Quotes About Passions

The first thing I started collecting was stamps. Until I started discovering girls. That was the end of stamps.

All of history misses out on the history of the soul. Human passions are so often not included in history.

If you have the same drive and passions that everybody else has - for example, if you're trying to do the right thing for your family and do the right thing for people you employ - then you can be forgiven quite a lot.

The first part of saving your life is coming to understand how you endangered it by loving wrongly, and living under the rule of your passions.

A few years ago, there was a popular stage play in London—you'll have to pardon me, but I'm quoting accurately—titled Shopping and F***ing. That's an apt description of the passions of our era, the goals most of us, liberal and conservative, aspire to. Democrats are the Party of Lust, Republicans the Party of Greed—both are individualist and materialist to the core.

In a letter to soldiers in 1798, John Adams, a Founding Father and practicing Unitarian, remarked: We had no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge, or gallantry, would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.

The monk holds that meaning exists objectively, within the natural world created by God, and is there to be discovered by the person who has detached themselves from their own passions and who seeks to see as God sees.

When Spinoza in the seventeenth century used the word reason, he meant an attitude toward life in which the mind united the emotions with the ethical goals and other aspects of the "whole man." When people today use the term they almost always imply a splitting of the personality. They ask in one form or another: "Should I follow reason or give way to sensual passions and needs or be faithful to my ethical duty?

The American Revolution was to succeed because it was undertaken by skeptical men who knew that the same passions that toppled tyrannies could be applied to destructive ends.

A slap or a fat check is what it takes if you want to see all the passions that go beating about behind a face take a sudden tack. It's as beautiful as watching a sailing ship maneuvering in a stormy sea. The whole person keels over in the changed wind.

This book was written in service to my obsessions. But it is also a story about other people's obsessions

Follow your dreams, your passions - your obsessions. Persistence will always turn failure into success.

And who shall say how many passions and how many hostile thoughts may live together in the mind of man?

I have no ambitions. I only have obsessions.

A rich boy goes to college. He makes a lot of friends. They all think they are special and that they suffer in distinct ways, but they are all hurtling down the same world-historical funnel. They will attempt to professionalize their passions, or else just get jobs.

This therefore is the praise of Shakespeare, that his drama is the mirrour of life; that he who has mazed his imagination, in following the phantoms which other writers raise up before him, may here be cured of his delirious extasies, by reading human sentiments in human language; by scenes from which a hermit may estimate the transactions of the world, and a confessor predict the progress of the passions.

Our senses, our appetites, and our passions, are our lawful and faithful guides, in most things that relate solely to this life; and, therefore, by the hourly necessity of consulting them, we gradually sink into an implicit submission, and habitual confidence. Every act of compliance with their motions facilitates a second compliance, every new step towards depravity is made with less reluctance than the former, and thus the descent to life merely sensual is perpetually accelerated.

You say that if a woman resolves not to marry till she finds herself addressed to by a man of strict virtue, she must be for ever single. If this be true, what wicked creatures are men! What a dreadful abuse of passions, given them for the noblest purposes, are they guilty of!

He has travelled. But is not human nature the same in every country, allowing only for different customs? — Do not Love, hatred, anger, malice, all the passions in short, good or bad, shew themselves by like effects in the faces, hearts,  and actions of the people of every country?

Passions! Intoxication! Insanity! You are so calm and collected, so indifferent, you respectable people, tut-tutting about drunkenness and holding unreasonable behaviour in contempt

Qui le passioni più meschine, le più miserevoli, si mostrano senza veli.

All that is great and skilful exists with the minority. There have been ministers who have had both king and people against them, and have carried out their great plans alone. It is not to be imagined that reason can ever be popular. Passions and feelings may become popular; but reason always remains the sole property of a few eminent individuals.

Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide. It is in vain to say that democracy is less vain, less proud, less selfish, less ambitious, or less avaricious than aristocracy or monarchy. It is not true, in fact, and nowhere appears in history. Those passions are the same in all men, under all forms of simple government, and when unchecked, produce the same effects of fraud, violence, and cruelty.

In reality, there is, perhaps, no one of our natural passions so hard to subdue as pride. Disguise it, struggle with it, beat it down, stifle it, mortify it as much as one pleases, it is still alive, and will every now and then peep out and show itself; you will see it perhaps often in this history; for even if I could conceive that I had completely overcome it, I should probably be proud of my humility.