quotations about passion
Whatever care we take to conceal our passions under the appearance of piety and honor, they are always to be seen through these veils.
FRANÇOIS DE LA ROCHEFOUCAULD
Reflections; or Sentences and Moral Maxims
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
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
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
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
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
With men passion is all at the beginning and with women it is all along.
ANITA BROOKNER
The Paris Review, fall 1987
Passion is the drunkenness of the mind.
ROBERT SOUTH
Twelve Sermons
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
For the passions of men, which asunder are moderate, as the heat of one brand, in assembly are like many brands that enflame one another, (especially when they blow one another with orations) to the setting of the commonwealth on fire, under pretense of counseling it.
THOMAS HOBBES
Leviathan
The worst of slaves are those that are constantly serving their passions.
DIOGENES
attributed, Day's Collacon
We may refute errors, but never passions.
ALEXANDRE RUDOLPHE VINET
Outlines of Theology
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
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 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
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
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
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
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
Passion doth sometimes whirl the torch of Love, lest into Friendship fade the waning flame.
RICHARD GARNETT
De Flagello Myrtes