Good physicians are rarely dispassionate. They agonize and self-doubt over patients.
There are two men in Tolstoy. He is a mystic and he is also a realist. He is addicted to the practice of a pietism that for all its sincerity is nothing if not vague and sentimental; and he is the most acute and dispassionate of observers, the most profound and earnest student of character and emotion.
Is E.T. out there? Well, I work at the SETI Institute. That's almost my name. SETI: Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. In other words, I look for aliens, and when I tell people that at a cocktail party, they usually look at me with a mildly incredulous look on their face. I try to keep my own face somewhat dispassionate.
My father was the most rational and the most dispassionate of men.
In a perfect world, probably we'd never yell, we'd just be firm and dispassionate. But of course, everyone yells at their children.
But I say these things in an objective dispassionate manner because, you know, and I can't explain why, but being one of the greatest guitarists in the world simply is not very important to me.
When William the Conqueror commissioned a great survey of his English realm at Gloucester in 1085, the result was a work so thorough, fair, dispassionate, and wide-ranging that it seemed to the succeeding generations to have come from another world.
If you don't have your experiences in the moment, if you gloss them over with jokes or zoom past them, you end up with curiously dispassionate memories.
You can say I give you this information as a dispassionate observer.
Dispassionate objectivity is itself a passion, for the real and for the truth.