Quotes about passion
page 11

Leo Tolstoy photo
Torrey DeVitto photo
André Maurois photo

“The passionate controversies of one era are viewed as sterile preoccupations by another, for knowledge alters what we seek as well as what we find.”

Freda Adler (1934) Criminologist, educator

Source: Sisters in Crime: The Rise of the New Female Criminal (1975), P. 31.

Zadie Smith photo
Michael Elmore-Meegan photo
John Adams photo

“A wise man rules his passions, a fool obeys them.”

Publilio Siro Latin writer

Maxim 49
Sentences, The Moral Sayings of Publius Syrus, a Roman Slave

Thomas Hobbes photo

“Sudden Glory, is the passion which maketh those Grimaces called LAUGHTER.”

The First Part, Chapter 6, p. 27 (italics and spelling as per text)
Leviathan (1651)

Annie Besant photo
William Vaughn Moody photo

“Passion is power,
And, kindly tempered, saves. All things declare
Struggle hath deeper peace than sleep can bring.”

William Vaughn Moody (1869–1910) United States dramatist and poet

The Masque of Judgment (1900), Act III, Sc. 2.

Robinson Jeffers photo

“The gang serves lies, the passionate
Man plays his part; the cold passion for truth
Hunts in no pack.”

Robinson Jeffers (1887–1962) American poet

"Be Angry At The Sun" (1941)

Oriana Fallaci photo
Martin Niemöller photo
Taliesin photo
David Dixon Porter photo
Clarence Thomas photo
Stendhal photo
Alexandre Vinet photo
Gerhard Richter photo
Fyodor Dostoyevsky photo
Clarence Thomas photo
James A. Garfield photo
Joyce Carol Oates photo

“Homo sapiens is the species that invents symbols in which to invest passion and authority, then forgets that symbols are inventions.”

Joyce Carol Oates (1938) American author

"The Calendar's New Clothes," New York Times (30 December 1999)

Aldous Huxley photo

“When your mother has grown old
and with her so have you,
When that which once came easy
has at last become a burden,
When her loving, true eyes
no longer see life as once they did
When her weary feet
no longer want to wear her as she stands,
then reach an arm to her shoulder,
escort her gently, with happiness and passion
The hour will come, when you, crying,
must take her on her final walk.
And if she asks you, then give her an answer
And if she asks you again, listen!
And if she asks you again, take in her words
not impetuously, but gently and in peace!
And if she cannot quite understand you,
explain all to her gladly
For the hour will come, the bitter hour
when her mouth will ask for nothing more.”

Source: The poem was originally titled "Habe Geduld". It was first published in Blüthen des Herzens around 1906. https://www.bartfmdroog.com/droog/dd/bluthen_des_herzens_scans.html#front

Adolf Hitler used this poem with the title "Deine Mutter" in the handwritten manuscript he signed and dated in 1923. For this reason, this poem is sometimes misattributed to him. Adolf Hitler, "Denk' es!" (Be Reminded!) 1923, first published in Sonntag-Morgenpost (14 May 1933).

Roberto Mangabeira Unger photo
Rian Johnson photo
J. J. Abrams photo
Nikos Kazantzakis photo
Robert P. George photo
Michael Polanyi photo
Margaret Mead photo
Hector Berlioz photo

“That is, in fact, the true female voice of the orchestra – a voice at once passionate and chaste, heart-rending, yet soft, which can weep, sigh, and lament, chant, pray, and muse, or burst forth into joyous accents, as none other can do.”

Hector Berlioz (1803–1869) French Romantic composer

C'est la vraie voix féminine de l'orchestre, voix passionnée et chaste en même temps, déchirante et douce, qui pleure et crie et se lamente, ou chante et prie et rêve, ou éclate en accents joyeux, comme nulle autre pourrait le faire.
Grand Traité d'Instrumentation et d'Orchestration Modernes (1844) http://www.hberlioz.com/Scores/BerliozTraite.html#Violon; Mary Cowden Clarke (trans.) A Treatise upon Modern Instrumentation and Orchestration (London: J. Alfred Novello, 1856) p. 25.
Of the violin.

