Henry Bourassa Quotes

What is now reason was formerly impulse or instinct.

Reason is the servant of instinct.

The Intellect engages us in the pursuit of Truth. The Passions impel us to Action.

We do want to drive out the beast in man, but we do not want on that account to emasculate him.

The laws of animality govern almost the whole of history.

Nothing leads to good that is not natural.

A person is born with desires of the eyes and ears, and a liking for beautiful sights and sounds. If he gives way to them, they will lead him to immorality and lack of restriction, and any ritual principles and propriety will be abandoned.

Man is primarily governed by passion and instinct.

It is a monstrous thing that I will say, but I will say it all the same: I find in many things more restraint and order in my morals than in my opinions, and my lust less depraved than my reason.

Biology always beats will power.

Man may act according to that principle or inclination which for the present happens to be strongest, and yet act in a way disproportionate to, and violate his real proper nature.

Panic is rare, looting is essentially insignificant, people are not terrified and trampling each other to flee from a disaster scene, but in fact are trying to manage a situation. We may in fact revert to some sort of primordial civility.

The great changes in civilisation and society have been wrought by deeply held beliefs and passion rather than by a process of rational deduction.

Reason is the historian, but passions are the actors.

In antiquity the sage kings recognized that men's nature is bad and that their tendencies were not being corrected and their lawlessness controlled.

The truth is, man is hereunto led by reason which is his nature.

I think one of the important evolutions is that we no longer feel compulsively the need to argue, or to justify things on a kind of rational level. We are much more willing to admit that certain things are completely instinctive and others are really intellectual.

Men live by intervals of reason under the sovereignty of humor and passion.

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

The savage in man is never quite eradicated.

Jesus did not get stuck in intellectual arguments with people. He did not go for the intellect; He went for the conscience. He spoke to that part of the person that knows the difference between right and wrong instinctively.

First, he must hold rational values, and to do this he must be a thinker.

Society cannot exist unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere; and the less of it there is within, the more of it there must be without.

Common sense is the most widely shared commodity in the world, for every man is convinced that he is well supplied with it.

I'm going to fight the force of emotions by that of intellect