Like all passions, anger has degrees, ascending from slight vexation through deepening clouds to rage, and finally to fury, which is a black and horrible tempest. In its mid-region, where it is neither too little to be motive nor too furious to be ungovernable, it has usefulness. For all feeling is as fuel, and where there is none life has no fire, and then no flame of ascent.
Powerful men who have powerful passions use much of their strength in forging chains for themselves.
In nature the most violent passions are silent; in tragedy they must speak and speak with dignity too.
The government of man should be the monarchy of reason: it is too often the democracy of passions or the anarchy of humors.
The passions I have in my life are my family, music, books, I'm an avid plant collector, and I love to ride my bike.
Its okay to have a job that fits your passions, we don't have to suffer for money.
The way to avoid evil is not by maiming our passions, but by compelling them to yield their vigor to our moral nature.
Even those who have the weakest souls could acquire absolute mastery over all their passions if we employed sufficient ingenuity in training and guiding them.
Tremble with awe, O men! The insults God suffered for the sake of our salvation you too must endure! God is slapped on the face by the basest of slaves (Jn. 18:22). He gives you an example of victory, yet do you refuse to undergo this at the hands of a man of like passions as yourself? You are ashamed of becoming an imitator of God (Eph. 5:1), how then will you reign with Him and share in His glory in the kingdom of heaven if you do not endure that man?
. . . when seeking material light, remember the spiritual light which is indispensable for the soul, and without which it remains in the darkness of the passions, in the darkness of spiritual death. 'I am come as a light into the world,' says the Lord, 'that whosoever believeth on Me, should not abide in darkness' (Jn. 12:46).
It is within your power to see that all you have experienced, trials, errors, faults, deceptions, passions, your love and your hope, shall be merged wholly in your aim.
Men are much oftener thrown on their knees by the melancholy than by the agreeable passions.
[Christ's] character is twofold: like the head of the body in that he is regarded as God and yet comparable to the feet in that he put on humanity for the sake of our salvation, a man of passions like ours.
There are moments when our passions speak and decide for us. . . like a fire kindled within our being to which everything else in us is mere fuel.
Passions change, politics are immutable.
Now, if the passions had no hold on us, a week and a hundred years would amount to the same.
Envy and fear are the only passions to which no pleasure is attached.
Passions are the gales of life.
Virtue is the music of the soul, the harmony of the passions.
The whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions, the most unremitting despotism on the one part, and degrading submissions on the other. Our children see this, and learn to imitate it.