Edward Jenks photo
Miss Shangay Lily photo
Sara Malakul Lane photo
Norman Mailer photo
George William Russell photo

“Ah, sigh for us whose hearts unseeing
Point all their passionate love in vain,
And blinded in the joy of being,
Meet only when pain touches pain.”

George William Russell (1867–1935) Irish writer, editor, critic, poet, and artistic painter

By Still Waters (1906)

George Steiner photo
Bruno Schulz photo
Jean Paul Sartre photo
Ambrose Bierce photo
William Wordsworth photo
Regina E. Dugan photo
Anna Akhmatova photo
Matthew Hayden photo
Charlotte Brontë photo

“The theatre was full — crammed to its roof: royal and noble were there; palace and hotel had emptied their inmates into those tiers so thronged and so hushed. Deeply did I feel myself privileged in having a place before that stage; I longed to see a being of whose powers I had heard reports which made me conceive peculiar anticipations. I wondered if she would justify her renown: with strange curiosity, with feelings severe and austere, yet of riveted interest, I waited. She was a study of such nature as had not encountered my eyes yet: a great and new planet she was: but in what shape? I waited her rising.She rose at nine that December night: above the horizon I saw her come. She could shine yet with pale grandeur and steady might; but that star verged already on its judgment-day. Seen near, it was a chaos — hollow, half-consumed: an orb perished or perishing — half lava, half glow.I had heard this woman termed "plain," and I expected bony harshness and grimness — something large, angular, sallow. What I saw was the shadow of a royal Vashti: a queen, fair as the day once, turned pale now like twilight, and wasted like wax in flame.For awhile — a long while — I thought it was only a woman, though an unique woman, who moved in might and grace before this multitude. By-and-by I recognized my mistake. Behold! I found upon her something neither of woman nor of man: in each of her eyes sat a devil. These evil forces bore her through the tragedy, kept up her feeble strength — for she was but a frail creature; and as the action rose and the stir deepened, how wildly they shook her with their passions of the pit! They wrote HELL on her straight, haughty brow. They tuned her voice to the note of torment. They writhed her regal face to a demoniac mask. Hate and Murder and Madness incarnate she stood.It was a marvellous sight: a mighty revelation.It was a spectacle low, horrible, immoral.Swordsmen thrust through, and dying in their blood on the arena sand; bulls goring horses disembowelled, made a meeker vision for the public — a milder condiment for a people's palate — than Vashti torn by seven devils: devils which cried sore and rent the tenement they haunted, but still refused to be exorcised.Suffering had struck that stage empress; and she stood before her audience neither yielding to, nor enduring, nor in finite measure, resenting it: she stood locked in struggle, rigid in resistance. She stood, not dressed, but draped in pale antique folds, long and regular like sculpture. A background and entourage and flooring of deepest crimson threw her out, white like alabaster — like silver: rather, be it said, like Death.”

Source: Villette (1853), Ch. XXIII: Vashi

Clarence Darrow photo
Julian of Norwich photo
Laurence Sterne photo
C. N. R. Rao photo

“Pursue your dreams with passion, hard work and dedication.”

C. N. R. Rao (1934) Indian chemist

How I made it: CNR Rao, Scientist (2010)

Jack McDevitt photo
E.M. Forster photo
Frank Klepacki photo
Ralph Ellison photo

“Whence all this passion toward conformity anyway?—diversity is the word.”

Epilogue.
Invisible Man (1952)

André Maurois photo
John Adams photo
Leo Tolstoy photo
William Wordsworth photo

“Wealth is the fountain head of passions.”

Nahj al-Balagha

Ai Weiwei photo

“The individual under this kind of life, with no rights, has absolutely no power in this land. How can they even ask you for creativity? Or imagination, or courage or passion?”

