quotations about passion
Those who have had great passions often find all their lives made miserable in being cured of them.
FRANÇOIS DE LA ROCHEFOUCAULD
Reflections; or Sentences and Moral Maxims
Impulse arrested spills over, and the flood is feeling, the flood is passion, the flood is even madness.
ALDOUS HUXLEY
Brave New World
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
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
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
We may refute errors, but never passions.
ALEXANDRE RUDOLPHE VINET
Outlines of Theology
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
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
A ruling passion gives to a shelf of novels the unity of a system.
GRAHAM GREENE
Conversations with Graham Greene
If love is a child, passion is a man.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Physiology of Marriage
A great tragedy passes from crest to hollow of passion, rises and sinks again, as rhythmically as sea-waves.
AUSTIN O'MALLEY
Keystones of Thought
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
Passions are likened best to floods and streams:
The shallow murmur, but the deep are dumb.
WALTER RALEIGH
The Silent Lover
Passion may not unfitly be termed the mob of the man, that commits a riot upon his reason.
WILLIAM PENN
Fruits of Solitude
Passionate persons are like men who stand upon their head; they see all things the wrong way.
PLATO
attributed, Day's Collacon
Everyone is running at lightning speed in the race for survival. Most of them live and work to make ends meet. The price of following a passion could be paid through their stomach. And if they fail, the fall is too steep in a dark, unknown trough with no supporting social infrastructure.
AASHI SANGHVI
"Following Your Passion: A Calling For The West, A Caution For The East", Huffington Post, February 12, 2016
Every spendthrift passion has its attendant courtiers.
DORIS LESSING
Shikasta
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
Passion and reason are ever at war.
ROBERT BAGE
attributed, Day's Collacon
Passion alone the abysses
Lights, while we grope up the rifted
Slopes; our spirits it kisses,
Ere into the deeps we are drifted.
HENRI CAZALIS
"Always"