Antonio Damasio Quotes

Without our emotions, we can't make smart decisions.

At the constitutional level where we work, 90 percent of any decision is emotional. The rational part of us supplies the reasons for supporting our predilections.

Opinion is ultimately determined by the feelings, and not by the intellect.

If passion drives you, let reason hold the reins.

Emotions have taught mankind to reason.

Of course our feelings matter. But emotional decisions are usually not the best ones. On the other hand, your emotions can affect your decisions whether you like it or not because the effects can occur on the unconscious level.

It is a poor head that cannot find plausible reason for doing what the heart wants to do.

Men, as well as women, are much oftener led by their hearts than by their understandings.

One of the things this world is finding is that emotion is the basis of reason. We really have to trust our emotions, which are much smarter than our reason in some ways.

The mind has its arrangement; it proceeds from principles to demonstrations. The heart has a different mode of proceeding.

For there are two distinct sorts of ideas: Those that proceed from the head and those that emanate from the heart.

The heart has its reasons; it's the mind that's suspect.

Emotions are enmeshed in the neural networks of reason.

Beneath words and logic are emotional connections that largely direct how we use our words and logic.

The intellect is always fooled by the heart.

Reason is the servant of instinct.

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

Some people carry their heart in their head and some carry their head in their heart. The trick is to keep them apart yet working together.

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.

When we can communicate from the inside out, we're talking directly to the part of the brain that controls behavior, and then we allow people to rationalize it with the tangible things we say and do. This is where gut decisions come from.

Mankind are governed more by their feelings than by reason.

To say that man is a reasoning animal is a very different thing than to say that most of man's decisions are based on his rational process. That I don't believe at all.

Fear is the enemy. I distrust it. Any feeling or decision I make that might be motivated by fear I quickly reassess.

There may be no less original idea than the notion that our hearts hold dominion over our heads.