Quotes about Passions

It is our ignorance of things that causes all our admiration and chiefly excites our passions.

Those despotic governments which are founded on the passions of men, and principally upon the passion of fear, keep their chief as much as may be from the public eye. The policy has been the same in many cases of religion.

When the sword is once drawn, the passions of men observe no bounds of moderation.

There are again two methods of removing the causes of faction: the one, by destroying the liberty which is essential to its existence; the other, by giving to every citizen the same opinions, the same passions, and the same interests. It could never be more truly said than of the first remedy, that it was worse than the disease. Liberty is to faction what air is to fire, an aliment without which it instantly expires.

Power," he wrote, "always thinks it has a great soul and vast views beyond the comprehension of the weak; and that it is doing God's service when it is violating all His laws. Our passions, ambitions, avarice, love and resentment, etc., possess so much metaphysical subtlety and so much overpowering eloquence that they insinuate themselves into the understanding and the conscience and convert both to their party.

Yet I must tell you, that all these graces which are expressed by passions of sorrow, fear, joy, hope, love, are not so certainly to be tried by the passion that is in them, as by the will that is either contained in them, or supposed in them; not as acts of the sensitive, but of the rational appetite (358).

On a man's journey, everything has its place. Our failures, heartbreaks, defeats, and victories; our wounds, dreams, and passions; our stops and our starts-all have a place in our story, and all have a place in our transformation from shadow men to real men. Everything has meaning, and everything belongs.

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

The Lord is well aware of our mortality. He knows our weaknesses. He understands the challenges of our everyday lives. He has great empathy for the temptations of earthly appetites and passions.

The tyrant of Syracuse once went to the slavephilosopher Epictetus and told him, "I'll pay the ransom for you and you will be liberated " Epictetus replied, "Why do you care about me? Free yourself." "But I am a king," said the amazed tyrant. "This I contest," was the answer of the philosopher. "He who masters his passions is a king even while in chains. He who is ruled by his passions is a slave even while sitting on a throne.

Human passions unbridled by morality and religion...would break the stronges cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net.

Maribeau said that "none but men of strong passions are capable of rising to greatness." Tennyson said, "The happiness of a man in his life does not consist in the absence but in the mastering of his passions." Franklin said that "he is a governor that governs his passions and he is a servant that serves them.