quotations about passion
Give me to drink the poison of thy breast--
Dark cruel wine from grapes of passion pressed--
Till I am drunk beyond delirium's dream
In that dim utter deep where men may rest.
ELSA BARKER
"The Garden of Rose and Rue", The Book of Love
There are moments when our passions speak and decide for us ... like a fire kindled within our being to which everything else in us is mere fuel.
GEORGE ELIOT
Romola
There is no human being who having both passions and thoughts does not think in consequences of his passions--does not find images rising in his mind which soothe the passion with hope or sting it with dread.
GEORGE ELIOT
Middlemarch
The passions refuse to be organized on a basis of their own; hostile to personal freedom and one another, they rush precipitately into anarchy and mob rule.
AMOS BRONSON ALCOTT
Table Talk
The man who will not give up his passions, who clings to anger, unkindness, sensuality, pride, vanity self-indulgence, for the momentary pleasure which their gratification affords him is a spiritual miser; he cannot have any spiritual comforts.
JAMES ALLEN
Byways of Blessedness
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.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Life Thoughts
Passion is the drunkenness of the mind.
ROBERT SOUTH
Twelve Sermons
If you have a great passion it seems that the logical thing is to see the fruit of it, and the fruit are children.
ROMAN POLANSKI
Independent on Sunday, May 12, 1991
The most stormy ebullitions of passion, from blasphemy to murder, are less terrific than one single act of cool villainy.
JOHANN KASPAR LAVATER
Aphorisms on Man
Men who act under dishonest passions are like men riding fierce horses: they cannot stop when they will, and they ride to ruin.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
With men passion is all at the beginning and with women it is all along.
ANITA BROOKNER
The Paris Review, fall 1987
The worst of slaves are those that are constantly serving their passions.
DIOGENES
attributed, Day's Collacon
In the composition of the human frame there is a good deal of inflammable matter, however dormant it may lie for a time.
GEORGE WASHINGTON
letter to Eleanor Parke Custis, January 16, 1795
In the human heart there is a perpetual generation of passions; so that the ruin of one is almost always the foundation of another.
FRANÇOIS DE LA ROCHEFOUCAULD
Reflections; or Sentences and Moral Maxims
For the passions of men, which asunder are moderate, as the heat of one brand, in assembly are like many brands that enflame one another, (especially when they blow one another with orations) to the setting of the commonwealth on fire, under pretense of counseling it.
THOMAS HOBBES
Leviathan
We have no more control over the duration of our passions than we do over the duration of our life.
FRANÇOIS DE LA ROCHEFOUCAULD
Reflections; or Sentences and Moral Maxims
What is passion? It is surely the becoming of a person. Are we not, for most of our lives, marking time? Most of our being is at rest, unlived. In passion, the body and the spirit seek expression outside of self. Passion is all that is other from self. Sex is only interesting when it releases passion. The more extreme and the more expressed that passion is, the more unbearable does life seem without it. It reminds us that if passion dies or is denied, we are partly dead and that soon, come what may, we will be wholly so.
JOHN BOORMAN
Projections
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
The intensity of passion often defies logic. Gripped by its urgency, you feel the heat in your bones. It's an intoxicating drive that can only be appeased with action.
SAMUEL MPAMUGO
"Raw passion can harm go-getters", The Kenya Star, November 19, 2016