Daily Inspiration Quote by John Churton Collins

Collins’s line slices at a familiar self-congratulation: the idea that being “a thinker” is automatically a virtue. As a late-Victorian critic, he’s writing from a culture that prized reason as a badge of seriousness while quietly outsourcing whole swaths of life to unexamined sentiment - patriotism, propriety, gender roles, class reflexes. The wit here is that he doesn’t simply scold emotion. He indicts category errors. We don’t just make mistakes because we feel too much; we err because we apply the wrong tool to the wrong job.

The sentence is built like a balanced scale: “feeling where we ought to think” and its mirror-image reversal. That symmetry is the point. Collins is describing a cognitive style, not a moral failing. Some decisions demand cold assessment (money, power, evidence), and we wreck them by letting mood masquerade as judgment. Other moments demand moral or human responsiveness (grief, loyalty, intimacy), and we botch them by turning them into puzzles to be solved, treating people as problems and pain as an argument.

The subtext is corrective to Victorian rationalism without surrendering to Romantic impulse. Collins is defending emotional intelligence before the term existed: an ethics of appropriate registers. His “half” is also slyly generous. He leaves room for the other half of mistakes - ignorance, bad luck, structural constraints - while insisting that many disasters are self-inflicted by miscalibration. It’s criticism aimed outward at society’s hypocrisies, but it lands as a private diagnostic: not “be more logical” or “be more sensitive,” but know which voice should be speaking now.