Benjamin Whichcote 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.

True, we love life, not because we are used to living, but because we are used to loving. There is always some madness in love, but there is also always some reason in madness.

Mankind are governed more by their feelings than by reason.

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

The only difference between me and a madman is that I'm not mad.

When a man asks himself what is meant by action he proves that he isn't a man of action. Action is a lack of balance. In order to act you must be somewhat insane. A reasonably sensible man is satisfied with thinking.

Why? Will no man ever do something without a why? Just like that? For the hell of it?

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

Logic is no answer to passion.

I can calculate the movement of the stars, but not the madness of men.

Of course I'm crazy, but that doesn't mean I'm wrong

Between incomprehensible and incoherent sits the madhouse. I am not in the madhouse.

Worse than madness. Sanity.

Reason can no more influence the will, and operate as a motive, than the eyes which show a man his road can enable him to move from place to place, or that a ship provided with a compass can sail without a wind.

Reason is no match for desire: when desire is purely and powerfully felt, it becomes a kind of reason of its own.

In the main, and from the beginning of time, mysticism has kept men sane. The thing that has driven them mad was logic.

Our occasional madness is less wonderful than our occasional sanity.

Many that are not mad have, sure, more lack of reason.

There nearly always is a method in madness.

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

In an insane world, sanity made very little sense.

Are we, then, insane because we have not gone mad?

If the sleep of reason produces monsters, what does the sleep of unreason produce?

Reason is the first victim of strong emotion.