding of rationalistic speculations, the passion for systematic consistency, a reluctance to recognize the existence of mystery and to let God be wiser than men, and a consequent subjecting of Scripture to the supposed demands of human logic. — J.I. Packer

If it be true (as it certainly is) that a man can feel exquisite happiness in skinning a cat, then the religious philosopher can only draw one of two deductions. He must either deny the existence of God, as all atheists do; or he must deny the present union between God and man, as all Christians do. The new theologians seem to think it a highly rationalistic solution to deny the cat. — G.K. Chesterton

I do not admit that theological points are small points. Theology is only thought applied to religion; and those who prefer a thoughtless religion need not be so very disdainful of others with a more rationalistic taste. The old joke that the Greek sects only differed about a single letter is about the lamest and most illogical joke in the world. An atheist and a theist only differ by a single letter; yet theologians are so subtle as to distinguish definitely between the two. — G.K. Chesterton

The modern world is filled with men who hold dogmas so strongly that they do not even know that they are dogmas. It may be said even that the modern world, as a corporate body, holds certain dogmas so strongly that it does not know that they are dogmas. It may be thought 'dogmatic,' for instance, in some circles accounted progressive, to assume the perfection or improvement of man in another world. But it is not thought "dogmatic" to assume the perfection or improvement of man in this world; though that idea of progress is quite as unproved as the idea of immortality, and from a rationalistic point of view quite as improbable. Progress happens to be one of our dogmas, and a dogma means a thing which is not thought dogmatic. — G.K. Chesterton

Religious fermentation is always a symptom of the intellectual vigor of a society; and it is only when they forget that they are hypotheses and put on rationalistic and authoritative pretensions, that our faiths do harm. — William James

The fact is, man has never stayed by a single ideal. The mass enthusiasm when you were young gave way to cool, rationalistic classicism. Today that's being drowned in turn by a kind of neoromanticism. God knows where that will lead. I probably won't approve. Regardless, new generations grow up. We've no right to freeze them into our own mold. The universe is too wide. — Poul Anderson

I would go even further and warn that failing to use both approaches invites danger. The STM, carried out in isolation from the RHM, can produce a Christianity that is rationalistic, legalistic, and individualistic. Similarly the RHM, carried out in isolation from the STM, tends to produce a Christianity that loves narrative and community but shies away from sharp distinctions between grace and law and between truth and heresy. — Timothy Keller

I don't have any desire to rebel and be something totally different from what I am. — Carly Rae Jepsen

It is true that the modern Christian is less robust, but that is not thanks to Christianity; it is thanks to the generations of freethinkers, who from the Renaissance to the present day, have made Christians ashamed of many of their traditional beliefs. It is amusing to hear the modern Christian telling you how mild and rationalistic Christianity really is and ignoring the fact that all its mildness and rationalism is due to the teaching of men who in their own day were persecuted by all orthodox Christians. — Bertrand Russell

For too long we've been suffering the tyranny of lowest-common-denominator fare, subjected to brain-dead summer blockbusters and manufactured pop. Why? Economics. Many of our assumptions about popular taste are actually artifacts of poor supply-and-demand matching - a market response to inefficient distribution. — Chris Anderson

The attachment to a rationalistic, teleological notion of progress indicates the absence of true progress; he whose life does not unfold satisfyingly under its own momentum is driven to moralize it, to set up goals and rationalize their achievement as progress. — John Carroll

When you're dealing with these forces or powers in a philosophic and scientific way, contemplating them from an armchair, that rationalistic approach is useful. It is quite profitable then to regard the gods and goddesses and demons as projections of the human mind or as unconscious aspects of ourselves. But every truth is a truth only for one place and one time, and that's a truth, as I said, for the armchair. When you're actually dealing with these figures, the only safe, pragmatic and operational approach is to treat them as having a being, a will, and a purpose entirely apart from the humans who evoke them. If the Sorcerer's Apprentice had understood that, he wouldn't have gotten into so much trouble. — Robert Anton Wilson

One can approach the Bible with a cold, rationalistic attitude, or one can do so with reverence and the desire to hear God speak. — Billy Graham

The new and needed apologetics will differ from previous apologetic models geared at convincing people solely or even mainly from a rationalistic perspective or that begin with biblical authority. People want to see spiritual power demonstrated by transformed lives expressed in community. This is the hope people harbor. They will respond to a spiritual belief system that delivers at this point. Jesus said that the proof f discipleship to the world would be his followers' love for one another
(John 13:35). Early observers were drawn to the Christian movement exactly for this reason (Acts 2: 44-47). Love expressed through community still transforms people and creates an attractive and compelling invitation for others to join up. — Reggie McNeal

