Oh, may I with myself agree,
And never covet what I see.
Content me with an humble shade,
My passions tamed, my wishes laid;
For, while our wishes wildly roll.
We banish quiet from the soul.
It is thus the busy beat the air,
And misers gather wealth and care. [ Dyer ]
Men of cold passions have quick eyes. [ Hawthorne ]
Steel assassinates; the passions kill. [ Mme. Deluzy ]
Great passions are incurable diseases. [ Goethe ]
Sudden passions are hard to be managed. [ Proverb ]
The passions are the voice of the body. [ Rousseau ]
The passions do not die out; they burn out. [ Ninon de Lenclos ]
Who is strong? He who subdues his passions. [ Talmud ]
Of all base passions fear is most accurs'd. [ William Shakespeare ]
He is happy who is forsaken by his passions. [ Hitopadesa ]
Vices are often habits rather than passions. [ Rivarol ]
In solitude the passions feed upon the heart. [ Edward Bulwer-Lytton ]
Who fights
With passions and overcomes, that man is armed
With the best virtue - passive fortitude. [ Webster ]
He was a man
Versed in the world as pilot in his compass;
The needle pointed ever to that interest
Which was his loadstar; and he spread his sails
With vantage to the gale of others' passions. [ Ben Jonson ]
Time is the sovereign physician of all passions. [ Montaigne ]
Passions are likened best to floods and streams;
The shallow murmur, but the deep are dumb. [ Sir Walter Raleigh ]
The passions are the orators of great assemblies. [ Rivarol ]
Serving one's own passions is the greatest slavery. [ Proverb ]
Reason is an historian, but the passions are actors. [ Rivarol ]
Regulate your own passions and bear those of others. [ Proverb ]
In the beginning, passions obey; later, they command. [ Mme. de Lambert ]
Passions are defects or virtues in the highest power. [ Goethe ]
The Alphabet Of Success
Attend carefully to details.
Be prompt in all things.
Consider well, then decide positively.
Dare to do right, fear to do wrong.
Endure trials patiently.
Fight life's battles bravely.
Go not into the society of the vicious.
Hold your integrity sacred.
Injure not another's reputation.
Join hands only with the virtuous.
Keep your mind free from evil thoughts.
Lie not for any consideration.
Make few special acquaintances.
Never try to appear what you are not.
Observe good manners.
Pay your debts promptly.
Question not the verity of a friend.
Respect the desires of your parents.
Sacrifice money rather than principle.
Touch not, taste not, handle not intoxicating drinks.
Use your leisure for improvement.
Venture not upon the threshold of wrong.
Watch carefully over your passions.
Xtend to everyone a kindly greeting.
Yield not to discouragement.
Zealously labor for the right, and success is certain. [ Ladies Home Journal ]
Govern your passions or otherwise they will govern you. [ Horace ]
In the human breast two master* passions cannot coexist. [ Campbell ]
Absence cools moderate passions, but inflames violent ones. [ Proverb ]
Rest not in an ovation, but in a triumph over thy passions. [ Sir Thomas Browne ]
The vicious obey their passions, as slaves do their masters. [ Diogenes ]
He that overcomes his passions overcomes his greatest enemies. [ Proverb ]
Our headstrong passions shut the door of our souls against God. [ Confucius ]
All the passions die with the years; self-love alone never dies. [ Voltaire ]
Manners, morals, customs change: the passions are always the same. [ Mme. de Flahaut ]
Women can less easily surmount their coquetry than their passions. [ Rochefoucauld ]
It is the path of the passions that has conducted me to philosophy. [ J. J. Rousseau ]
We use up in the passions the stuff that was given us for happiness. [ Joubert ]
We are by no means aware how much we are influenced by our passions. [ La Rochefoucauld ]
The passions are like fire and water; good servants, but bad masters. [ Proverb ]
How many coward passions hide themselves under the mask of puritanism! [ Mme. Louise Colet ]
Great passions are incurable diseases; the very remedies make them worse. [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ]
A man's passions, tastes, and opinions are discovered by his admirations. [ C. Nodier ]
There are some passions so sweet that they excuse all the follies they provoke. [ Rochebrune ]
All passions exaggerate; and they are passions only because they do exaggerate. [ Chamfort ]
It is not the absence, but the mastery, of our passions which affords happiness. [ Mme. de Maintenon ]
If we resist our passions it is more from their weakness than from our strength. [ La Rochefoucauld ]
A wicked man is his own hell; and his passions and lusts the fiends that torment him. [ Proverb ]
All passions are good when one masters them; all are bad when one is a slave to them. [ J. J. Rousseau ]
