What does this quote mean?

“The heart has its reasons, which reason knows not.”

Human judgment includes forms of intuition, feeling, and commitment that cannot always be reduced to explicit logical argument.

Source note: Pensées; Pascal contrasts forms of knowing associated with the heart and with discursive reason.

“For love is the desire of the whole, and the pursuit of the whole is called love.”

Aristophanes presents love as a longing to recover wholeness, but the claim belongs to his deliberately mythic account of divided human beings rather than to a literal theory of human origins.

Source note: Symposium, Aristophanes’s speech, Benjamin Jowett translation, Project Gutenberg #1600. The sentence concludes the comic myth of humans split into halves; it is a speaker position inside Plato’s dialogue, not direct autobiography or anthropology by Plato.

“What’s in a name? That which we call a rose by any other word would smell as sweet.”

The line questions whether labels and inherited identities should determine the value or reality of the person beneath them.

Source note: Act 2, Scene 2; Juliet separates Romeo from the social meaning of his family name.

“Humanity does not desire to be great, but to be beloved.”

Smith contrasts humane character with status-seeking by presenting affection and social trust, rather than greatness itself, as the fitting reward of humanity.

Source note: The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Part III, in Smith’s discussion of the rewards commonly associated with industry, truth, justice, and humanity.

“Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same.”

The line describes intimacy as profound likeness rather than surface compatibility, making identity and attachment almost inseparable in the speaker’s imagination.

Source note: Wuthering Heights; Catherine explains the depth and identity-level nature of her attachment to Heathcliff.

“One must learn to love, one must learn to be kind, and this from childhood onwards.”

The aphorism treats loving and kind dispositions as capacities that can be practiced and cultivated rather than assumed to arise automatically.

Source note: Human, All-Too-Human, Part I, aphorism 601, “Learning to Love”; Helen Zimmern translation; this record uses the opening sentence.