For me the breakthrough was the realization that I wasn't the center of the universe or even the centre of my own world. That you and your work, your living, are not the only reason you're here. Your role is to shepherd your children through to adulthood. That's the point of life. Your own little sessions and needs and passions are just there to flavour you and help you do that job for your children.
The passions of youth are not more dangerous to health than is the lukewarmness of old age.
As men advance in life, all passions resolve themselves into money. Love, ambition, even poetry, end in this.
Love is of all passions the strongest, for it attacks simultaneously the head, the heart and the senses.
Freedom without virtue is not freedom but license to pursue whatever passions prevail in the intemperate mind; man's right to freedom being in exact proportion to his willingness to put chains upon his own appetites; the less restraint from within, the more must be imposed from without.
I am a man of passions, capable of and subject to doing more or less foolish things- which I happen to regret, more or less, afterwards.
Now, if the passions had no hold on us, a week and a hundred years would amount to the same.
While I understand the passions and the anger that arise over the death of Michael Brown, giving into that anger by looting or carrying guns, and even attacking the police, only serves to raise tensions and stir chaos.
The passions do very often give birth to others of a nature most contrary to their own. Thus avarice sometimes brings forth prodigality, and prodigality avarice; a man's resolution is very often the effect of levity, and his boldness that of cowardice and fear.
Just as there are rocks which receive the constant shock and spray, the battering of waves, so there are heads about which passions roar.
There is in stillness oft a magic power To calm the breast when struggling passions lower, Touched by its influence, in the soul arise Diviner feelings, kindred with the skies.
How little of permanent happiness could belong to a couple who were only brought together because their passions were stronger than their virtue.
I can control my passions and emotions if I can understand their nature
So many of us have abdicated our passions for obligations, as if passion is a luxury for the young, and we must all grow up one day. We, even if reluctantly, fall into place to live a life of conformity that we describe as ‘maturity. ’ We’ve made acting like an adult synonymous with living apathetic lives.
Of all base passions, fear is the most accursed.
There are passions that it is not for man to choose.
The more veiled becomes the outside world, steadily losing in colour, tone and passions, the more urgently the inner world calls us
He who, with strong passions, remains chaste--he who, keenly sensitive, with manly power of indignation in him, can yet restrain himself and forgive--these are strong men, spiritual heroes.
Conscience is the voice of the soul; the passions of the body.
Pity and friendship are two passions incompatible with each other.