Passion Quotes

Never underestimate the power of passion.

Eve Sawye

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.

A religious man is a person who holds God and man in one thought at one time, at all times, who suffers harm done to others, whose greatest passion is compassion, whose greatest strength is love and defiance of despair.

Abraham Joshua Heschel

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

U Thant

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

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

Martha Graham

I wanted to become the seeker, the aroused and passionate explorer, and it was better going at it knowing nothing at all, always choosing the unmarked bottle, always choosing your own unproven method, armed with nothing but faith and a belief in astonishment.

Pat Conroy, "The Lords of Discipline".

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

John Milton

The most common of all follies is to believe passionately in the palpably not true. It is the chief occupation of mankind.

H. L. Mencken

The greatest gift is a passion for reading. It is cheap, it consoles, it distracts, it excites, it gives you knowledge of the world and experience of a wide kind. It is a moral illumination.

Elizabeth Hardwick

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

Chuang - Tzu, On Leveling All Things

In how many lives does love really play a dominant part The average taxpayer is no more capable of the grand passion than of a grand opera.

Israel Zangwill

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

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

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, 1966

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 or the prejudices of the few.

Benjamin Disraeli, campaign speech at High Wycombe, England, November 27, 1832

You can overcome any obstacles by asking the right questions of the right people at the right time, then act on that advice with passion.

Dan Surface, The One Business Book You Absolutely Must Own!

The first glance at History convinces us that the actions of men proceed from their needs, their passions, their characters and talents and impresses us with the belief that such needs, passions and interests are the sole spring of actions.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

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

Claude A. Helvetius

Happy is he who has laid up in his youth, and held fast in all fortune, a genuine and passionate love of reading.

Rufus Choate

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

Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet

It is easy to fly into a passion - - Anybody can do that - - But to be angry with the right person and at the right time and with the right object and in the right way - - That is not easy, and it is not everyone who can do it.

Aristotle

Compassion and love are not mere luxuries. As the source of both inner and external peace, they are fundamental to the continued survival of our species.

Dalai Lama, The Times (1999)

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

Alfred Lord Tennyson

Absence extinguishes small passions and increases great ones, as the wind blows out a candle, and blows in a fire.

De La Rochefoucauld.

Things fall apart the center cannot hold Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity.

William Butler Yeats

Matters of religion should never be matters of controversy. We neither argue with a lover about his taste, not condemn him, if we are just, for knowing so human a passion.

George Santayana

All human actions have one or more of these seven causes chance, nature, compulsion, habit, reason, passion, and desire.

Aristotle

Compassion is the basis of all morality.

Arthur Schopenhaue

Until he extends his circle of compassion to include all living things, man will not himself find peace.

Albert Schweitze

If I were to wish for anything, I should not wish for wealth and power, but for the passionate sense of potential - - For the eye which, ever young and ardent, sees the possible. Pleasure disappoints; possibility never.

S? ren Kierkegaard

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

Some people think only intellect counts: knowing how to solve problems, knowing how to get by, knowing how to identify an advantage and seize it. But the functions of intellect are insufficient without courage, love, friendship, compassion and empathy.

Dean Koontz

The very essence of literature is the war between emotion and intellect, between life and death. When literature becomes too intellectual - - when it begins to ignore the passions, the motions - - It becomes sterile, silly, and actually without substance.

Isaac Bashevis Singe

Reason can never be popular. Passions and feelings may become popular, but reason will always remain the sole property of a few eminent individuals.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Any piece of clothing can be sexy with a quietly passionate woman inside it.

Anonymous

The worst sin - Perhaps the only sin - Passion can commit, is to be joyless.

Dorothy L. Sayers, O Magazine, September 2003