Jeff Lindsay Quotes

Human beings are the only creatures who are able to behave irrationally in the name of reason.

Logic will never change emotion or perception.

Logic is one thing, the human animal another. You can quite easily propose a logical solution to something and at the same time hope in your heart of hearts it won't work out.

I've always been more comfortable making my decisions from the subconscious level, or more emotionally, because I find it is more truthful to me; Intellectually, I don't think like that because I get uncomfortable.

The most important thing when you study hypnosis is that you learn that humans are irrational. Until you understand that, hypnosis is hard to do... For me, it was this great awakening to understand that humans are deeply irrational, and it's probably the greatest influence on me in terms of my writing.

It's awfully hard to get into the head of a liberal. Instead of logic and reason, they are drawn to emotions and feelings.

Man's brain, enlarged fortuitously, invented words in an ambitious attempt to learn how to think, only to have them usurped by his emotions. But we still try.

Man is not a rational animal, he is a rationalizing animal.

But with man the case is otherwise, in that when logic leads to any humiliating conclusion, the sole effect is to discredit logic.

If one devalues rationality, the world tends to fall apart.

By the way, the point between rationality and what we would call the irrational is a very difficult point to establish. There's no specific line, as you know.

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.

It's hard to find logic in things sometimes. That's why I can't analyze things too much, because it often doesn't make much sense.

People mistakenly assume that their thinking is done by their head; it is actually done by the heart which first dictates the conclusion, then commands the head to provide the reasoning that will defend it.

No rational argument will have a rational effect on a man who does not want to adopt a rational attitude.

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

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

The Enlightenment view of mankind is a complete myth. It leads us into thinking we're sane and rational creatures most of the time, and we're not.

For all their expertise at figuring out how things work, technical people are often painfully aware how much of human behavior is a mystery. People do things for unfathomable reasons. They are opaque even to themselves.

Very bad things follow when we kid ourselves that we're naturally rational, rather than the more humbling truth: naturally emotional.

Emotion is a rotten base for politics.

I realised that people respond to banal things. They don't accept their own history, not participating in acceptance within their own being.

But we all recognise the primary foible of frail humanity - our propensity for embracing hope and shunning logic, our tendency to believe what we desire rather than what we observe.

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

I no longer idolize reason. I have come to accept that ninety percent of what we do is irrational and that we spend what little rational thought we have in justifying our irrationality.