Daily Inspiration Quote by Erich Segal

Grown-up life, Segal suggests, is a performance of rationality that collapses right when it matters most. The passage starts by nodding to the civics-class ideal of adulthood: logic, reason, careful thought. Then it undercuts that ideal with a kind of conversational shrug: "But maybe they never heard..". The tone is important. Segal isn’t mounting a philosophical argument so much as staging a confession, one that smuggles authority in through anecdote (Dr. London, Freud) while admitting the messiness of actual choice.

The subtext is a defense of irrationality that wants to sound responsible. Notice the neat moral division: "little things" get reason; "really big decisions" get the unconscious. It flatters the reader twice. You can still be a sensible person in daily life, yet when love, marriage, vocation, or grief hits, your gut instincts become not a lapse but a deeper intelligence. Freud is invoked less as science than as permission: a cultural stamp that turns intuition into wisdom.

Contextually, this sits comfortably in Segal’s broader project as a novelist of romantic stakes, where feelings arrive like verdicts and characters rationalize after the fact. The line reads like a bridge between mid-century faith in psychology and late-20th-century self-help: you’re complex, your motives are layered, your "unconscious" is a legitimate co-author of your life. It works because it doesn’t deny logic; it simply demotes it to the minor leagues, leaving the big games to whatever is speaking beneath your speech.