quotations about passion
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
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
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
With men passion is all at the beginning and with women it is all along.
ANITA BROOKNER
The Paris Review, fall 1987
Passion doth sometimes whirl the torch of Love, lest into Friendship fade the waning flame.
RICHARD GARNETT
De Flagello Myrtes
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
Passion may not unfitly be termed the mob of the man, that commits a riot upon his reason.
WILLIAM PENN
Fruits of Solitude
My fault, my failure, is not in the passions I have, but in my lack of control of them.
ALLEN GINSBERG
journal, July 30, 1947
If passion is a drug, your startup should be OD'ing on it all the time! If there's something you aren't passionate about, it's really hard to come to work, feel motivated, and full of energy. So, passion is almost an underlying requirement to form great culture as people driven by passion are usually able to do well even in new domains and uncharted territories.
VINOD MUTHUKRISHNAN
"Culture begets success. Or does it?", Your Story, December 10, 2016
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
Passion is like a ruin, which, in falling upon its victim, breaks itself to pieces.
ELIZA COOK
Diamond Dust
Passion is the genesis of genius.
LILLET WALTERS
Secrets of Successful Speakers
Passion and reason are ever at war.
ROBERT BAGE
attributed, Day's Collacon
Every spendthrift passion has its attendant courtiers.
DORIS LESSING
Shikasta
Passions are likened best to floods and streams:
The shallow murmur, but the deep are dumb.
WALTER RALEIGH
The Silent Lover
Passion is a sort of fever in the mind, which ever leaves us weaker than it found us.... It more than anything deprives us of the use of our judgment; for it raises a dust very hard to see through. Like wine, whose lees fly by being jogg'd, it is too muddy to drink.
WILLIAM PENN
Some Fruits of Solitude
We are all alike, and we love to keep passion aglow at our feet,
Like one that sitteth in shade and complacently smiles at the heat.
ALFRED AUSTIN
"A Woman's Apology"
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