Passages about reason and passion

Sing, goddess, the anger of Peleus' son Achilleus and its devastation, which put pains thousandfold upon the Achaians.

As is the generation of leaves, so is that of humanity. The wind scatters the leaves on the ground, but the live timber burgeons with leaves again in the season of spring returning.

This proposition, I am, I exist, is necessarily true each time it is expressed by me, or conceived in my mind.

Some malignant demon, who is at once exceedingly potent and deceitful, has employed all his artifice to deceive me.

Nothing in the world, or even out of it, can possibly be conceived which could be called good without qualification except a good will.

Act only according to that maxim whereby thou canst at the same time will that it should become a universal law.

Dionysus opens the play by naming himself, saying he has come to Thebes disguised as a man because his mother's sisters denied that Zeus fathered him and called her death a punishment for a lie.

Tiresias tells Pentheus that the new god gives wine, which relieves men of pain and gives them sleep, and that a city gains nothing by fighting a power it cannot see.

Every art and every inquiry, and similarly every action and pursuit, is thought to aim at some good; and for this reason the good has rightly been declared to be that at which all things aim.

For one swallow does not make a summer, nor does one day; and so too one day, or a short time, does not make a man blessed and happy.

The eternal silence of these infinite spaces terrifies me.

The heart has its reasons, which reason does not know.

To be, or not to be, that is the question: Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, Or to take arms against a sea of troubles And by opposing end them.

What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving how express and admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god.

Good sense is, of all things among men, the most equally distributed; for every one thinks himself so abundantly provided with it, that those even who are the most difficult to satisfy in everything else, do not usually desire a larger measure of this quality than they already possess.

I think, therefore I am, was so certain and of such evidence, that no ground of doubt, however extravagant, could be alleged by the sceptics capable of shaking it.

All the objects of human reason or enquiry may naturally be divided into two kinds, to wit, Relations of Ideas, and Matters of Fact.

Custom, then, is the great guide of human life.

Men are disturbed not by the things which happen, but by the opinions about the things.

Seek not that the things which happen should happen as you wish; but wish the things which happen to be as they are, and you will have a tranquil flow of life.

I cannot but conclude the bulk of your natives to be the most pernicious race of little odious vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth.

And he gave it for his opinion, that whoever could make two ears of corn or two blades of grass to grow upon a spot of ground where only one grew before, would deserve better of mankind, and do more essential service to his country, than the whole race of politicians put together.

Ambition must be made to counteract ambition. The interest of the man must be connected with the constitutional rights of the place.

If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary.

Supposing truth is a woman, what then?

He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster. And if you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you.

Of all creatures that have breath and understanding, we women are the most wretched.

I would rather stand three times in the line of battle than give birth once.

My tongue swore, but my mind is unsworn.

We know the good and recognise it, but we do not work it out, some from idleness, and some from preferring some other pleasure to the good.

Men seek retreats for themselves, houses in the country, seashores, and mountains, but it is in thy power whenever thou shalt choose to retire into thyself.

Do not act as if thou wert going to live ten thousand years. Death hangs over thee. While thou livest, while it is in thy power, be good.

I do not seek to understand that I may believe, but I believe in order to understand. For this also I believe, that unless I believed, I should not understand.

Even the fool is convinced that something than which nothing greater can be conceived exists at least in his understanding, since when he hears of this he understands it.

I saw him, I blushed, I turned pale at the sight of him.

It is Venus entire, fastened on her prey.

The True is the whole.

Everything turns on grasping and expressing the True, not only as Substance, but equally as Subject.

Life, as we find it, is too hard for us; it brings us too many pains, disappointments and impossible tasks.

Man has become a kind of prosthetic God.

I am not what I am.

O, beware, my lord, of jealousy; it is the green-eyed monster which doth mock the meat it feeds on.

All the sciences are nothing other than human wisdom, which always remains one and the same, however different the subjects to which it is applied.

