All 13 Uses of
irrational
in
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
- Frivolous, irrational, erratic, untrustworthy, interested primarily in pleasure-seeking.†
Part 1 *irrational = unreasonable
- I feel some anxiety about this, which I realize is irrational and try to get rid of by talking about the road to the others.†
Part 2
- As a result we're getting more and more people in irrational areas of thought...occultism, mysticism, drug changes and the like...because they feel the inadequacy of classical reason to handle what they know are real experiences.†
Part 2
- Yet that was all rationality offered and there was nothing to do about it without being irrational And if there was one thing he had a clear mandate to do in this Church of Reason it was to be rational, so he had to let it go at that.†
Part 2
- The students had no formal training that would have told them his statement was, in a formal sense, completely irrational.†
Part 3
- In time, however, he wondered why it worked, especially when he already knew it was irrational.†
Part 3
- Why should an irrational method work when rational methods were all so rotten?†
Part 3
- He was turning the method of rationality against itself, turning it against his own kind, in defense of an irrational concept, an undefined entity called Quality.†
Part 3
- This "something else" opened up into a huge area of classic scientific belief which stated that "what you like" is unimportant because it's all composed of irrational emotions within yourself.†
Part 3
- He showed a way by which reason may be expanded to include elements that have previously been unassimilable and thus have been considered irrational.†
Part 3
- I think it's the overwhelming presence of these irrational elements crying for assimilation that creates the present bad quality, the chaotic, disconnected spirit of the twentieth century.†
Part 3
- In the past our common universe of reason has been in the process of escaping, rejecting the romantic, irrational world of prehistoric man.†
Part 3
- At present we're snowed under with an irrational expansion of blind datagathering in the sciences because there's no rational format for any understanding of scientific creativity.†
Part 3
Definitions:
-
(1)
(irrational) not reasonable
-
(2)
(meaning too rare to warrant focus) meaning too rare to warrant focus:
More rarely, irrational numbers in mathematics are numbers that cannot be expressed as a fraction consisting of only an integer in the numerator and denominator. For example, pi is an irrational number while 1/3 is rational.