Passions are like storms which, full of present mischief, serve to purify the atmosphere. [ Ramsay ]
The art of poetry is to touch the passions, and its duty to lead them on the side of virtue. [ Cowper ]
The mind hath not reason to remember that passions ought to be her vassals, not her masters. [ Sir Walter Raleigh ]
All other passions do occasional good; but when pride puts in its word everything goes wrong. [ Ruskin ]
There is always something ridiculous about the passions of people whom one has ceased to love. [ Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Grey ]
He who cannot govern his passions should kill them, as we kill a horse when we cannot master it. [ Chamfort ]
According to the Stoics, apathy meant the extinction of the passions by the ascendency of reason. [ William Fleming ]
Nature has planted passions in the heart of man for the wisest purposes both of religion and life. [ Fox ]
Strong as our passions are, they may be starved into submission, and conquered without being killed. [ Colton ]
We should employ our passions in the service of life, not spend life in the service of our passions. [ Richard Steele ]
It is the work of a philosopher to be every day subduing his passions and laying aside his prejudices. [ Addison ]
The passions are like fire, useful in a thousand ways and dangerous only in one, through their excess. [ Bovee ]
The very beautiful rarely love at all. Those precious images are placed above the reach of the passions. [ Lander ]
Absence lessens weak, and intensifies violent, passions, as wind extinguishes a taper and lights up a fire. [ La Roche ]
The source of all passions is sensitiveness: it is the errors of imagination that transform them into vices. [ J. J. Rousseau ]
Great passions are incurable diseases; what might heal them is precisely that which makes them so dangerous. [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ]
Love is of all the passions the strongest, for it attacks simultaneously the head, the heart, and the senses. [ Voltaire ]
The passions are the gales of life; and it is religion only that can prevent them from rising into a tempest. [ Dr. Watts ]
Our passions are like convulsion fits, which make us stronger for the time, but leave us weaker forever after. [ Dean Swift ]
Passions, as fire and water, are good servants, but bad roasters, and subminister to the best and worst purposes. [ L'Estrange ]
Man is only truly great when he acts from his passions; never irresistible but when he appeals to the imagination. [ Benjamin Disraeli ]
Poetry is the blossom and the fragrance of all human knowledge, human thoughts, human passions, emotions, language. [ Coleridge ]
Nature is upheld by antagonism. Passions, resistance, danger, are educators. We acquire the strength we have overcome. [ Emerson ]
Our passions are like convulsion fits, which, though they make us stronger for a time, leave us the weaker ever after. [ Pope ]
The way to avoid evil is not by maiming our passions, but by compelling them to yield their vigour to our moral nature. [ Ward Beecher ]
Absence diminishes weak passions and augments great ones; as the wind extinguishes tapers,but increases a conflagration. [ La Rochefoucauld ]
Reason developed and cultivated will always be the most powerful curb to the passions: this is the compass of all mankind. [ J. J. Rousseau ]
Great souls are not those who have fewer passions and more virtues than the common, but those only who have greater designs. [ La Rochefoucauld ]
Our estimate of a character always depends much on the manner in which that character affects our own interests and passions. [ Macaulay ]
To regard the excesses of the passions as maladies has so salutary an effect that this idea renders all moral sermons useless. [ Boiste ]
The happiness of the human race in this world does not consist in our being devoid of passions, but in our learning to command them. [ From the French ]
It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free; their passions forge their fetters. [ Burke ]
Men will always act according to their passions. Therefore the best government is that which inspires the nobler passions and destroys the meaner. [ Jacobi ]
A principle fruit of friendship is the ease and discharge of the fulness and swellings of the heart, which passions of all kinds do cause and induce. [ Lord Bacon ]
Love is the most terrible, and also the most generous, of the passions: it is the only one that includes in its dreams the happiness of some one else. [ A. Karr ]
Of all things known to mortals wine is the most powerful and effectual for exciting and inflaming the passions of mankind, being common fuel to them all. [ Lord Bacon ]