By a method I mean reliable rules which are easy to apply, such that whoever follows them exactly will never take what is false to be true, and will arrive at a true understanding of everything within his capacity.

Cover that bosom, which I cannot endure to look on. Such things damage the soul and stir up sinful thoughts.

There is a great difference between hypocrisy and devotion.

By God I mean an absolutely infinite being, that is, substance consisting of infinite attributes, each of which expresses eternal and infinite essence.

Men believe themselves free because they are conscious of their volitions and their desire, and do not think, even in their dreams, of the causes by which they are disposed to want and to will.

Let us then suppose the mind to be, as we say, white paper, void of all characters, without any ideas: how comes it to be furnished? To this I answer, in one word, from experience.

It is ambition enough to be employed as an under-labourer in clearing the ground a little, and removing some of the rubbish that lies in the way to knowledge.

Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.

Tis not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger.

In this best of all possible worlds, everything is for the best.

It is demonstrable that things cannot be otherwise than they are; for as all things have been created for some end, they must necessarily be created for the best end. Noses were made to carry spectacles, so we have spectacles.

Actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness, wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness.

It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied. And if the fool, or the pig, is of a different opinion, it is because they only know their own side of the question.

The ego is not master in its own house.

A dream is a disguised fulfilment of a suppressed or repressed wish.

Rhetoric may be defined as the faculty of observing in any given case the available means of persuasion.

Persuasion is achieved by the speaker's personal character when the speech is so spoken as to make us think him credible.

Of things some are in our power, and others are not. In our power are opinion, movement towards a thing, desire, aversion; and in a word, whatever are our own acts. Not in our power are the body, property, reputation, offices, and in a word, whatever are not our own acts.

Men are disturbed not by the things which happen, but by the opinions about the things.

The barge she sat in, like a burnish'd throne, / Burn'd on the water: the poop was beaten gold; / Purple the sails, and so perfumed that / The winds were love-sick with them.

Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale / Her infinite variety: other women cloy / The appetites they feed, but she makes hungry / Where most she satisfies.

I want us to be men, and on every occasion for the bottom of our hearts to show itself in what we say.

Sometimes it is a sign of honesty to hide what one thinks. Would it be right to tell a thousand people what one feels about them?

Thieves! Thieves! Assassins! Murderers! Justice, just heaven! I am undone, I am murdered, they have cut my throat, they have stolen my money.

Without a dowry.

A sound mind in a sound body is a short but full description of a happy state in this world.

I imagine the minds of children as easily turned this or that way as water itself.

Know then thyself, presume not God to scan; / The proper study of Mankind is Man.

All Nature is but Art, unknown to thee; / All Chance, Direction, which thou canst not see; / All Discord, Harmony not understood; / All partial Evil, universal Good: / And spite of Pride, in erring Reason's spite, / One truth is clear, Whatever IS, is RIGHT.

Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and reverence, the more often and more steadily one reflects on them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.

Act so that the maxim of your will could always hold at the same time as a principle of a universal legislation.

Beautiful is that which pleases universally without a concept.

Taste is the faculty for judging an object or a kind of representation through a satisfaction or dissatisfaction without any interest. The object of such a satisfaction is called beautiful.

I do not wish them to have power over men; but over themselves.

Taught from their infancy that beauty is woman's sceptre, the mind shapes itself to the body, and roaming round its gilt cage, only seeks to adorn its prison.

Habit is thus the enormous fly-wheel of society, its most precious conservative agent. It alone is what keeps us all within the bounds of ordinance, and saves the children of fortune from the envious uprisings of the poor.

Consciousness, then, does not appear to itself chopped up in bits. Such words as chain or train do not describe it fitly as it presents itself in the first instance. It is nothing jointed; it flows. A river or a stream are the metaphors by which it is most naturally described.

The interpretation of dreams is the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind.

When the work of interpretation has been completed, we perceive that a dream is the fulfilment of a wish.

