quotations about passion
It is only with the passions of others that we are ever really familiar, and what we come to discover about our own can only be learned from them.
MARCEL PROUST
Swann's Way
My fault, my failure, is not in the passions I have, but in my lack of control of them.
ALLEN GINSBERG
journal, July 30, 1947
We may refute errors, but never passions.
ALEXANDRE RUDOLPHE VINET
Outlines of Theology
Passion and reason are ever at war.
ROBERT BAGE
attributed, Day's Collacon
Passion doth sometimes whirl the torch of Love, lest into Friendship fade the waning flame.
RICHARD GARNETT
De Flagello Myrtes
Passion is like a ruin, which, in falling upon its victim, breaks itself to pieces.
ELIZA COOK
Diamond Dust
Behold, O Lord, that I am
indignant with myself,
for my senseless, profitless,
hurtful, perilous passions;
that I loathe myself,
for these inordinate, unseemly,
deformed, false,
shameful, disgraceful
passions;
that my confusion is daily before me,
and the shame of my face hath covered me.
Alas! woe, woe!
O me, how long?
LANCELOT ANDREWES
The Private Devotions of Lancelot Andrewes
If passion is a drug, your startup should be OD'ing on it all the time! If there's something you aren't passionate about, it's really hard to come to work, feel motivated, and full of energy. So, passion is almost an underlying requirement to form great culture as people driven by passion are usually able to do well even in new domains and uncharted territories.
VINOD MUTHUKRISHNAN
"Culture begets success. Or does it?", Your Story, December 10, 2016
Impulse arrested spills over, and the flood is feeling, the flood is passion, the flood is even madness.
ALDOUS HUXLEY
Brave New World
Passionate persons are like men who stand upon their head; they see all things the wrong way.
PLATO
attributed, Day's Collacon
If love is a child, passion is a man.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Physiology of Marriage
It is a remarkable property of human nature, that any emotion, which attends a passion, is easily converted into it, though in their natures they be originally different from, and even contrary to each other. It is true; in order to make a perfect union among passions, there is always required a double relation of impressions and ideas; nor is one relation sufficient for that purpose. But though this be confirmed by undoubted experience, we must understand it with its proper limitations, and must regard the double relation, as requisite only to make one passion produce another. When two passions are already produced by their separate causes, and are both present in the mind, they readily mingle and unite, though they have but one relation, and sometimes without any. The predominant passion swallows up the inferior, and converts it into itself. The spirits, when once excited, easily receive a change in their direction; and it is natural to imagine this change will come from the prevailing affection. The connexion is in many respects closer betwixt any two passions, than betwixt any passion and indifference.
DAVID HUME
"Of the Causes of the Violent Passions", A Treatise of Human Nature
Passion is a sort of fever in the mind, which ever leaves us weaker than it found us.... It more than anything deprives us of the use of our judgment; for it raises a dust very hard to see through. Like wine, whose lees fly by being jogg'd, it is too muddy to drink.
WILLIAM PENN
Some Fruits of Solitude
Strong passions work wonders when there is a greater strength of reason to curb them.
ABRAHAM TUCKER
An Abridgment of The Light of Nature Pursued
Every spendthrift passion has its attendant courtiers.
DORIS LESSING
Shikasta
Nature in causing reason and the passions to be born at one and the same time apparently wished by the latter gift to distract man from the evil she had done him by the former, and by only permitting him to live for a few years after the loss of his passions seems to show her pity by early deliverance from a life that reduces him to reason as his sole resource.
CHAMFORT
The Cynic's Breviary
Passions are likened best to floods and streams:
The shallow murmur, but the deep are dumb.
WALTER RALEIGH
The Silent Lover
Passion is the genesis of genius.
LILLET WALTERS
Secrets of Successful Speakers
Passion may not unfitly be termed the mob of the man, that commits a riot upon his reason.
WILLIAM PENN
Fruits of Solitude
We are all alike, and we love to keep passion aglow at our feet,
Like one that sitteth in shade and complacently smiles at the heat.
ALFRED AUSTIN
"A Woman's Apology"