Life & Wisdom Quote by Bryant H. McGill

McGill frames feeling as a kind of makeshift bridge: not the opposite of intelligence, but the emergency architecture we throw across its gaps. The line works because it refuses the comforting myth that humans are mostly rational with a few sentimental glitches. Instead, it implies intelligence is pocked with “unfathomable voids” - not minor blind spots, but chasms where explanation fails, data runs out, and certainty becomes a cosplay.

The verb choice is slyly forgiving. “Rely upon” doesn’t scold; it admits a practical dependency. Emotion becomes a survival tool, the thing that gets you from one usable belief to the next when analysis can’t. That’s the subtext: reason is not a seamless highway; it’s a set of islands, and the tides between them are high. We cross anyway, often on trust, fear, hope, love, pride - the motives that move the body when the mind can’t produce a clean proof.

Contextually, this fits late-20th/early-21st century self-help humanism: the rehabilitation of emotion as legitimate knowledge rather than mere bias. It also quietly acknowledges the cognitive-science turn in pop culture - the growing awareness that humans are not disembodied calculators, and that “thinking” is shot through with affect. The line lands because it’s both humbling and permission-giving: you’re not broken for leaning on feeling; you’re human navigating a world too complex for total comprehension.