Subrational Quotes & Sayings

But al be that he was a philosophre, Yet hadde he but litel gold in cofre. — Geoffrey Chaucer

Rationality or consciousness is itself a ratio or proportion among the sensuous components of experience, and is not something added to such sense experience. Subrational beings have no means of achieving such a ratio or proportion in their sense lives but are wired for fixed wave lengths, as it were, having infallibility in their own area of experience. Consciousness, complex and subtle, can be impaired or ended by a mere stepping-up or dimming-down of any one sense intensity, which is the procedure in hypnosis. And the intensification of one sense by a new medium can hypnotize an entire community. — Marshall McLuhan

As I ascended, I realized I didn't understand what a mountain was, or even if I was hiking up one mountain or a series of them glommed together. I'd not grown up around mountains. I'd walked on a few, but only on well-trod paths on day hikes. They'd seemed to be nothing more than really big hills. But they were not that. They were, I now realized, layered and complex, inexplicable and analogous to nothing. Each time I reached the place that I thought was the top of the mountain or the series of mountains glommed together, I was wrong. There was still more up to go, even if first there was a tiny slope that went tantalizingly down. So up I went until I reached what really was the top. I knew it was the top because there was snow. Not on the ground, but falling from the sky, in thin flakes that swirled in mad patterns, pushed by the wind. — Cheryl Strayed

Success does not consist in never making mistakes but in never making the same one a second time. — George Bernard Shaw

My career means, if you're a non-Indian writing about Indians, at least there's one Indian in your rearview mirror. — Sherman Alexie

We face paired dangers. The first is that our networks are successfully attacked. The second is that our fear of attack will cause us to destroy what makes the Internet special. — Jonathan Zittrain

In war, more than anywhere else in the world, things happen differently from what we had expected, and look differently when near from what they did at a distance. — Carl Von Clausewitz

Live your life by the hour, not by the day. What will you achieve in the next hour? — Frank Zane

America, I'm gonna shoot straight with you, I think I've wasted your time. I think this is the first time I have wasted an hour of your time. I apologize for that. — Glenn Beck

Make him [the reader] think the evil, make him think it for himself, and you are released from weak specifications. — Henry James

We're not witches. We're the bogeymen and angels that walk the thin seam of the two worlds, like cats on high-wire beams.
Assassins. Peacekeepers. A secret government that's a two-way mirror. — Alyse M. Gardner