“Reason is always a kind of brute force; those who appeal to the head rather than the heart, however pallid and polite, are necessarily men of violence. We speak of 'touching' a man's heart, but we can do nothing to his head but hit it.”
—G. K. Chesterton, “Charles II” Twelve Types
2 comments:
Yes, or as Yeats said in his wise poem "Under Ben Bulben":
when all words are said
And a man is fighting mad,
Something drops from eyes long blind,
He completes his partial mind,
For an instant stands at ease,
Laughs aloud, his heart at peace.
Even the wisest man grows tense
With some sort of violence
Before he can accomplish fate,
Know his work or choose his mate.
Then there's that, yes. The passion, the spiritedness, the thumos, as the Greeks called it.
Or as Howard Beale put it, first you've got to get mad!
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