Passions Quotes

Few people have ever seriously wished to be exclusively rational. The good life which most desire is a life warmed by passions and touched with that ceremonial grace which is impossible without some affectionate loyalty to traditional form and ceremonies.

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 abate of themselves if they be brought every day to the shrift.

To be exempt from the Passions with which others are tormented, is the only pleasing Solitude.

We are people with all the hopes, dreams, passions, and faults of everyone else. Eighty percent of us are born into families with no history of dwarfism.

The design of Rhetoric is to remove those Prejudices that lie in the way of Truth, to Reduce the Passions to the Government of Reasons; to place our Subject in a Right Light, and excite our Hearers to a due consideration of it.

Only as you do know yourself can your brain serve you as a sharp and efficient tool. Know your own failings, passions, and prejudices so you can separate them from what you see.

The happiness of a man in this life does not consist in the absence but in the mastery of his passions.

One guy that I wish was here right now, Ted Williams, helped me so much, our long talks, not about hitting but about fishing, one of Ted's passions, and I wish he was here today to share this with me because I owe so much to Ted Williams.

Basically, fundamentalism is a modern phenomenon. In the same way that Hitler evoked a mythological religion of German purity and the glory of the past, the Islamists use religion to evoke emotions and passions in people who have been oppressed for a long time in order to reach their purpose.

The natural man has only two primal passions, to get and to beget.

Every man without passions has within him no principle of action, nor motive to act.

I deliberately wrote a poem in my last book where I was suggesting that there are other passions as great as or more important than the passion of sex.

Who is wise? He that learns from everyone. Who is powerful? He that governs his passions. Who is rich? He that is content. Who is that? Nobody.

They sin who tell us Love can die: with Life all other passions fly, all others are but vanity.

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

All passions exaggerate; and they are passions only because they do exaggerate.

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

The idea is that the state doesn't have rights to limit individuals' wants and passions. I disagree with that. I think we absolutely have rights because there are consequences to letting people live out whatever wants or passions they desire.

Lust is to the other passions what the nervous fluid is to life; it supports them all, lends strength to them all ambition, cruelty, avarice, revenge, are all founded on lust.

Always go with your passions. Never ask yourself if it's realistic or not.

The old interests of aristocracy - the romance of action, the exalted passions of chivalry and war - faded into the background, and their place was taken by the refined and intimate pursuits of peace and civilization.

When I say manage emotions, I only mean the really distressing, incapacitating emotions. Feeling emotions is what makes life rich. You need your passions.

The passions are the only orators which always persuade.

I have lived and slept in the same bed with English countesses and Prussian farm women... no woman has excited passions among women more than I have.

More and more the world is growing to love a lover, and one has only to read the newspapers to see how sympathetic are the times to any generous and adventurous display of the passions.

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.

The paradox is really the pathos of intellectual life and just as only great souls are exposed to passions it is only the great thinker who is exposed to what I call paradoxes, which are nothing else than grandiose thoughts in embryo.

He who reigns within himself and rules passions, desires, and fears is more than a king.

And in a way, that's been a help to me, because I take great passions for a particular poet - sometimes it lasts for many years, sometimes only for a while. This happens to everybody.

The creations of a great writer are little more than the moods and passions of his own heart, given surnames and Christian names, and sent to walk the earth.