Eleanor Catton Quotes

Reason guides but a small part of man, and the rest obeys feeling, true or false, and passion, good or bad.

As reason is a rebel to faith, so passion is a rebel to reason.

All human actions have one or more of these seven causes: chance, nature, compulsions, habit, reason, passion, desire.

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

We do not wish ardently for what we desire only through reason.

Reason is the historian, but passions are the actors.

In my experience, there is only one motivation, and that is desire. No reasons or principle contain it or stand against it.

Logic is no answer to passion.

The trouble is that sex is a force of nature, and reason is not.

Man is primarily governed by passion and instinct.

Of all the ways of defining man, the worst is the one which makes him out to be a rational animal.

There is a boundary to men's passions when they act from feelings; but none when they are under the influence of imagination.

Mankind will not be reasoned out of the feelings of humanity.

And, speaking generally, passion seems not to be amenable to reason, but only to force.

Le coeur a ses raisons que la raison ne connait point. French. Pascal. The heart has its reasons, whereof reason knows nothing.

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

When desire, having rejected reason and overpowered judgment which leads to right, is set in the direction of the pleasure which beauty can inspire . . .

Passion makes the will lord of the reason.

But it is not reason that governs love.

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

Reason is not what decides love.

Reason has not tamed desire: it is as strong as ever.

They declaim against the passions without bothering to think that it is from their flame philosophy lights its torch.

Every man without passions has within him no principle of action, nor motive to act.

Mankind are governed more by their feelings than by reason.