Quotes about Passions

"Those who control their passions do so because their passions are weak enough to be controlled."
-William Blake

"Of all the creatures that were made, man is the most detestable. Of the entire brood he is the only one--the solitary one--that possesses malice. That is the basest of all instincts, passions, vices--the most hateful. He is the only creature that has pain for sport, knowing it to be pain. Also--in all the list he is the only creature that has a nasty mind."
-Mark Twain

"Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation."
-Oscar Wilde

"The overman...Who has organized the chaos of his passions, given style to his character, and become creative. Aware of life's terrors, he affirms life without resentment."
-Friedrich Nietzsche

"Out of passions grow opinions, mental sloth lets these rigidify into convictions."
-Friedrich Nietzsche

"Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone elses opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation."
-Oscar Wilde

"It is knowledge that influences and equalizes the social condition of man; that gives to all, however different their political position, passions which are in common, and enjoyments which are universal."
-Benjamin Disraeli

"Judge of thine improvement, not by what thou speakest or writest, but by the firmness of thy mind, and the government of thy passions and affections."
-Dr. Thomas Fuller

"From their experience or from the recorded experience of others (history), men learn only what their passions and their metaphysical prejudices allow them to learn."
-Aldous Huxley

"We should every night call ourselves to an account: What infirmity have I mastered today? What passions opposed? What temptation resisted? What virtue acquired?"
-Seneca

"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

"No mortal man has ever served at the same time his passions and his best interests."
-Sallust

"Who is wise? He that learns from every One. Who is powerful? He that governs his Passions. Who is rich? He that is content. Who is that? Nobody."
-Benjamin Franklin

"There is a boundary to men's passions when they act from feelings; but none when they are under the influence of imagination."
-Edmund Burke

"It is only necessary to make war with five things; with the maladies of the body, the ignorances of the mind, with the passions of the body, with the seditions of the city and the discords of families."
-Pythagoras

"It is with our passions, as it is with fire and water, they are good servants but bad masters."
-Aesop

"Yer beautiful in yer wrath! I shall keep you, and in responding to my passions, yer hatred will kindle into love."
-John Wayne

"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

"Our passions are like convulsion fits, which, though they make us stronger for a time, leave us the weaker ever after."
-Alexander Pope

"The happiness of a man in this life does not consist in the absence but in the mastery of his passions."
-Alfred Lord Tennyson

"Anger is the most impotent of passions. It effects nothing it goes about, and hurts the one who is possessed by it more than the one against whom it is directed."
-Carl Sandburg

"My fault, my failure, is not in the passions I have, but in my lack of control of them."
-Jack Kerouac

"These are real people with real emotions and real passions. We do our real history a disservice when we think of them as only names and dates. So we try to bring history alive."
-Hal Bidlack

"Probably the happiest period in life most frequently is in middle age, when the eager passions of youth are cooled, and the infirmities of age not yet begun; as we see that the shadows, which are at morning and evening so large, almost entirely disappear at midday."
-Thomas Arnold

"How little of permanent happiness could belong to a couple who were only brought together because their passions were stronger than their virtue."
-Jane Austen

"My passions were all gathered together like fingers that made a fist. Drive is considered aggression today; I knew it then as purpose."
-Bette Davis

"Only passions, great passions, can elevate the soul to great things."
-Denis Diderot

"Strength instead of being the lusty child of passions, grows by grappling with and subduing them."
-James M. Barrie