“Your reason and your passion are the rudder and the sails of your seafaring soul.
Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet (Page 47)
If either your sails or your rudder be broken, you can but toss and drift, or else be held at a standstill in mid-seas. For reason, ruling alone, is a force confining; and passion, unattended, is a flame that burns to its own destruction.
Therefore let your soul exalt your reason to the height of passion, that it may sing;
And let it direct your passion with reason, that your passion may live through its own daily resurrection, and like the phoenix rise above its own ashes.”
“Our misery is that we have forgotten the language of love. The reason we have forgotten the language of love is that we have become too identified with reason. Nothing is wrong with reason, but it has a tendency to monopolize. It clings to the whole of your being. Then feeling suffers—feeling is starved—and by and by you forget about feeling completely. So it goes on shrinking and shrinking, and that dead feeling becomes a dead weight; that feeling becomes a dead heart. Then one can go on pulling oneself along somehow—it will always be ‘somehow.’ There will be no charm, no magic, because without love there is no magic in life. And there will be no poetry either; life will be all prose, flat. Yes, it will have grammar, but it will not have a song in it. It will have a structure, but it will not have substance.”
Osho, Everyday Osho (Page 102)
“Emotion is not opposed to reason; our emotions assign value to experiences and thus are the foundation of reason. Our self-experience is the product of the balance between our rational and our emotional brains. When these two systems are in balance, we ‘feel like ourselves.’ However, when our survival is at stake, these systems can function relatively independently.”
Bessel van der Kolk, The Body Keeps The Score (Page 64)
“For nothing outside my reasoned choice can hinder or harm it—my reasoned choice alone can do this to itself. If we would lean this way whenever we fail, and would blame only ourselves and remember that nothing but opinion is the cause of a troubled mind and uneasiness, then by God, I swear we would be making progress.”
Epictetus, Discourses, via The Daily Stoic (Page 246)
“The fact that you can think, the fact that you can read this book, the fact that you are able to reason in and out of situations—all of this is what gives you the ability to improve your circumstances and become better. It’s important to appreciate this ability, because it’s a genuine ability. Not everyone is so lucky. Seriously—what you take for granted, others wouldn’t even think to dream of.”
Ryan Holiday, The Daily Stoic (Page 86)