Passion Quotes

How fleeting are all human passions compared with the massive continuity of ducks.

Dorothy Sayers, Gaudy Night

Great wisdom is generous petty wisdom is contentious. Great speech is impassioned, small speech cantankerous.

Chuang - Tzu

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 or the prejudices of the few.

Benjamin Disraeli, campaign speech at High Wycombe, England, November 27, 1832

In endowing us with memory, nature has revealed to us a truth utterly unimaginable to the unreflective creation, the truth of immortality.... The most ideal human passion is love, which is also the most absolute and animal and one of the most ephemeral.

George Santayana

Doubtless criticism was originally benignant, pointing out the beauties of a work rather that its defects. The passions of men have made it malignant, as a bad heart of Procrustes turned the bed, the symbol of repose, into an instrument of torture.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

We should every night call ourselves to an account; What infirmity have I mastered today? What passions opposed? What temptation resisted? What virtue acquired? Our vices will abort of themselves if they be brought every day to the shrift.

Seneca

Passion governs, and she never governs wisely.

Benjamin Franklin, In response to the situation of the colonists

The artist, depicting man disdainful of the storm and stress of life, is no less reconciling and healing than the poet who, while endowing Nature and Humanity, rejoices in its measureless superiority to human passions and human sorrows.

Berenson

When men exercise their reason coolly and freely on a variety of distinct questions, they inevitably fall into different opinions on some of them. When they are governed by a common passion, their opinions, if they are to be called, will be the same.

Alexander Hamilton

Love works in miracles every day such as weakening the strong, and strengthening the weak making fools of the wise, and wise men of fools favouring the passions, destroying reason, and in a word, turning everything topsy - Turvy.

Marguerite de Valois

All human actions have one or more of these seven causes chance, nature, compulsion, habit, reason, passion, and desire.

Aristotle

When the habitually even - Tempered suddenly fly into a passion, that explosion is apt to be more impressive than the outburst of the most violent amongst us.

Margery Allingham, Death of a Ghost, 1934

Any piece of clothing can be sexy with a quietly passionate woman inside it.

Anonymous

Difficult as it is really to listen to someone in affliction, it is just as difficult for him to know that compassion is listening to him.

Simone Weil

Clarity of mind means clarity of passion, too this is why a great and clear mind loves ardently and sees distinctly what it loves.

Blaise Pascal

Things fall apart the center cannot hold Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity.

William Butler Yeats

Calendars are for careful people, not passionate ones.

Chuck, The World According to Chuck weblog, September 8, 2003

I have no mercy or compassion in me for a society that will crush people, and then penalize them for not being able to stand up under the weight.

Malcolm X, The Autobiography of Malcolm X

We are not enemies but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic cords of memory shall swell when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of nature.

Abraham Lincoln

National Health Insurance: The compassion of the IRS The efficiency of the Postal Service All at Pentagon prices!!!!

Seen on a bumper sticke

Passion is the source of our finest moments, the joy of love, the clarity of hatred, and the ectasy of grief.

Ty King, Written for Buffy the Vampire Slayer, episode Passion, voice over by David Boreanaz

It is easy to fly into a passion - - Anybody can do that - - But to be angry with the right person and at the right time and with the right object and in the right way - - That is not easy, and it is not everyone who can do it.

Aristotle

The duration of passion is proportionate with the original resistance of the woman.

Honore de Balzac

Why has government been instituted at all? Because the passions of men will not conform to the dictates of reason and justice, without constraint.

Alexander Hamilton

The capacity for passion is both cruel and divine.

George Sand

Wine gives courage and makes men more apt for passion.

Ovid

Hope arouses, as nothing else can arouse, a passion for the possible.

William Sloane Coffin, http: //www. pbs. org/now/society/coffin. html

All the passions make us commit faults love makes us commit the most ridiculous ones.

La Rochefoucauld

A religious man is a person who holds God and man in one thought at one time, at all times, who suffers harm done to others, whose greatest passion is compassion, whose greatest strength is love and defiance of despair.

Abraham Joshua Heschel

Reason can never be popular. Passions and feelings may become popular, but reason will always remain the sole property of a few eminent individuals.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

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.

Edward Bulwer - Lytton

A compassionate government keeps faith with the trust of the people and cherishes the future of their children.

Lyndon B. Johnson

It is easier to exclude harmful passions than to rule them, and to deny them admittance than to control them after they have been admitted.

Seneca

Life is short. Time is fleeting. Realize the Self. Purity of the heart is the gateway to God. Aspire. Renounce. Meditate. Be good do good. Be kind be compassionate. Inquire, know Thyself.

Swami Sivanada

The human animal differs from the lesser primates in his passion for lists of Ten Best.

H. Allen Smith

Love is substance; Lust, illusion. Only in the surge of passion do the two mingle in confusion.

Calvin Miller, The Singer Trilogy

It is very difficult to be wholly joyous or wholly sad on this earth. The comic, when it is human, soon takes upon itself a face of pain and some of our griefs... have their source in weaknesses which must be recognized with smiling compassion as the common inheritance of us all.

Miguel de Cervantes