Passion Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

I prithee gentle friend,
Let thy fair wisdom, not thy passions, sway
In this uncivil and unjust extent
Against thy peace.

William Shakespeare

Nature intended me for the tranquil pursuits of science, by rendering them my supreme delight. But the enormities of the times in which I have lived, have forced me to take a part in resisting them, and to commit myself on the boisterous ocean of political passions.

Thomas Jefferson

To whom can I expose the urgency of my own passion?…There is nobody—here among these grey arches, and moaning pigeons, and cheerful games and tradition and emulation, all so skilfully organised to prevent feeling alone.

The selfish spirit of commerce knows no country, and feels no passion or principle but that of gain.

Thomas Jefferson

Suffering is nothing by itself. But suffering shared with the passion of Christ is a wonderful gift, the most beautiful gift, a token of love.

A man's nature is best perceived in privateness, for there is no affectation; in passion, for that putteth a man out of his precepts; and in a new case or experiment, for there custom leaveth him.

Is the devil to have all the passions as well as all the good tunes?

George Bernard Shaw

Meantime, the world in which we exist has other aims. But it will pass away, burnt up in the fire of its own hot passions; and from its ashes will spring a new and younger world, full of fresh hope, woth the light of morning in its eyes.

Bertrand Russell

Ignore fact and reason, live entirely in the world of your own fantastic and myth-producing passions; do this whole-heartedly and with conviction, and you will become one of the prophets of your age.

Bertrand Russell

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.

We must picture Hell as a state where everyone is perpetually concerned about his own dignity and advancement, where everyone has a grievance, and where everyone lives the deadly serious passions of envy, self-importance, and resentment.

To create today is to create dangerously. Any publication is an act, and that act exposes one to the passions of an age that forgives nothing.

It is an old prerogative of kings to govern everything but their passions.

Charles Dickens

Great passions are for the great of soul, and great events can be seen only by those who are on a level with them

When the heat and motion of blind impulses and passions distract it on all sides, we can neither give nor receive anything truly. But when we find our centre in our soul by the power of self-restraint, by the force that harmonizes all warring element

Rabindranath Tagore

Who can deny that much that passes for science and art today destroys the soul instead of uplifting it and instead of evoking the best in us, panders to our basest passions?

A people contending for life and liberty are seldom disposed to look with a favorable eye upon either men or measures whose passions, interests or consequences will clash with those inestimable objects.

George Washington

I see this evident, that we willingly accord to piety only the services that flatter our passions.

Michel de Montaigne

Jealousy... survives every other passion of mankind...

The passion of laughter is nothing else but a sudden glory arising from sudden conception of some eminency in ourselves, by comparison with the infirmities of others, or with our own formerly...

In that daily effort in which intelligence and passion mingle and delight each other, the absurd man discovers a discipline that will make up the greatest of his strengths. The required diligence and doggedness and lucidity thus resemble the conqueror's attitude. To create is likewise to give a shape to one's fate. For all these characters, their work defines them at least as much as it is defined by them. The actor taught us this: There is no frontier between being and appearing.

With equal passion I have sought knowledge. I have wished to understand the hearts of men. I have wished to know why the stars shine. And I have tried to apprehend the Pythagorean power by which number holds sway about the flux. A little of this, but not much, I have achieved.

Bertrand Russell

Tis pleasant purchasing our fellow-creatures; And all are to be sold, if you consider Their passions, and are dext'rous; some by features Are brought up, others by a warlike leader; Some by a place--as tend their years or natures; The most by ready cash--but all have prices, From crowns to kicks, according to their vices.

For what we suppose to be our love or our jealousy is never a single, continuous and indivisible passion. It is composed of an infinity of successive loves, of different jealousies, each of which is ephemeral, although by their uninterrupted multiplicity they give us the impression of continuity, the illusion of unity.

It was the mystical dogma of Bentham and Adam Smith and the rest, that some of the worst of human passions would turn out to be all for the best. It was the mysterious doctrine that selfishness would do the work of unselfishness.

G. K. Chesterton