Quotations about Passion

We welcome passion, for the mind is briefly let off duty. ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960


Love is often gentle, desire always a rage. ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966


If passion drives you, let reason hold the reins. ~Benjamin Franklin


It is with our passions as it is with fire and water; they are good servants, but bad masters. ~Roger L'Estrange, Aesop's Fables, 1692


Passion and prejudice govern the world, only under the name of reason. ~John Wesley


Passion, though a bad regulator, is a powerful spring. ~Ralph Waldo Emerson


Passion makes the world go round. Love just makes it a safer place. ~Ice T, The Ice Opinion, quoted in Reader's Digest, "Quotable Quotes," February 2002


Chase down your passion like it's the last bus of the night. ~Terri Guillemets


Let men tremble to win the hand of woman, unless they win along with it the utmost passion of her heart! Else it may be their miserable fortune, when some mightier touch than their own may have awakened all her sensibilities, to be reproached even for the calm content, the marble image of happiness, which they will have imposed upon her as the warm reality. ~Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter


Follow your passion, and success will follow you. ~Terri Guillemets


Don't ask yourself what the world needs; ask yourself what makes you come alive. And then go and do that. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive. ~Attributed to Howard Thurman


When I hear a man preach, I like to see him act as if he were fighting bees. ~Abraham Lincoln


The most beautiful make-up of a woman is passion. But cosmetics are easier to buy. ~Yves Saint Laurent


The same passions in man and woman nonetheless differ in tempo; hence man and woman do not cease misunderstanding one another. ~Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil


Without passion man is a mere latent force and possibility, like the flint which awaits the shock of the iron before it can give forth its spark. ~Henri-Frédéric Amiel, Journal, 17 December 1856


You can have anything you want if you want it desperately enough. You must want it with an exuberance that erupts through the skin and joins the energy that created the world. ~Sheila Graham


But this had been a sin of passion, not of principle, nor even purpose. ~Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter


The passions are like fire, useful in a thousand ways and dangerous only in one, through their excess. ~Christian Nestell Bovee


Oh how the passions, insolent and strong,
Bear our weak minds their rapid course along;
Make us the madness of their will obey;
Then die and leave us to our griefs as prey!
~George Crabbe


Passion is universal humanity. Without it religion, history, romance and art would be useless. ~Honoré de Balzac


In music the passions enjoy themselves. ~Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 1886


Our passions are the true phoenixes; when the old one is burnt out, a new one rises from its ashes. ~Johann Wolfgang von Goethe


It is a revenge the devil sometimes takes upon the virtuous, that he entraps them by the force of the very passion they have suppressed and think themselves superior to. ~George Santayana


You taught me to be nice, so nice that now I am so full of niceness, I have no sense of right and wrong, no outrage, no passion. ~Garrison Keillor


Every civilization is, among other things, an arrangement for domesticating the passions and setting them to do useful work. ~Aldous Huxley