Ai Weiwei (1957) Chinese concept artist

“ House Arrest in China: Orwell, Kafka, and Ai Weiwei http://www.economist.com/blogs/analects/2012/04/house-arrest-china.” Economist, April 13, 2012
2010-, 2012

Samuel Taylor Coleridge photo
Matthew Arnold photo

“How thick the bursts come crowding through the leaves!
Again — thou hearest?
Eternal passion!
Eternal pain!”

Matthew Arnold (1822–1888) English poet and cultural critic who worked as an inspector of schools

"Philomela" (1853), st. 3

Francis Parkman photo
George Chapman photo

“For one heat, all know, doth drive out another,
One passion doth expel another still.”

Monsieur D'Olive, Act V, scene i; reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

Pythagoras photo

“Sobriety is the strength of the soul, for it preserves its reason unclouded by passion.”

Pythagoras (-585–-495 BC) ancient Greek mathematician and philosopher

As quoted in The History of Philosophy: From the Earliest Times to the Beginning of the Present Century (1819) by William Enfield
Sobriety is the strength of the mind; for it preserves reason unclouded by passion.
As quoted in Bible of Reason (1831) by Benjamin F. Powell, p. 157
Strength of mind rests in sobriety; for this keeps your reason unclouded by passion.
As quoted in Dictionary of Quotations from Ancient and Modern English and Foreign Sources (1899) by James Wood

Eugene J. Martin photo

“Passion is a disguise for attachment – sometimes as hate and other times as love.”

Eugene J. Martin (1938–2005) American artist

Annotated Drawings by Eugene J. Martin: 1977-1978

W. Somerset Maugham photo
T.S. Eliot photo
Nelson Mandela photo

“A fundamental concern for others in our individual and community lives would go a long way in making the world the better place we so passionately dreamt of.”

Nelson Mandela (1918–2013) President of South Africa, anti-apartheid activist

Nelson Mandela on selflessness, Kliptown, Soweto, South Africa (12 July 2008). Source: From Nelson Mandela By Himself: The Authorised Book of Quotations © 2010 by Nelson R. Mandela and The Nelson Mandela Foundation http://www.nelsonmandela.org/content/mini-site/selected-quotes

Burkard Schliessmann photo

“The listener with no preconceptions hears massive waves of sound breaking over him and forms from them the image of a passionate soul seeking and finding the path to faith and peace in God through a life of struggle and a vigorous pursuit of ideals. It is impossible not to hear the confessional tone of this musical language; Liszt’s sonata becomes - perhaps involuntarily on the part of the composer - an autobiographical document and one which reveals an artist in the Faustian mold in the person of its author. As in the Harmonies poétiques et religieuses, the underlying religious concept which dominates and permeates the whole work demands a special kind of approach. Whereas representations of human passions and conflicts force themselves on our understanding with their powerfully suggestive coloring, this concept only becomes manifest to those souls who are prepared to soar to the same heights. The equilibrium of the sonata’s hymnic chordal motif, the transformation of its defiant battle motif (first theme) into a triumphant fanfare, and its appearance in bright, high notes on the harp, together with the devotional atmosphere of the Andante, represent a particular challenge to the listener; he is, after all, also expected to grasp the wide-spanned arcs of sound which, from the first hesitant descending octaves to the radiant final chords, build up a graphic panorama of the various stages of progress of a human spirit filled with faith and hope. As the reflection of a remarkable artistic personality worthy of deep admiration and, by extension, of the whole Romantic period, Liszt’s B minor Sonata deserves lasting recognition.”

Burkard Schliessmann classical pianist

About the Liszt Sonata in B minor

Ada Leverson photo

“His long struggle with physical passion was almost over, and, as with many other great sensualists, its place had been taken by an obsession with death.”

