Vance Havner Quotes

I think there is only one quality worse than hardness of heart and that is softness of head.

When a person responds emotionally to intellectual things, or emotionally only to traditional emotional things - I find that an interesting break between myself and some other writers and fans.

We don't look at problems logically, we look at them emotionally. We look at them through the guts. We look at them as if we're doing a high school problem, like what is beautiful, what makes me recognized among my peers. We don't go and think about things. We, as a society, don't wish to engage in rational thought.

I have an adult emotional life and an editing system inside me which prevents me from being preposterously stupid.

People of little understanding are most apt to be angry when their sense is called into question.

Maybe you are the 'cool' generation If coolness means a capacity to stay calm and use your head in the service of ends passionately believed in, then it has my admiration.

We believe it is bad or dangerous to be carried away by our emotions. We admire the person who is cool, who acts without feeling.

We should take care not to make the intellect our god; it has, of course, powerful muscles, but no personality.

I think one of the important evolutions is that we no longer feel compulsively the need to argue, or to justify things on a kind of rational level. We are much more willing to admit that certain things are completely instinctive and others are really intellectual.

The problem with emotion was that it was clearly something important, but-at least according to the old philosophy-it was something to overcome.

For no art and no religion is possible until we make allowances, until we manage to keep quiet the enfant terrible of logic that plays havoc with the other faculties.

Half our mistakes in life arise from feeling where we ought to think, and thinking where we ought to feel.

Reason without passion is sterile, but passion without reason is hysteria.

The voice of the intelligence ... is drowned out by the roar of fear. It is ignored by the voice of desire. It is contradicted by the voice of shame. It is hissed away by hate, and extinguished by anger. Most of all it is silenced by ignorance.

In Quebec, people are moved too often by passion and too little by intelligence.

Life is a massive amount of feelings with the occasional profound engagement with intellect. As I get older, I hope the intellect takes over.

To me, the worst thing is to just be knee-jerk and emotional.

Italians think with their heads.

I've always been able to put things in perspective.

However, if we wish to be compassionate with our fellow man, we must learn to engage in dispassionate analysis. In other words, thinking with our hearts, rather than our brains, is a surefire method to hurt those whom we wish to help.

Feeling without judgement is a washy draught indeed; but judgement untempered by feeling is too bitter and husky a morsel for human deglutition.

I need a boy who thinks with his big head, not his little one. Since they do not exist, I have fashioned my own.

What I believe in my heart must make sense in my mind.

Without the aid of trained emotions the intellect is powerless against the animal organism.

As a nation, we may take pride in the fact that we are softhearted; but we cannot afford to be soft-headed.