Quotes About Passions

Find Your Strengths and Interests

Monteverdi gives us the full gamut of human pssions in music, the first composer to do so; Beethoven tells us what a terrible struggle it is to transcend human frailties and to aspire to the Godhead; and Mozart shows the kind of music we might hope to hear in heaven. But it is Bach, making music in the Castle of Heaven, who gives us the voice of God - in human form.

We shall see shortly that Bach was to seize on a mutant type of opera that was to serve his purpose when composing the more dramatic of his church cantatas and Passions.

we have entertained ourselves with the pornography of violence and inflamed passions that might otherwise have slumbered...

Aristotle's version of Plato's God is pure nous, or pure thought. The human soul is not; it includes other faculties or powers, like the senses and the passions. But there is still enough nous left to figure out what is going on.

Rather, it was more beneficial, and ultimately more rational, than ones put together by politicians or rulers, who are themselves creatures of their own passions and whims.

David Hume would put it even more vividly: all the other passions, including self-interest itself, have relatively minor effect on our lives, compared with the desire for property. "This avidity alone of acquiring goods and possessions for ourselves and our nearest friends is insatiable, perpetual, universal, and directly destructive of society .

Any appeal to reason is hopeless, since "reason is, and ought to be, the slave of the passions": and the passions are the root of the problem.

his real point was not that a market-based order was perfect or even perfectible. Rather, it was more beneficial, and ultimately more rational, than ones put together by politicians or rulers, who are themselves creatures of their own passions and whims.

Beloved-of-the-Gods, King Piyadasi, desires that all religions should reside everywhere, for all of them desire self-control and purity of heart. But people have various desires and various passions, and they may practice all of what they should or only a part of it. But one who receives great gifts yet is lacking in self-control, purity of heart, gratitude and firm devotion, such a person is mean.

Error always addresses the passions and prejudices; truth scorns such mean intrigue, and only addresses the understanding and the conscience.

As for the passions, and studies of the mind; avoid envy, anxious fears; anger fretting inwards; subtle and knotty inquisitions; joys and exhilarations in excess; sadness not communicated. Entertain hopes; mirth rather than joy; variety of delights, rather than surfeit of them; wonder and admiration, and therefore novelties; studies that fill the mind with splendid and illustrious objects, as histories, fables, and contemplations of nature.

The heart and passions of men are moved by things more within their attainment; the essential nature is stirred by the essential life; by the real actual existence of love, and hope, and character, and by the real literature which takes in its spirit, and which is in some sort its undefecated essence.

What tragedies, what passions, what crimes had surrounded the idyll of Raoul and his sweet and charming Christine!... What had become of that wonderful, mysterious artist of whom the world was never, never to hear again?...

powerful is the charm of words, which for us reduces to manageable entities all the passions that would otherwise madden and destroy us.

By the use of the language of sorrow I had for the time being obliterated my sorrow—so powerful is the charm of words, which for us reduces to manageable entities all the passions that would otherwise madden and destroy us.

Mediante el empleo del lenguaje del dolor, por el momento lo había eliminado.... tan poderoso es el encantamiento de las palabras, que reduce a entidades manejables todas las pasiones que de otro modo nos enloquecerían y nos destruirían (La sombra del Torturador - Gene Wolfe)

I think that his innocence has a great deal to do with his suggestions of sexual revolution. Such a man is comparatively audacious in theory because he is comparatively clean in thought. Powerful men who have powerful passions use much of their strength in forging chains for themselves; they alone know how strong the chains need to be. But there are other souls who walk the woods like Diana, with a sort of wild chastity.

Vital art comes always from a cross between art and life: art being of one sex only, and quite sterile by itself. Such a cross is always possible; for though the artist may not have the capacity to bring his art into contact with the higher life of his time; fermenting in its religion, its philosophy, its science, and its statesmanship (perhaps indeed their may not be any statesmanship going), he can at least bring it into contact with the obvious life and common passions of the streets.

True, he had dreamy visions of possibilities: there is no human being who having both passions and thoughts does not think in consequence of his passions - does not find images rising in his mind which soothe the passion with hope or sting it with dread.

It is the favourite stratagem of our passions to sham a retreat, and to turn sharp round upon us at the moment we have made up our minds that the day is our own.

Our passions do not live apart in locked chambers, but, dressed in their small wardrobe of notions, bring their provisions to a common table and mess together, feeding out of the common store according to their appetite.

Le nostre passioni non vivono l'una separata dall'altra, in camere serrate a chiave, ma, rivestite del loro modesto guardaroba di idee, portano i loro viveri a un tavolo comune e mangiano assieme, nutrendosi delle provviste comuni a seconda del loro appetito.

I hated Woody Woodpecker and Scooby-Doo, but I was a cartoon freak.