I had often thought that the mind was, quite literally, a
devil’s advocate, an agent of diabolical sophistry that could argue any point
and its opposite with equal conviction; an imp that delighted in
self-contradiction and yet, though full of sound and fury, ultimately signified
nothing. None of the truest things in life — like love or faith — was arrived
at by thinking; indeed, one could almost define the things that mattered as the
ones that came as suddenly as thunder. Too often, I thought, the rational
faculty tended only to rationalize, and the intellect served only to put one in
two minds, torn apart by second thoughts.
~Pico Iyer, The Lady and the Monk: Four Seasons in Kyoto,
1991
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