Love Quote by Anthony de Mello

De Mello’s line lands like a polite ambush: you think you’re being praised for rationality, then he quietly suggests your “reason” is basically a press office. The hook is the reversal. We’re trained to picture the mind as a clean, top-down system - facts in, conclusions out. He flips the order: conclusion first, justification second. That inversion is why the quote stings; it exposes how often logic functions less as a microscope than as makeup.

The intent isn’t anti-intellectual so much as diagnostic. De Mello, a spiritual writer shaped by Jesuit training and Eastern contemplative traditions, is aiming at the modern ego’s favorite costume: the reasonable person. His subtext is that most debates aren’t battles over truth; they’re battles over identity, fear, belonging, status. The “heart” here isn’t Hallmark sentimentality. It’s the seat of attachment: what we want to be true, what we’re scared to lose, what story about ourselves must remain intact.

Context matters: de Mello wrote in an era when psychology was popularizing the unconscious and self-deception, and when religion was being reframed as inner awakening rather than rule-following. The quote reads like a spiritual update to cognitive bias research before the term went mainstream. It also preempts today’s culture-war epistemology: people don’t browse for information, they browse for ammunition.

What makes it work rhetorically is the implied challenge. If your “head” is hired help, then the real work isn’t winning arguments; it’s noticing the hidden emotional contract that drafted the argument in the first place.