Degeneracy can be fun but it's hard to keep up as a serious lifetime occupation. — Robert M. Pirsig

Therefore the Sophists, with courageous sauciness, pronounce the reassuring words, "Don't be bluffed!" and diffuse the rationalistic doctrine, "Use your understanding, your wit, your mind, against everything; it is by having a good and well-drilled understanding that one gets through the world best, provides for himself the best lot, the pleasantest life." Thus they recognize in mind man's true weapon against the world. This is why they lay such stress on dialectic skill, command of language, the art of disputation, etc. They announce that mind is to be used against everything; but they are still far removed from the holiness of the Spirit, for to them it is a means, aweapon, as trickery and defiance serve children for the same purpose; their mind is the unbribable understanding. — Max Stirner

A friend of mine rang the box office to collect a ticket I'd reserved for her, and the girl said, 'Who's Lesley Manville?' — Lesley Manville

I do not put much stock in "believing in God." The grammar of "belief" invites a far too rationalistic account of what it means to be a Christian. "Belief" implies propositions about which you get to make up your mind before you know the work they are meant to do. — Stanley Hauerwas

Don't confuse hypothesis and theory. The former is a possible explanation; the latter, the correct one. The establishment of theory is the very purpose of science. — Martin H. Fischer

Things are changing, but this time I'm not afraid. This time I know who I am. This time I've made the right choice and fighting for the right team. I feel safe. Confident — Tahereh Mafi

Compared with members of other nations of Western civilization, the ordinary American is a rationalistic being, and there are close relations between his moralism and his rationalism. Even romanticism, transcendentalism, and mysticism tend to be, in the American culture, rational, pragmatic and optimistic. — Gunnar Myrdal

wir konnen warten. wissen macht frei [we can wait. knowledge liberates]. in these confident words the stalwart Ritter von Schmerling expressed the rationalistic expectations of the political process at the beginning of the liberal era in 1861.

at the end of that era, the poet Hugo von Hofmannsthal, scion of a cultivated middle-class family, offered a different formula for political success: politics is magic. he who knows how to summon the forces from the deep, him will they follow. — Carl E. Schorske

If we try and direct our lives with only our limited rationalistic thoughts and our sense perceptions, then our actions and our activities will not be prefect. — Frederick Lenz

I'm thankful that every day I actually get to wake up. — Andrew Chan

If you, however, separate reason and faith so that it's purely a rationalistic scheme, it will end in violence. If a pure faith scheme - sometimes called the fundamentalist scheme in modern parlance - you'll end in violence too. — Francis George

The West, for many centuries, has been dominated by a highly rationalistic mindset that presumes to express and explain the nature of God through words. The East has only recently begun to express its understanding of God in those ways. For the most part, Eastern Christianity has always recognized that it can only say so much about God in finite, human ways before it must go silent before the mystery of the Infinite and Unspeakable. Instead of defining ultimate reality in theological concepts, the East has relied upon its artists, musicians, and poets to proclaim what can only be understood in the heart. — Peter Pearson

Love isn't blind. Love is reasonable. God is pure love, but He is also pure reason. If you separate reason from faith you'll end in violence. Either way, if you have a purely rationalistic scheme that is atheistic, for instance Communism was for social justice. Fascism was for the nation-state, which isn't automatically a bad thing. — Francis George

Contemporary philosophers, even the rationalistic minded ones, have on the whole agreed that no one has intelligibly banished the mystery of fact. — William James

For at sixteen I had imagined that Blake, like the other romantics, was glorifying passion, natural energy, for their own sake. Far from it! What he was glorifying was the transfiguration of man's natural love, his natural powers, in the refining fires of mystical experience: and that, in itself, implied an arduous and total purification, by faith and love and desire, from all the petty materialistic and commonplace and earthly ideals of his rationalistic friends. — Thomas Merton

When we understand clearly that inner peace is the real source of happiness, and how, through spiritual practice, we can experience progressively deeper levels of inner peace, we will develop tremendous enthusiasm to practice — Geshe Kelsang Gyatso

I don't remember what made me want to be an actor. In fact, I'm always curious. — Robert De Niro

Yet as bad as she felt, it was nothing compared to the stark despair she saw in Rafferty's eyes. It was so total, and went so deep, that it made her forget her own hurt to see it. It was the look of a man who'd given up deep inside where it mattered most, and for Maggie, who was a survivor to her very toes, it was profoundly disturbing. — Caroline Cross