quotations about passion
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
We condemn generally the passions of others by other passions either like or unlike.
PASQUIER QUESNEL
attributed, Day's Collacon
The worst of slaves are those that are constantly serving their passions.
DIOGENES
attributed, Day's Collacon
Passion is the drunkenness of the mind.
ROBERT SOUTH
Twelve Sermons
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
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
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
With men passion is all at the beginning and with women it is all along.
ANITA BROOKNER
The Paris Review, fall 1987
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
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
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
If love is a child, passion is a man.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Physiology of Marriage
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
Impulse arrested spills over, and the flood is feeling, the flood is passion, the flood is even madness.
ALDOUS HUXLEY
Brave New World
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
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
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
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 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