Music is a source of surpassing delight to many minds. From its power to soothe the feelings and modify the passions, it seems desirable to understand it. [ Mrs. Sigourney ]
No passions are without their use, none without their nobleness, when seen in balanced unity with the rest of the spirit which they are charged to defend. [ John Ruskin ]
Music, of all the liberal arts, has the greatest influence over the passions, and is that to which the legislator ought to give the greatest encouragement. [ Napoleon I ]
What is life? A gulf of troubled waters, where the soul, like a vexed bark, is tossed upon the waves of pain and pleasure by the wavering breath of passions. [ Miss L. E. Landon ]
One means very effectual for the preservation of health is a quiet and cheerful mind, not afflicted with violent passions or distracted with immoderate cares. [ John Ray ]
He that lays down precepts for the governing of our lives, and moderating our passions, obliges humanity not only in the present, but in all future generations. [ Seneca ]
Which of us that is thirty years old has not had his Pompeii? Deep under ashes lie life, youth, the careless sports, the pleasures and passions, the darling joy. [ William M. Thackeray ]
The passions act as winds to propel our vessel, our reason is the pilot that steers her; without the winds she would not move, without the pilot she would be lost. [ F. Schultz ]
The mathematics are friends to religion, inasmuch as they charm the passions, restrain the impetuosity or imagination, and purge the mind from error and prejudice. [ Arbuthnot ]
It is a bird-flight of the soul, when the heart declares itself in song. The affections that clothe themselves with wings are passions that have been subdued to virtues. [ Simms ]
The passions are the celestial fire that vivifies the moral world. It is to them that the arts and sciences owe their discoveries, and man the elevation of his position. [ Helvetius ]
Of all the passions, jealousy is that which exacts the hardest service and pays the bitterest wages. Its service is, to watch the success of our enemy, to be sure of it. [ Colton ]
Madness is consistent, which is more than can be said for poor reason. Our passions and principles are steady in frenzy, but begin to shift and waver as we return to reason. [ Sterne ]
The avarice of the miser may be termed the grand sepulchre of all his other passions, as they successively decay. But unlike other tombs, it is enlarged by repletion and strengthened by age. [ Colton ]
The passions are the only orators that always persuade; they are, as it were, a natural art, the rules of which are infallible; and the simplest man with passion is more persuasive than the most eloquent without it. [ La Rochefoucauld ]
Friendship may outlive love and its passions; for instances have not unfrequently occurred, in which parties who have ceased to regard each other as lovers, have been found necessary as friends and confidential advisers. [ Mme. de Pompadour ]
All the other passions condescend at times to accept the inexorable logic of facts; but jealousy looks facts straight in the face, ignores them utterly, and says that she knows a great deal better than they can tell her. [ Helps ]
Love works miracles every day: such as weakening the strong, and strengthening the weak; making fools of the wise, and wise men of fools; favoring the passions, destroying reason, and, in a word, turning everything topsy-turvy. [ Marguerite de Valois ]
In reality, there is perhaps no one of our natural passions so hard to subdue as pride. Disguise it, struggle with it, stifle it, mortify it as much as you please, it is still alive, and will every now and then peep out and show itself. [ Franklin ]
It is the passions which do and undo everything; if reason ruled, nothing would get on. It is said that pilots fear beyond everything those halcyon seas where the vessel obeys not the helm, and that they prefer wind at the risk of storms. [ Fontenelle ]
Every movement of the theater by a skilful poet is communicated, as it were, by magic, to the spectators; who weep, tremble, resent, rejoice, and are inflamed with all the variety of passions which actuate the several personages of the drama. [ Hume ]
There is no power like that of oratory. Caesar controlled men by exciting their fears; Cicero, by captivating their affections and swaying their passions. The influence of the one perished with its author; that of the other continues to this day. [ Henry Clay ]
Wisdom is the only thing which can relieve us from the sway of the passions and the fear of danger, and which can teach us to bear the injuries of fortune itself with moderation, and which shows us all the ways which lead to tranquillity and peace. [ Cicero ]