Hysterics suffer mainly from reminiscences.

The patient herself, who at this period of her illness strangely enough spoke and understood only English, gave this procedure the name of the talking cure.

The aim of all life is death, and, looking backwards, that what was inanimate existed before what is living.

What follows is speculation, often far-fetched speculation, which the reader will consider or dismiss according to his individual predilection.

Inwood and Gerson translate and number the fragments and reports from Diogenes Laertius, Cicero, Plutarch, Stobaeus, Sextus Empiricus and others, arranged by topic, logic, physics, ethics, reconstructing Stoic doctrine's systematic architecture from scattered secondary sources.

The collection is the standard way for students to read what the Stoics actually argued about fate, the passions, virtue and the rational cosmos, giving readers direct access to positions otherwise recoverable only through this careful scholarly reconstruction.

On Anger argues against Aristotle that anger is never useful, describes with unpleasant vividness what it does to a face and a household, and prescribes a daily examination of conscience, giving abstract philosophical argument concrete documentary force.

On Mercy is addressed to the young Nero, whose tutor Seneca was, and tries to persuade an absolute ruler that clemency is in his own interest, giving the treatise genuine biographical stakes beyond abstract political theory alone.

Epictetus states that men are disturbed not by the things that happen, but by their opinions about the things that happen, so that death itself is nothing terrible, since if it were it would have appeared so to Socrates, but the terror lies entirely in our own judgment that death is terrible.

He compares life to a play whose length and character the author has already determined, and insists that our own task is simply to act well the part that has been given us, whether that part is short or long, a beggar's or a king's, since choosing the role is not up to us but acting it well entirely is.

Scepticism is the ability to set appearances and arguments against one another so that the mind suspends judgement and tranquillity follows, a genuinely active method rather than mere passive absence of belief that Sextus lays out systematically.

The first book lays out the ten modes of Aenesidemus and the five modes of Agrippa for producing suspension of judgement, giving Pyrrhonism a systematic technical apparatus transforming skeptical practice into methodical, teachable technique.

The poem begins by praising the awakening mind, confesses faults and generates the resolve, establishing the bodhisattva vow to attain enlightenment for the sake of all beings as the practice's central organizing and motivating principle throughout.

The chapter on patience argues against anger, and the meditation chapter teaches the exchange of self and other, offering a genuinely concrete practical technique for cultivating compassion through systematic contemplative exercise rather than abstract aspiration alone.

I came to know that what most distinguishes the Sufis is something that can be attained only by immediate experience, by ecstasy and by a moral change.

The disease was baffling, and it lasted almost two months, during which I was a determinist in fact, though not in theory or belief. Then God cured me of this malady. My spirit regained its health and equilibrium.

Maimonides reads the physical language scripture uses of God, God's hand, God's place, God's speech, as figurative rather than literal, and argues that nothing positive can actually be said of God at all, only what he is not, a negative theology refusing any positive description of divine nature.

Maimonides examines the Aristotelian proofs of God and the eternity of the world, and defends creation as philosophically possible rather than demonstrated, neither proven by reason nor disprovable by it, a genuinely honest account of where rational argument's actual limits fall on this contested question.

Romeo Montague crashes a Capulet feast and falls in love with Juliet Capulet, and they are married in secret by Friar Laurence the next day, their love's compressed timeframe giving it genuinely dangerous intensity from its very first meeting.

Romeo kills Juliet's cousin Tybalt to avenge his friend Mercutio and is banished, demonstrating how thoroughly the older generation's feud reasserts itself even within the younger generation's attempted escape from it through violent, inherited obligation.

Hermia, ordered by her father to marry Demetrius, runs into the woods outside Athens with Lysander, followed by Demetrius and by Helena, who loves him, establishing the tangled romantic pursuit the woods' magic will further complicate.

