This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"I believe that being true to the self is the most important thing in life - to have a free heart, a pure soul and a pure mind. We all live, or should live, for the fulfillment of the self. We are all mirror images of each other; whatever we feel in ourselves we feel in others. I believe that we create our own lives... Intuition should play the main role in everything we do. Through the creative source of the mind and the unlimited power of the spirit all our deepest wishes come true. For me the meaning is that we are all one, and the only true reality is the spirit. Believing in the power of spirit is simply to have a passion for life, to learn, to grow, to evolve and most of all to love, and live each day and each moment of the day to the fullest." - Tatjana Patitz
"Passion may not unfitly be termed the mob of the man, that commits a riot on his reason." - William Penn
"We ought to be guarded against every appearance of envy, as a passion that always implies inferiority wherever it resides." - Pliny the Elder, full name Casus Plinius Secundus NULL
"Strength of mind is Exercise, not Rest: The rising tempest puts in act the soul, parts it may ravage, but preserves the whole. On life’s vast ocean diversely we sail. Reason the card, but Passion is the gale... The Mind’s disease, its ruling Passion came." - Alexander Pope
"The ruling passion conquers reason still." - Alexander Pope
"The ruling passion, be it what it will, the ruling passion conquers reason still." - Alexander Pope
"You will conquer more surely by prudence than by passion." - Publius Syrus
"Rage is the shortest passion of our souls." - Nicolas Rowe
"If the intellectual has any function in society, it is to preserve a cool and unbiased judgment in the face of all solicitations to passion... During the war, the ordinary virtues, such as thrift, industry, and public spirit, were used to swell the magnitude of the disaster by producing a greater energy in the work of mutual extermination." -
"The quintessence of every passion is selfishness." - Moritz Saphir, fully Moritz Gottlieb Saphir, born Moses Saphir
"Who is wise? The man who can learn something from every man. Who is strong? The man who overcomes his passion. Who is rich? The man who is content with his fate. Whom do men honor? The man who honors his fellow man." - Sayings of the Fathers (Pirkei Avot or Pirqe Aboth) NULL
"To feel, to feel exquisitely, is the lot of every man; it is the charm that lends a superstitious joy to fear. But to appreciate belongs to the few; to one or two alone, here and there, the blended passion and understanding that constitute in its essence worship." - Elizabeth Sara Sheppard
"To achieve something great in the world you need Passion To fulfill vision, a great leader’s courage comes from Passion Whatever it may be, you must find your Passion If passion drives you, let reason hold the reins Follow your passion and success will follow you! Never underestimate the power of passion Without passion religion is spiritless Without Passion history is meaningless Without Passion art is useless Follow your passion and success will follow you! When you take up a mission with passion There are no dreams too large No innovation unimaginable No frontiers beyond reach Follow your passion and success will follow you! Our passions are the winds that propel our vessel Our reason is the pilot that steers her Without winds the vessel would not move Without a pilot she would be lost Follow your passion and success will follow you! There is no end and there is no beginning There is only the passion of life Passion is universal humanity Passion is the genesis of genius Follow your passion and success will follow you! " - Pooja Natarajan
"Passion is the great mover and spring of the soul: when men's passions are strongest, they may have great and noble effects; but they are then also apt to fall into the greatest miscarriages." - Thomas Sprat
"Each successive generation plunges into the abyss of passion, without the slightest regard to the fatal effects which such conduct has produced upon their predecessors; and lament, when too late, the rashness with which they slighted the advice of experience, and stifled the voice of reason." - Richard Steele, fully Sir Richard Steele
"It is certainly a very important lesson, to learn how to enjoy ordinary things, and to be able to relish your being, without the transport of some passion, or the gratification of some appetite." - Richard Steele, fully Sir Richard Steele
"The envious man is in pain upon all occasions which ought to give him pleasure. The relish of his life is inverted; and the objects which administer the highest satisfaction to those who are exempt from this passion give the quickest pangs to persons who are subject to it. All the perfections of their fellow creatures are odious. Youth, beauty, valor and wisdom are provocations of their displeasure. What a wretched and apostate state is this! to be offended with excellence, and to hate a man because we approve him!" - Richard Steele, fully Sir Richard Steele
"A passion comes to an end; it is carried off in a coffin, or, weeping in a post-chaise; it drops out of life one way or another, and the earth-clods close over it, and we see it no more. But it has been part of our souls, and it is eternal." - William Makepeace Thackeray
"It cannot be denied that democratic institutions strongly tend to promote the feeling of envy in the human heart; not so much because they afford to everyone the means of rising to the same level with others as because those means perpetually disappoint the persons who employ them. Democratic institutions awaken and foster a passion for equality which they can never entirely satisfy." -
