Clarence Darrow Quotes

Man is primarily governed by passion and instinct.

Reason is the historian, but passions are the actors.

Men are rather reasoning than reasonable animals, for the most part governed by the impulse of passion.

Human behavior flows from three main sources: desire, emotion, and knowledge.

People and nations act on the basis of what they feel rather than what is real.

The emotions of man are stirred more quickly than man’s intelligence.

The words are meaningless except in terms of feeling. Does anyone act as the result of thought or does feeling stimulate action and sometimes thought implement it.

I'm insatiably curious about human nature.

Two things control men's nature, instinct and experience.

Man is said to be a reasoning animal. I do not know why he has not been defined as an affective or feeling animal. Perhaps that which differentiates him from other animals is feeling rather than reason

I'm interested in character and people and motivations and things like that.

When you start to think about the drives that humans have, I think sometimes we find we are simpler than we thought and more easily manipulated.

There appears to be but two grand master passions or movers in the human mind, namely, love and pride. And what constitutes the beauty or deformity of a man's character is the choice he makes under which banner he determines to enlist himself. But there is a strong distinction between different degress in the same thing and a mixture of two contraries.

The important thing about human beings is not what they do, but why they do it.

Ninety percent of our lives is governed by emotion.

That is the way we are made: we don't reason, where we feel; we just feel.

It is feeling that sets a man thinking, and not thought that sets him feeling.

Action often precedes the feeling.

The heart, not the head, must be the guide.

My theory was that what I had to do was make a study of human behavior.

People react to fear, not love; they don't teach that in Sunday School, but it's true.

Apart from anything else, I am designed by evolution, like we all are: if we see a little thing like that, big eyes, tiny nose, we go 'aaah'. That's what evolution does. We are programmed to do that. So to find babies the most amazing, isn't surprising, I don't think.

Most men seem to live according to sense rather than reason.

All of our reasoning ends in surrender to feeling.

The greatest happiness is to transform one's feelings into action.