Oberon and Titania, king and queen of the fairies, are quarrelling over a changeling boy, and Oberon's servant Puck misapplies a love potion, the lovers' affections tangle, and the weaver Bottom is given an ass's head and Titania's love.

Rodrigue asks himself whether he should avenge his father and lose Chimène, or keep Chimène and live with a father's dishonor, and concludes that a single moment's hesitation would itself be a second, unforgivable dishonor added to the first.

Chimène tells the king that she demands Rodrigue's death not because her love for him has died, but precisely because it has not, and that only justice, not diminished feeling, drives her to ask for his execution.

Hobbes objects that from the fact that I am a thinking thing, it does not follow that thought requires an immaterial substance distinct from body, since a material subject might just as well be what does the thinking, and Descartes's reply insists the objection has missed what the Meditations actually claims to prove at this stage.

Arnauld presses Descartes on an apparent circle, that the certainty of clear and distinct ideas seems to depend on first proving God's existence and non-deception, while the proof of God's existence itself seems to depend on trusting clear and distinct ideas already.

Elisabeth asks Descartes directly how the soul, being only a thinking substance, can determine the movement of the bodily spirits in order to perform voluntary actions, given that all determination of movement seems to require either physical contact or some quality belonging to matter, neither of which the soul, as Descartes describes it, actually possesses.

Descartes replies with an account of the soul and body as forming a genuine, primitive union that cannot be fully explained through the same concepts used to explain interaction between two separate physical bodies, an answer Elisabeth continues to press without ever declaring herself satisfied.

Descartes states that the nature of matter, or body considered in general, consists not in its being something hard, or heavy, or coloured, but simply in its being something extended in length, breadth and depth.

He argues that since extension and matter are identical, there can be no vacuum anywhere in the universe, since any space, however apparently empty, is by definition extended and therefore is itself a body.

Don Juan, a nobleman who takes any woman he wants and believes in nothing but arithmetic, abandons his new wife Elvire and moves from seduction to seduction with his servant Sganarelle protesting behind him throughout the play's entire action.

Don Juan mocks a beggar's faith, cheats a creditor, rejects his father's pleas, and finally adopts hypocrisy as a calculated strategy rather than experiencing any genuine change of heart, escalating his cruelty toward everyone around him.

Andromache, Hector's widow, is the captive of Pyrrhus, son of Achilles, who loves her and will spare her son Astyanax only if she marries him, weaponizing his considerable political power over a captive woman into coercive romantic leverage.

Andromache agrees to marry Pyrrhus intending to kill herself afterwards, staging maternal duty and personal integrity in irreconcilable tension, accepting a repugnant marriage purely to save her son while privately refusing to actually survive the compromise.

Titus has just become emperor of Rome, and for five years he has loved Berenice, queen of Judaea, and promised to marry her, but Roman law and opinion will not accept a foreign queen as empress, staging political prejudice against personal devotion.

His friend Antiochus, king of Commagene, also loves Berenice and has kept silent, maintaining his own unfulfillable devotion even while loyally serving Titus throughout, a poignant third perspective deepening the play's meditation on thwarted love.

Ventidius, Antony's loyal general, argues directly and repeatedly that Cleopatra has cost Antony everything a Roman should value, honor, command, the world itself, and that true friendship requires speaking this hard truth rather than flattering a friend toward his own ruin.

Octavia arrives in Alexandria with the couple's children, appealing to Antony's sense of duty as husband and father rather than to political ambition alone, and for a time genuinely seems to be winning him back to Rome before Cleopatra's own intervention reverses his course.

Written as a dialogue between Philalethes, who speaks for Locke's actual positions, and Theophilus, who speaks for Leibniz's own views, the book proceeds chapter by chapter through Locke's Essay, keeping each specific philosophical disagreement concrete rather than allowing it to remain abstract.

Against Locke's image of the mind as a blank slate written on entirely by experience, Leibniz argues for innate ideas and truths that experience only awakens rather than creates, comparing the mind to a block of marble already containing veins that guide how a sculptor's work can proceed.

Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime, that is, it is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling.

Beauty is a social quality, for where women and men, and not only they but when other animals give us a sense of joy and pleasure in beholding them, and make us count nothing in the estimation of ourselves which do not command such regard, they inspire us with sentiments of tenderness and affection.

Its foundation is sympathy, our capacity to imagine ourselves in another's situation and to feel a version of what they feel, and we approve of conduct when we can go along with it, locating moral judgment in genuinely psychological and social capacity.

We judge ourselves by imagining an impartial spectator looking on, converting sympathy's basic mechanism into disciplined self-assessment rather than leaving it as unmediated emotional reaction, a genuinely rigorous internal check against self-serving bias.

Tristram sets out to tell his life and opinions but cannot get himself born until volume three, since every fact requires a digression, making narrative delay itself the novel's genuine formal subject rather than merely an obstacle to proper storytelling.

The book is really about his father Walter, a theorist of names and noses, his gentle Uncle Toby, who refights the siege of Namur in the garden, and the Widow Wadman's campaign for Toby, populating the novel with figures more vivid than Tristram himself.

From the evidence of his own consciousness, the Savoyard Vicar argues for a will that moves the universe, for an intelligent God, and for the freedom and immortality of the soul, deriving natural religion's core commitments from reason and inner experience alone.

The Vicar argues for conscience as an infallible inner voice, giving moral knowledge a foundation genuinely independent of external religious instruction and locating ethical certainty within immediate individual experience rather than requiring doctrinal mediation.

Parson Yorick travels through France without ever reaching Italy, recording not sights but encounters, with a monk in Calais, a lady whose hand he holds, a grisette, a caged starling that cannot get out, and a peasant family at supper.

The book is a comedy of feeling that parodies the grand tour and Smollett's ill-tempered travels, positioning Sterne's approach as deliberate corrective, substituting cultivated sensibility for aristocratic cataloguing or irritable complaint.

Wollstonecraft accuses Burke of sentimental theatricality, of feeling for the queen of France and the pageantry of the old order while the sufferings of the poor, the pressed sailor and the game-law victim, leave him unmoved.

Against Burke's defence of property and hereditary privilege in the name of tradition she sets natural rights grounded in reason and God, arguing that the age of a custom is no argument for it.

Schiller argues that political freedom cannot be achieved by people who are inwardly divided, and that modern specialisation has split the human being into a sense drive and a form drive, a psychological diagnosis with direct political consequences.

Only beauty, through the play drive, can reconcile the sense drive and the form drive, Schiller argues, giving aesthetic experience unusually consequential stakes as the necessary psychological precondition for any genuinely free political order.

A typical selection includes Blake's Songs of Innocence and of Experience, Wordsworth's Tintern Abbey and the Immortality Ode, Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Kubla Khan, Byron, Shelley's Mont Blanc and Ode to the West Wind, and Keats's odes.

Common threads across the selection are nature, the imagination, childhood, revolution and the poet's own mind, themes recurring across genuinely distinct individual voices spanning roughly the generation between the French Revolution and the Reform Act.

Shelley argues that poetry in the broad sense, the imaginative making of order, underlies language, law, religion and science, and that poets have been the founders of civil society, considerably expanding poetry's claimed scope beyond verse alone.

Poetry enlarges the sympathetic imagination, which is the instrument of moral good, giving aesthetic experience direct ethical consequence and connecting imaginative literature's pleasures to genuine moral development rather than treating them as merely decorative.

Stendhal distinguishes passionate love, mannered love, physical love and vanity love, describing the seven stages by which a person falls in love, the second of which he names crystallisation, giving romantic experience precise analytical vocabulary.

Crystallisation is the process by which the mind covers the beloved with perfections as a bare branch left in a salt mine comes out covered with crystals, offering a genuinely memorable and psychologically acute account of how idealization actually operates.

