quotations about passion
What makes you mad? What makes you sad? What makes you glad? There lies your passion.
ANONYMOUS
The worst of slaves are those that are constantly serving their passions.
DIOGENES
attributed, Day's Collacon
We condemn generally the passions of others by other passions either like or unlike.
PASQUIER QUESNEL
attributed, Day's Collacon
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
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
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 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
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
Impulse arrested spills over, and the flood is feeling, the flood is passion, the flood is even madness.
ALDOUS HUXLEY
Brave New World
Passion should not, in theory, offer any advantage, but should merely level out the playing field and make sport the spectacle that it so often is; passion is simply an inherently natural part of sport, it is not as the media hype train would like to argue, a phenomenon that raises its head only at those particularly heated derbies and grudge matches.
ADAM HILSENRATH
"The fundamentals of sporting passion", Cherwell Online, December 4, 2016
If love is a child, passion is a man.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Physiology of Marriage
It is only with the passions of others that we are ever really familiar, and what we come to discover about our own can only be learned from them.
MARCEL PROUST
Swann's Way
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
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
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
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
With men passion is all at the beginning and with women it is all along.
ANITA BROOKNER
The Paris Review, fall 1987
It is a remarkable property of human nature, that any emotion, which attends a passion, is easily converted into it, though in their natures they be originally different from, and even contrary to each other. It is true; in order to make a perfect union among passions, there is always required a double relation of impressions and ideas; nor is one relation sufficient for that purpose. But though this be confirmed by undoubted experience, we must understand it with its proper limitations, and must regard the double relation, as requisite only to make one passion produce another. When two passions are already produced by their separate causes, and are both present in the mind, they readily mingle and unite, though they have but one relation, and sometimes without any. The predominant passion swallows up the inferior, and converts it into itself. The spirits, when once excited, easily receive a change in their direction; and it is natural to imagine this change will come from the prevailing affection. The connexion is in many respects closer betwixt any two passions, than betwixt any passion and indifference.
DAVID HUME
"Of the Causes of the Violent Passions", A Treatise of Human Nature
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