Passion Quotes

Playing seems to be both disinterested and passionate at the same time disinterested in that it is not for real, and passionate in the absorption it requires.

Oliver Bevan

Great dancers are not great because of their technique, they are great because of their passion.

Martha Graham

You can make those promises with just as much passion the second time around. Such is the regenerative power of the human heart.

Marion Wink, O Magazine, 2003

Intellectual passion dries out sensuality.

Leonardo da Vinci, The Notebooks

A grand passion is the privelege of people who have nothing to do.

Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

Nothing is quite so wretchedly corrupt as an aristocracy which has lost its power but kept its wealth and which still has endless leisure to devote to nothing but banal enjoyments. All its great thoughts and passionate energy are things of the past, and nothing but a host of petty, gnawing vices now cling to it like worms to a corpse.

Alexis Charles Henri Clrel de Tocqueville

Maybe you are the cool generation... If coolness means a capacity to stay calm and use your head in the service of ends passionately believed in, then it has my admiration.

Kingman Brewster, Jr.

Heroism on command, senseless violence, and all the loathsome nonsense that goes by the name of patriotism - How passionately I hate them.

Albert Einstein

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, The Lonely Life, 1962

Great wisdom is generous; petty wisdom is contentious. Great speech is impassioned, small speech cantankerous.

Chuang - Tzu, On Leveling All Things

Let thy chief fort and place of defense be a mind free from passions. A stronger place and better fortified than this, hath no man.

Marcus Aelius Aurelius

Passionate hatred can give meaning and purpose to an empty life. Thus people haunted by the purposelessness of their lives try to find a new content not only by dedicating themselves to a holy cause but also by nursing a fanatical grievance. A mass movement offers them unlimited opportunities for both.

Eric Hoffe

Love works in miracles every day such as weakening the strong, and strengthening the weak making fools of the wise, and wise men of fools favouring the passions, destroying reason, and in a word, turning everything topsy - Turvy.

Marguerite de Valois

Lust of power burns more fiercely than all the passions combined.

Blessing Irish

Educate your children to self - Control, to the habit of holding passion and prejudice and evil tendencies to an upright and reasoning will, and you have done much to abolish misery from their future lives and crimes to society.

Daniel Webste

If we resist our passions, it is more from their weakness than from our strength.

La Rochefoucauld

Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind.

Bertrand Russell, Autobiography

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

Love is substance; Lust, illusion. Only in the surge of passion do the two mingle in confusion.

Calvin Miller, The Singer Trilogy

Wars begin in the minds of man, and in those minds, love and compassion would have built the defenses of peace.

U Thant

I passionately hate the idea of being with it, I think an artist has always to be out of step with his time.

Orson Welles

What a mistake to suppose that the passions are strongest in youth! The passions are not stronger, but the control over them is weaker! They are more easily excited, they are more violent and apparent; but they have less energy, less durability, less intense and concentrated power than in the maturer life.

Edward Bulwer - Lytton

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

Aesop

Calendars are for careful people, not passionate ones.

Chuck, The World According to Chuck weblog, September 8, 2003

I am a Conservative to preserve all that is good in our constitution, a Radical to remove all that is bad. I seek to preserve property and to respect order, and I equally decry the appeal to the passions of the many of the prejudices of the few.

Benjamin Disraeli

There is no passion like that of a functionary for his function.

Georges Clemenceau

No deep and strong feeling, such as we may come across here and there in the world, is unmixed with compassion. The more we love, the more the object of our love seems to us to be a victim.

Boris Pasternak

Control thy passions, lest they take vengeance on thee.

Epictetus

I have no mercy or compassion for a society that crushes people, and then penalizes them for not being able to stand up under the weight.

Malcom X, My counselor, Mrs. Ross

Know thyself, said the old philosopher, improve thyself, saith the new. Our great object in time is not to waste our passions and gifts on the things external that we must leave behind, but that we cultivate within us all that we can carry into the eternal progress beyond.

Edward Bulwer - Lytton

If I were to wish for anything, I should not wish for wealth and power, but for the passionate sense of the potential, for the eye which, ever young and ardent, sees the possible. Pleasure disappoints, possibility never. And what wine is so sparkling, what so fragrant, what so intoxicating, as possibility.

Sren Aaby Kierkegaard

Fear grows out of the things we think it lives in our minds. Compassion grows out of the things we are, and lives in our hearts.

Barbara Garrison

Make no judgements where you have no compassion.

Anne McCaffrey

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

Seneca

Mortal lovers must not try to remain at the first step for lasting passion is the dream of a harlot and from it we wake in despair.

C. S. Lewis

Your soul is oftentimes a battlefield, upon which your reason and your judgment wage war against passion and your appetite.

Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet

Matters of religion should never be matters of controversy. We neither argue with a lover about his taste, nor condemn him, if we are just, for knowing so human a passion.

George Santayana