Quotes About Passions

Men were better, or more timid. Secular and religious education had effaced the throat-grappling instinct, or else firm finance held in check the passions.

Your schedule and your spending describe what you really love in life.

Great passions, my dear, don't exist: they're liars fantasies. What do exist are little loves that may last for a short or a longer while.

Nazi ideology cannot be summarized in a program or platform. It can be better understood as a maelstrom of prejudices, passions, hatreds, emotions, resentments, biases, hopes, and attitudes that, when combined, most often resembled a religious crusade wearing the mask of a political ideology.4

These subjects were reasoning. They were working quite hard at reasoning. But it was not reasoning in search of truth; it was reasoning in support of their emotional reactions. It was reasoning as described by the philosopher David Hume, who wrote in 1739 that "reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.

I believe the Scottish philosopher David Hume was closer to the truth than was Plato when he said, "Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.

Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them."26

Western philosophy has been worshipping reason and distrusting the passions for thousands of years.4 There's a direct line running from Plato through Immanuel Kant to Lawrence Kohlberg. I'll refer to this worshipful attitude throughout this book as the rationalist delusion.

Reasoning was merely the servant of the passions, and when the servant failed to find any good arguments, the master did not change his mind.

David Hume, who wrote in 1739 that "reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.

Passions often corrupt reason, but if we can learn to control those passions, our God-given rationality will shine forth and guide us to do the right thing, not the popular thing.

Talmud, en una de sus sentencias, que el hombre fuerte es el que domina sus pasiones, el sabio el que aprende de todos con amor, y el honrado, aquel que trata a todos con dignidad, honrando a cada ser humano.

He begins collecting books as well as passions, he knows that the hunt for books, like sexual pursuit, enriches the geography of pleasure.

Men inflict injuries from hatred, jealousy or contempt, but the wise man masters all these passions by means of reason.

Man's nature, his passions and anxieties, are a cultural product; as a matter of fact, man himself is the most important creation and achievement of the continuous human effort, the record of what we call history.

Para ser felices debemos deshacernos de nuestros prejuicios, poseer virtudes, gozar de una buena salud, tener inclinaciones y pasiones, porque pobres de aquellos que pierden la capacidad de tener ilusiones.

The way to avoid evil is not by maiming our passions, but by compelling them to yield their vigor to our moral nature. They should be to spiritual sentiments what the hot-bed is to early flowers.

Men who act under dishonest passions are like men riding fierce horses: they cannot stop when they will, and they ride to ruin.

The fugitive, brief, though intense satisfactions that come to the nerves through the appetite and passions are not the foundations of joy in this world: they come with a moment's flash, and are disastrous in their flight.

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.

Human character is smaller now, people don't have durable passions; they've replaced passions with excitement.

The Passions of men," Hobbes writes, "are commonly more potent than their Reason." Reason cannot bring happiness, nor can it be used as the goal of a philosophical life. There is no happiness. There is only striving and security and passion. Reason cannot save us from the war of all against all; only the Leviathan, the power of the state, can.21

It was left to Hume, once again, to completely circumscribe reason. "Reason is, and ought only to be, the slave of the passions," Hume famously wrote, taking to its logical extreme the thought of his predecessors. "[Reason] cannot be the source of moral good or evil, which are found to have that influence."24

I am a Conservative to preserve all that is good in our constitution, a Radical to remove all that is bad. I seek to preserve property and to respect order, and I equally decry the appeal to the passions of the many of the prejudices of the few.