Kenneth Clark (1903–1983) Art historian, broadcaster and museum director

Referring to Michelangelo
Source: The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form (1951), Ch. VI: Pathos

Glen Cook photo

“A teacher?”
“Yes. He argued that we are the gods, that we create our own destiny. That what we are determines what will become of us. In a peasantlike vernacular, we all paint ourselves into corners from which here is no escape simply by being ourselves and interacting with other selves.”
“Interesting.”
“Well. Yes. There is god of sorts, Croaker. Do you know? Not a mover and shaker, though. Simply a negator. An ender of tales. He has a hunger that cannot be sated. The universe itself will slide down his maw.”
“Death?”
“I do not want to die, Croaker. All that I am shrieks against the unrighteousness of death. All that I am, was, and probably will be, is shaped by my passion to evade the end of me.” She laughed quietly, but there was a thread of hysteria there. She gestured, indicating the shadowed killing ground below. “I would have built a world in which I was safe. And the cornerstone of my citadel would have been death.”
The end of the dream was drawing close. I could not imagine a world without me in it, either. And the inner me was outraged. Is outraged. I have no trouble imagining someone becoming obsessed with escaping death.
“I understand.”

“Maybe. We’re all equals at the dark gate, no? The sands run for us all. Life is but a flicker shouting into the jaws of eternity. But it seems so damned unfair!”
Source: The White Rose (1985), Chapter 39, “A Guest at Charm” (p. 625)

Siddharth Katragadda photo
Winston S. Churchill photo
David Hume photo

“No quality of human nature is more remarkable, both in itself and in its consequences, than that propensity we have to sympathize with others, and to receive by communication their inclinations and sentiments, however different from, or even contrary to our own. This is not only conspicuous in children, who implicitly embrace every opinion propos’d to them; but also in men of the greatest judgment and understanding, who find it very difficult to follow their own reason or inclination, in opposition to that of their friends and daily companions. To this principle we ought to ascribe the great uniformity we may observe in the humours and turn of thinking of those of the same nation; and ’tis much more probable, that this resemblance arises from sympathy, than from any influence of the soil and climate, which, tho’ they continue invariably the same, are not able to preserve the character of a nation the same for a century together. A good-natur’d man finds himself in an instant of the same humour with his company; and even the proudest and most surly take a tincture from their countrymen and acquaintance. A chearful countenance infuses a sensible complacency and serenity into my mind; as an angry or sorrowful one throws a sudden dump upon me. Hatred, resentment, esteem, love, courage, mirth and melancholy; all these passions I feel more from communication than from my own natural temper and disposition. So remarkable a phaenomenon merits our attention, and must be trac’d up to its first principles.”

Part 1, Section 11
A Treatise of Human Nature (1739-40), Book 2: Of the passions

J. M. Barrie photo
Alexandra Kollontai photo

“I revolted against this marriage of convenience, this marriage for money and wanted to marry only for love, out of a great passion.”

Alexandra Kollontai (1872–1952) Soviet diplomat

The Autobiography of a Sexually Emancipated Communist Woman (1926)

Max Beckmann photo
William Wordsworth photo
Dave Matthews photo
Rani Mukerji photo

“I don't party, I don't get drunk and I don't have affairs. So all my passion goes into my work.”

Rani Mukerji (1978) Indian film actress

[bollyvista.com, What Rani Had To Say, http://www.bollyvista.com/quote/s/786/2, 23 April, 2006]
Famous Quotes

F. Scott Fitzgerald photo
James Braid photo
David Cameron photo

“This is something I feel very strongly and very passionately about. Together I want us to pave the road from Ankara to Brussels.”

David Cameron (1966) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Quoted from 'A speech about Turkey's EU membership process'; "Turkey must be welcome in EU, insists Cameron" http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/turkey-must-be-welcome-in-eu-insists-cameron-2036190.html
2010s, 2010, First speech as UK Prime Minister (2010)

José Rizal photo

“To live is to be among men, and to be among men is to struggle, a struggle not only with them but with oneself; with their passions, but also with one's own.”

José Rizal (1861–1896) Filipino writer, ophthalmologist, polyglot and nationalist

Letter to his family, Dapitan (c. 1884)

Letitia Elizabeth Landon photo
Woodrow Wilson photo
Isaac Barrow photo
Fitz-Greene Halleck photo