Quotes About Passions

The best way to control a man is to do so without his awareness that he is being controlled, and the best way to do that is through the systematic manipulation of passions, because man tends to identify his passions as his own. In defending them, he defends his "freedom", which he usually sees as the unfettered ability to fulfill his desires, without, for the most part, understanding how easy it is to manipulate those passions from without.

Morals lead to order; passions lead to revolution.

The unregenerate human heart is, perhaps,the most inconsistent thing in all nature; and in nothing is it more capricious than in the manifestations of its passions; and in no passion is it so fantastic as in that which it miscalls love, but which is really often only appetite.

We are conventional people, and conventions — if you will but see it — are majestic in their way, and will claim us in the end. We do not live for great passions or for great memories, or for anything great.

If her aunt could not see why she must go down, she was not going to tell her. She was not going to say, "I love my dear sister; I must be near her at this crisis of her life." The affections are more reticent than the passions, and their expression more subtle. If she herself should ever fall in love with a man, she, like Helen, would proclaim it from the housetops, but as she loved only a sister she used the voiceless language of sympathy.

He guided the passions of others, because he was master of his own.

It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters.

There is a boundary to men's passions when they act from feelings; but none when they are under the influence of imagination.

Reason is and ought to be, as Hume said, the slave of the passions.

What a mistake to suppose that the passions are strongest in youth! The passions are not stronger, but the control over them is weaker! They are more easily excited, they are more violent and apparent; but they have less energy, less durability, less intense and concentrated power than in the maturer life.

And now the initiation was begun. She was to read, to study, to depict by a gesture, a look, the passions she was to delineate on the boards; lessons dangerous, in truth, to some, but not to the pure enthusiasm that comes from art; for the mind that rightly conceives art is but a mirror which gives back what is cast on its surface faithfully only—while unsullied.

If you are a law unto yourself, obeying the promptings of your pleasure within a state-sanctioned playground, you are no citizen but a subject, or a slave, both to your passions and to the dictates of a state which men no longer govern.

Our enemies are our evil deeds and their memories, our pride, our selfishness, our malice, our passions, which by conscience or by habit pursue us with a relentlessness past the power of figure to express.

If you think about becoming a writer, that's just really one of the big dreams I had. It's really important to have those dreams and pursue your passions.

The resources at Harvard - its professors, our fellow students, the libraries, its alumni - created for me the opportunity to pursue my passions in finance.

My life is sectioned off into hot flushes, pursuits of this or that.

I grew up on Long Island, and from as early as I can remember, as far back as first grade, I had two real passions - one of them was putting on plays, and the other was journalism. I was directing plays and editing school papers from first grade on, all the way through college.

If you'd rather go to the football game than read a comic, that's fine. I'd rather do both.

What interests me most are the emotional lives of the people. If I don't have that, it's not worth doing, frankly.

You have a certain number of dreams in your life you want to fulfill.

How can intemperate minds be free when they're slaves to their own passions?

These conquerors of the world are slaves to their passions, and someday their passions will bring them down.

Seeing the intensity and power she brings to the game, it's hard to imagine her being anything but single-minded in pursuing tennis. But Serena Williams has other passions, too. In fact, there doesn't seem to be enough time in the day, week or month for one of the world's most gifted athletes to chase her many interests.

I started collecting baseball cards and basketball cards when I was younger. I have a CD collection that turned into a DVD collection, and I have a Jordan shoe collection. And I don't drink, but I have a wine collection. I just started a sweatshirt collection. Every city that I'm in, I buy a sweatshirt. It's just something that I do.