quotations about passion
The worst of slaves are those that are constantly serving their passions.
DIOGENES
attributed, Day's Collacon
Men utter a vast amount of slander against their physical nature, and attempt to repair deficient virtue by maiming their animal passions. These are to be trained, guided, restrained, but never crucified or exterminated, for they are the soil in which we were planted.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Life Thoughts
As a storm conceals the glories of the sun and defaces the beauty of the landscape, even so do maddening passions deform the soul, bearing along with their impetuous waves both pestilence and death.
WILLIAM SCOTT DOWNEY
Proverbs
There is no human being who having both passions and thoughts does not think in consequences of his passions--does not find images rising in his mind which soothe the passion with hope or sting it with dread.
GEORGE ELIOT
Middlemarch
What is passion? It is surely the becoming of a person. Are we not, for most of our lives, marking time? Most of our being is at rest, unlived. In passion, the body and the spirit seek expression outside of self. Passion is all that is other from self. Sex is only interesting when it releases passion. The more extreme and the more expressed that passion is, the more unbearable does life seem without it. It reminds us that if passion dies or is denied, we are partly dead and that soon, come what may, we will be wholly so.
JOHN BOORMAN
Projections
We have no more control over the duration of our passions than we do over the duration of our life.
FRANÇOIS DE LA ROCHEFOUCAULD
Reflections; or Sentences and Moral Maxims
Passion doth sometimes whirl the torch of Love, lest into Friendship fade the waning flame.
RICHARD GARNETT
De Flagello Myrtes
Between two beings susceptible of love, the duration of passion is in proportion to the original resistance of the woman, or to the obstacles which the accidents of social life put in the way of your happiness.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Physiology of Marriage
What makes you mad? What makes you sad? What makes you glad? There lies your passion.
ANONYMOUS
The awful daring of a moment's surrender
Which an age of prudence can never retract
By this, and this only, we have existed.
T. S. ELIOT
The Waste Land
Give me to drink the poison of thy breast--
Dark cruel wine from grapes of passion pressed--
Till I am drunk beyond delirium's dream
In that dim utter deep where men may rest.
ELSA BARKER
"The Garden of Rose and Rue", The Book of Love
The man who will not give up his passions, who clings to anger, unkindness, sensuality, pride, vanity self-indulgence, for the momentary pleasure which their gratification affords him is a spiritual miser; he cannot have any spiritual comforts.
JAMES ALLEN
Byways of Blessedness
While the happiest retirees have a passion, they leave enough room in their lives for the other spokes of the wheel.
LARRY JACOBSON
"The happiest retirees have learned this lesson", Market Watch, November 23, 2016
The most stormy ebullitions of passion, from blasphemy to murder, are less terrific than one single act of cool villainy.
JOHANN KASPAR LAVATER
Aphorisms on Man
Men who act under dishonest passions are like men riding fierce horses: they cannot stop when they will, and they ride to ruin.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
The intensity of passion often defies logic. Gripped by its urgency, you feel the heat in your bones. It's an intoxicating drive that can only be appeased with action.
SAMUEL MPAMUGO
"Raw passion can harm go-getters", The Kenya Star, November 19, 2016
My fault, my failure, is not in the passions I have, but in my lack of control of them.
ALLEN GINSBERG
journal, July 30, 1947
In the composition of the human frame there is a good deal of inflammable matter, however dormant it may lie for a time.
GEORGE WASHINGTON
letter to Eleanor Parke Custis, January 16, 1795
Passion is the drunkenness of the mind.
ROBERT SOUTH
Twelve Sermons
If love is a child, passion is a man.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Physiology of Marriage