quotations about passion
Man is only truly great when he acts from the passions.
BENJAMIN DISRAELI
Coningsby
Many people in reasoning on the passions make a continual appeal to common sense. But passion is without common sense, and we must frequently discard the one in speaking of the other.
WILLIAM HAZLITT
Characteristics
Those who have had great passions often find all their lives made miserable in being cured of them.
FRANÇOIS DE LA ROCHEFOUCAULD
Reflections; or Sentences and Moral Maxims
However we may conceal our passions under the veil ... there is always some place where they peep out.
FRANÇOIS DE LA ROCHEFOUCAULD
Reflections; or Sentences and Moral Maxims
There are moments when our passions speak and decide for us ... like a fire kindled within our being to which everything else in us is mere fuel.
GEORGE ELIOT
Romola
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 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
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
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 is the drunkenness of the mind.
ROBERT SOUTH
Twelve Sermons
The passions refuse to be organized on a basis of their own; hostile to personal freedom and one another, they rush precipitately into anarchy and mob rule.
AMOS BRONSON ALCOTT
Table Talk
The worst of slaves are those that are constantly serving their passions.
DIOGENES
attributed, Day's Collacon
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
In the human heart there is a perpetual generation of passions; so that the ruin of one is almost always the foundation of another.
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
If you have a great passion it seems that the logical thing is to see the fruit of it, and the fruit are children.
ROMAN POLANSKI
Independent on Sunday, May 12, 1991
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
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
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 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