Rhetoric is appealing to the passions instead of the reason of your auditors, and claiming that value for the workmanship which ought to be measured by the ore alone. An orator is one who can stamp such a value upon counterfeit coin as shall make it pass for genuine. [ Chatfield ]
That fine part of our construction, the eye, seems as much the receptacle and seat of our passions as the mind itself; and at least it is the outward portal to introduce them to the house within, or rather the common thoroughfare to let our affections pass in and out. [ Addison ]
Grief! thou art classed amongst the depressing passions. And true it is that thou humblest to the dust, but also thou exaltest to the clouds. Thou shakest us with ague, but also thou steadiest like frost. Thou sickenest the heart, but also thou healest its infirmities. [ De Quincey ]
Why doth Fate, that often bestows thousands of souls on a conqueror or tyrant, to be the sport of his passions, so often deny to the tenderest and most feeling hearts one kindred one on which to lavish their affections? Why is it that Love must so often sigh in vain for an object, and Hate never? [ Richter ]
A phlegmatic insensibility is as different from patience as a pool from a harbor; into the one, indolence naturally sinks us; but if we arrive at the other, it is by encountering many an adverse wind and rough wave, with a more skillful pilot at the helm than self, and a company under better command than the passions. [ L. W. Dilwyn ]
Music has certainly a powerful influence on the passions, and produces happy effects upon the human heart and mind when cultivated moderately; but when it becomes the general prevailing passion of a nation, or, as it were, gets dominion over them, it unquestionably produces not effeminacy merely, but a hateful depravity of manners. [ S. F. Bradford ]
Eloquence is the language of nature, and cannot be learned in the schools; the passions are powerful pleaders, and their very silence, like that of Garrick, goes directly to the soul, but rhetoric is the creature of art, which he who feels least will most excel in; it is the quackery of eloquence, and deals in nostrums, not in cures. [ Colton ]
There is no more potent antidote to low sensuality than the adoration of the beautiful. All the higher arts of design are essentially chaste without respect to the object. They purify the thoughts as tragedy purifies the passions. Their accidental effects are not worth consideration, - there are souls to whom even a vestal is not holy. [ Schlegel ]
A wound in the friendship of young persons, as in the bark of young trees, may be so grown over as to leave no scar; the case is very different in regard to old persons and old timber. The reason of this may be accountable from the decline of the social passions, and the prevalence of spleen, suspicion, and rancor toward the latter part of life. [ Shenstone ]
The powers of music are felt or known by all men, and are allowed to work strangely upon the mind and the body, the passions and the blood; to raise joy and grief; to give pleasure and pain; to cure diseases, and the mortal sting of the tarantula; to give motions to the feet as well as the heart; to compose disturbed thoughts; to assist and heighten devotion itself. [ Sir W. Temple ]
Superstition is the fear of a spirit whose passions and acts are those of a man, who is present in some places, and not in others; who makes some places holy, and not others; who is kind to one person, and unkind to another; who is pleased or angry according to the degree of attention you pay him, or praise you refuse him; who is hostile generally to human pleasure, but may be bribed by sacrificing a part of that pleasure into permitting the rest. [ John Ruskin ]
If we wish to know the political and moral condition of a state, we must ask what rank women hold in it; their influence embraces the whole of life; a wife! - a mother! - two magical words, comprising the sweetest source of man's felicity; theirs is a reign of beauty, of love, of reason, - always a reign! a man takes counsel with his wife, he obeys his mother; he obeys her long after she has ceased to live; and the ideas which he has received from her become principles stronger even than his passions. [ Aime Martin ]
The province of music is rather to express the passions and feelings of the human heart than the actions of men, or the operations of nature. When employed in the former capacity, it becomes an eloquent language; when in the latter, a mere mimic - an imitator, and a very miserable one - or rather a buffoon, caricaturing what it cannot imitate; the idea of the different stages of a battle, or the progress of a tempest being represented to the eye or the ear, or even the imagination, by the quavering of a fiddler's elbow, or the squeaking of catgut, is preposterous. [ G. P. Morris ]