Rex Stout Quotes

Reason is the servant of instinct.

If you see voters as rational, you'll be a terrible politician. People are not wired to be rational. Our brains simply evolved to keep us alive. Brains did not evolve to give us truth. Brains merely give us movies in our minds that keeps us sane and motivated. But none of it is rational or true, except maybe sometimes by coincidence.

When the heart flies out before the understanding, it saves the judgment a world of pains.

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

Our unconscious is not more animal than our conscious, it is often even more human.

Mankind are governed more by their feelings than by reason.

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.

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

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

As history reminds us again and again, wars are not always made on the basis of rational calculations: often the contrary.

First with the head, then with the heart.

Instinct leads, logic does but follow.

The great thing about behavioural psychology and economics is that they help us to see that there are actually pretty good reasons why human beings swing from greed to fear, and why we're not really calculating machines or utility-maximisers.

There's no evidence whatsoever that men are more rational than women. Both sexes seem to be equally irrational.

I continue to be fascinated by the fact that feelings are not just the shady side of reason but that they help us to reach decisions as well.

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

Among the enduring truths I keep bumping into when there is the luxury of time to get to know people or institutions, is that their decisions are often made for what are not, strictly speaking, reasons of logic.

Logic will never change emotion or perception.

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.

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.

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

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.

I have a good brain on me, but I've never really used it when it came to making decisions about love, which has been a blessing and a curse.

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.