Julien Sorel, a carpenter's son in a provincial town under the Restoration, admires Napoleon in secret and takes holy orders as the only route open to ambition, exposing how thoroughly the Restoration's structural corruption closed legitimate paths to advancement.

As tutor in the house of the mayor, Monsieur de Rênal, he seduces the mayor's wife; sent to Paris as secretary to the Marquis de la Mole, he wins the marquis's proud daughter Mathilde, class boundaries proving genuinely permeable to skilled self-presentation.

War is nothing but the continuation of policy by other means, and this fundamental relationship, Clausewitz insists, must never be lost from view no matter how the specific character or scale of a war might vary.

War is more than a true chameleon that slightly adapts its characteristics to the given case, since in its objective nature it is a fascinating trinity, composed of primordial violence, hatred and enmity, the play of chance and probability, and its element of subordination as an instrument of policy, which makes it subject to reason alone.

Gradgrind opens the novel by instructing a schoolroom that facts alone are wanted in life, nothing else will ever be of any service, and that children should be taught nothing but facts, planting nothing else and rooting out everything else.

Louisa, married off to the much older Bounderby with no real feeling on either side, tells her father directly that she has never had a childhood in any real sense, and asks him what he has left within her to call upon now that Bounderby's marriage proposal has forced an actual choice requiring more than facts.

Isolde, brought to Cornwall as bride for King Marke by the man who killed her betrothed, means to poison them both, but her servant Brangäne substitutes a love potion, and they drink believing it is death.

In the king's garden by night the lovers sing that day is the realm of illusion and honour, and night the realm of truth, and long to sink into the night together and be free of the world.

Leo argues that faith and reason cannot genuinely conflict, since both ultimately derive from the same divine source, refusing the assumption that rigorous philosophical inquiry and Catholic doctrinal commitment exist in permanent, irreconcilable tension with one another.

Leo surveys the Church Fathers and the medieval scholastics broadly before singling out Thomas Aquinas specifically as the master to be followed in Catholic schools and seminaries, treating this specific historical judgment as a considered verdict rather than arbitrary preference.

Breuer and Freud's joint preliminary communication of 1893 states that hysterics suffer mainly from reminiscences, proposing that hysterical symptoms represent the transformed, physically expressed residue of memories too emotionally intolerable to remain in ordinary conscious awareness.

The case of Anna O., treated by Breuer rather than Freud directly, describes a patient who herself named the treatment the talking cure, working through each individual symptom by tracing it back to its original precipitating memory and putting that memory into words under a kind of induced hypnotic concentration.

John Tanner, a rich revolutionary who has written a book on the Life Force, is made guardian of Ann Whitefield and flees to Spain when he realises she means to marry him; she pursues and catches him, inverting conventional courtship dynamics with genuine comic force.

The third act, often played on its own as Don Juan in Hell, is a long debate among Don Juan, Doña Ana, the Statue and the Devil about whether life is going anywhere and what the superman would be, giving philosophical concerns direct dramatic voice.

Dewey describes reflective thought as beginning in a state of doubt, hesitation or perplexity in which a felt difficulty disturbs the smooth flow of ordinary experience, and argues that without this genuine, felt difficulty, no real thinking, as opposed to mere daydreaming or fantasy, actually occurs.

He argues that curiosity, suggestion and orderliness are not separate skills a teacher must somehow install in a child from outside, but native resources every child already brings to school, resources that good teaching cultivates and channels rather than replaces or overrides.

Gustav von Aschenbach, a celebrated and disciplined German writer whose entire career rests on decades of rigorous self-control, is seized by a sudden, uncharacteristic urge to travel, a break from his established pattern that sets the entire subsequent narrative in motion.

At the Lido hotel, Aschenbach becomes fascinated by Tadzio, a beautiful Polish boy of about fourteen, an obsession he never acts on directly, never approaching or speaking to the boy, yet one that escalates with unflinching psychological precision across the narrative's remaining length.