Carlos Castaneda Quotes

Logic never attracts men to the point of carrying them away.

All of our reasoning ends in surrender to feeling.

Common sense is calculation applied to life.

Sometimes, I work a little more from emotion than I do from rational thought.

No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical.

People are powerfully moved by imagination, belief, and knowledge. They can consider the past and future. They can make changes in their behavior out of reason in a way that animals can't do.

But I don't think I have any particular talent for prediction, because when you have three or four elements in hand, you don't have to be a genius to reach certain conclusions.

Reason is the historian, but passions are the actors.

In life, particularly in public life, psychology is more powerful than logic.

We think, each of us, that we're much more rational than we are. And we think that we make our decisions because we have good reasons to make them. Even when it's the other way around. We believe in the reasons, because we've already made the decision.

I've become wary of interviews in which you're forced to go back over the reasons why you made certain decisions. You tend to rationalize what you've done, to intellectually review a process that is often intuitive.

Mankind are governed more by their feelings than by reason. Events which excite those feelings will produce wonderful effects.

We all have a limited amount of good judgment.

Logic is a wonderful thing but doesn't always beat actual thought.

The theoretician believes in logic and believes that he despises dreams, intuition, and poetry. He does not recognize that these three fairies have only disguised themselves in order to dazzle him.... He does not know that he owes his greatest discoveries to them.

In political matters feeling often decides more correctly than reason.

There are those who reason well, but they are greatly outnumbered by those who reason badly.

The vexing thing about human behavior is that when we say we know we should do something, we really and truly do know it. It's hard to be 50 lbs. overweight or smoke a pack a day or feel miserable every moment you spend at work and not understand in a deep and primal way that change is in order - and that in some cases it could even save your life.

The explanations for the things we do in life are many and complex. Supposedly mature adults should live by logic, listen to their reason. Think things out before they act. But maybe they never heard what Dr. London told me one, Freud said that for the little things in life we should react according to our reason. But for really big decisions, we should heed what our unconscious tells us.

All our reasoning boils down to yielding to sentiment.

Sometimes I'll trust my gut more than my head. Logical information might lead me in one direction and my feelings in another. Whereas I would have followed my head ten years ago, now I'm as likely or more likely to go with my gut feeling. It's ironic - you'd think the opposite would be true as you move to the top but it's not.

The concept of logical thinking is selection and this is brought about by the processes of acceptance and rejection. Rejection is the basis of logical thinking.

Logic can convince but only emotion can motivate.

A man must be completely wanting in intelligence if he does not show it when actuated by love, malice, or necessity.

Thinking. A process by which I use my brain to make a rational decision.