Passion quotes
5.8K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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Browse quotes that often appear alongside passion — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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"A man often thinks he rules himself, when all the while he is ruled and managed; and while his understanding directs one design, his affections imperceptibly draw him into another."
"No matter how much care we put into hiding our passions under the appearances of devotion and honor, they can always be seen to peer out through these covers."
"Passions often produce their contraries: avarice sometimes leads to prodigality, and prodigality to avarice; we are often obstinate through weakness and daring through timidity."
"Spiritual health is no more stable than bodily; and though we may seem unaffected by the passions we are just as liable to be carried away by them as to fall ill when in good health."
"Absence cools moderate passions, and inflames violent ones; just as the wind blows out candles, but kindles fires."
"The health of the soul is as precarious as that of the body; for when we seem secure from passions, we are no less in danger of their infection than we are of falling ill when we appear to be well."
"Absence abates a moderate passion and intensifies a great one - as the wind blows out a candle but fans fire into flame."
"Passion often makes fools of the wisest men and gives the silliest wisdom."
"It is a mighty error to suppose that none but violent and strong passions, such as love and ambition, are able to vanquish the rest. Even idleness, as feeble and languishing as it is, sometimes reigns over them; it usurps the throne and sits paramount over all the designs and actions of our lives, and imperceptibly wastes and destroys all our passions and all our virtues."
"The rich have a passion for bargains as lively as it is pointless."
"I've always been a multi-passionate woman, so my passion for business existed right alongside my passion for dance."
"He felt all the torment of his and her position, all the difficulties they were surrounded by in consequence of their station in life, which exposed them to the eyes of the whole world, obliged them to hide their love, to lie and deceive, and again to lie and deceive, to scheme and constantly think about others while the passion that bound them was so strong that they both forgot everything but their love."
"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."
"Freedom is not only the absence of external restraints. It is also the absence of irresistible internal compulsions, unmanageable passion, and uncensorable highlights."
"Art is accusation, expression, passion. Art is black charcoal crushing white paper."
"I have always felt it is my destiny to build a machine that would allow man to fly."
"Probably the institution of marriage had its origin in love of property. Both men and women were united in this--that whatever they loved best, they wished to possess. The usual theory holds that the communal system would not permit the gratification of this desire at the expense of communal rights, and that therefore men were driven to gratify their passion by purchasing or by capturing women from neighboring and hostile tribes."
"I love swimming, swimming's my passion and I hope I swim until the last day of my life, so I really, really do enjoy swimming, but swimming for me is simply a way of carrying a message."
"The strongest and most evil spirits have to date advanced mankind the most: they always rekindled the sleeping passions - all orderly arranged society lulls the passions to sleep; they always reawakened the sense of comparison, of contradiction, of delight in the new, the adventurous, the untried; they compelled men to set opinion against opinion, ideal plan against ideal plan."
"That whatever a man says, promises, or resolves in passion he must stick to later on when he is cold and sober--this demand is among the heaviest burdens that weigh on humankind."
