quotations about passion
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
Passions are likened best to floods and streams:
The shallow murmur, but the deep are dumb.
WALTER RALEIGH
The Silent Lover
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
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
Strong passions work wonders when there is a greater strength of reason to curb them.
ABRAHAM TUCKER
An Abridgment of The Light of Nature Pursued
The greatest mania of all is passion: and I am a natural slave to passion: the balance between my brain and my soul and my body is as wild and delicate as the skin of a Ming vase.
HUNTER S. THOMPSON
The Curse of Lono
Most marriages recognize this paradox: Passion destroys passion; we want what puts an end to wanting what we want.
JOHN FOWLES
The Aristos: A Self-Portrait in Ideas
With men passion is all at the beginning and with women it is all along.
ANITA BROOKNER
The Paris Review, fall 1987
Finding your passion isn't just about careers and money. It's about finding your authentic self. The one you've buried beneath other people's needs.
KRISTIN HANNAH
Distant Shores
Passion and reason are ever at war.
ROBERT BAGE
attributed, Day's Collacon
A man or a woman without passions is like a windmill in a calm--motionless, ghastly, useless.
ABRAHAM MILLER
Unmoral Maxims
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
Every spendthrift passion has its attendant courtiers.
DORIS LESSING
Shikasta
Nature in causing reason and the passions to be born at one and the same time apparently wished by the latter gift to distract man from the evil she had done him by the former, and by only permitting him to live for a few years after the loss of his passions seems to show her pity by early deliverance from a life that reduces him to reason as his sole resource.
CHAMFORT
The Cynic's Breviary
Behold, O Lord, that I am
indignant with myself,
for my senseless, profitless,
hurtful, perilous passions;
that I loathe myself,
for these inordinate, unseemly,
deformed, false,
shameful, disgraceful
passions;
that my confusion is daily before me,
and the shame of my face hath covered me.
Alas! woe, woe!
O me, how long?
LANCELOT ANDREWES
The Private Devotions of Lancelot Andrewes
Passion doth sometimes whirl the torch of Love, lest into Friendship fade the waning flame.
RICHARD GARNETT
De Flagello Myrtes
Passion is the drunkenness of the mind.
ROBERT SOUTH
Twelve Sermons
Passionate persons are like men who stand upon their head; they see all things the wrong way.
PLATO
attributed, Day's Collacon
Passion alone the abysses
Lights, while we grope up the rifted
Slopes; our spirits it kisses,
Ere into the deeps we are drifted.
HENRI CAZALIS
"Always"
We may refute errors, but never passions.
ALEXANDRE RUDOLPHE VINET
Outlines of Theology