"Educate your children of self-control, to the habit of holding passion and prejudice and evil tendencies subject to an upright and reasoning will, and you have done much to abolish misery from their future lives and crimes from society." - Daniel Webster
"Passion and prejudice govern the world; only under the name of reason. It is our part, by religion and reason joined, to counteract them all we can." - John Wesley
"Religion is a hunger for beauty and love and glory. It is wonder and the mystery and majesty, passion and ecstasy. It is emotion as well as mind, feeling as well as knowing, the subjective as well as the objective. It is the heart soaring to heights the head alone will never know; the apprehension of meanings science alone will never find; the awareness of values ethics alone will never reveal. It is the human spirit yearning for, and finding, something infinitely greater than itself which it calls God." - Waldemar Argow, fully Wendelin Waldemar Wieland Argow
"All humanity is passion; without passion, religion, history, novels, art would be ineffectual." - Honoré de Balzac
"Passion is universal humanity. With it religion, history, romance and art would be useless." - Honoré de Balzac
"To be in a Passion you Good man do, But no Good if a Passion is in you." - William Blake
"Man have long begun to suspect that civilization's repression of our primitive impulses has somehow warped what are potentially the most productive forces in human nature. We are increasingly disturbed by the thought that society's passion for obedience and conformity may have overreached itself, causing us to lose in individual happiness perhaps as much as we have gained in group activity." -
"There is the laughter which is born out of the pure joy of living, the spontaneous expression of health and energy - the secret laughter of the child. This is a gift of God. There is the warm laughter of the kindly soul which heartens the discouraged, gives health to the sick and comfort to the dying... There is, above all, the laughter that comes from the eternal joy of creation, the joy of making the world new, the joy of expressing the inner riches of the soul - laughter that triumphs over pain and hardship in the passion for an enduring ideal, the joy of bringing the light of happiness, of truth and beauty into a dark world. This is divine laughter par excellence." - J. E. Boodin
"The essential conditions of everything you do must be choice, love, passion." - Nadia Boulanger, fully Juliette Nadia Boulanger
"It is the passion that is in a kiss that gives to it its sweetness; it is the affection in a kiss that sanctifies it." - Christian Nestell Bovee
"Revenge is a common passion; it is the sun of the uninstructed. The savage deems it noble; but the religion of Christ, which is the sublime civilizer, emphatically condemns it. Why? Because religion ever seeks to ennoble man; and nothing so debases him as revenge." - Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton, fully Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer-Lytton, Lord Lytton
"The mind profits by the wreck of every passion, and we may measure our road to wisdom, by the sorrows we have undergone." - Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton, fully Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer-Lytton, Lord Lytton
"There is a time in the lives of most of us when, despondent of all joy in an earthly future, and tortured by conflicts between inclination and duty, we transfer all the passion and fervor of our troubled souls to enthusiastic yearnings for the divine love, looking to its mercy, and taking thence the only hopes that can cheer - the only strength that can sustain us." - Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton, fully Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer-Lytton, Lord Lytton
"For the poor of this world, two major ways of expiring are available: either by the absolute indifference of your fellow-men in peace-time, or by the homicidal passion of these same when war breaks out." - Louis-Ferdinand Céline, pen name Louis-Ferdinand Destouches
"The more discussion the better, if passion and personality be eschewed. Discussion, even if stormy, often winnows truth from error - a good never to be expected in an uninquiring age." - William Ellery Channing
"We must select the illusion which appeals to our temperament and embrace it with passion, if we want to be happy." - Cyril Connolly, fully Cyril Vernon Connolly
"Passion is always suffering, even when gratified." - Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach
"There exists a passion for comprehension, just as there exists a passion for music. That passion is rather common in children but gets lost in most people later on. Without this passion, there would be neither mathematics nor natural science." - Albert Einstein
"He whose ruling passion is the love of praise is a slave to everyone who has a tongue for flattery and calumny." - George Eliot, pen name of Mary Ann or Marian Evans
"The vainest woman is never thoroughly conscious of her beauty till she is loved by the man who sets her own passion vibrating in return." - George Eliot, pen name of Mary Ann or Marian Evans
"There is one wish ruling over all mankind, and it is a wish which is never in any single instance granted - each man wishes to be his own master. It is a boy's beautific vision, and it remains the grown-up man's ruling passion to the last. But the fact is, life is a service; the only question is, whom will we serve?" -
"The free expression of opinion, as experience has taught us, is the safety-valve of passion." - William Ewart Gladstone
"What makes poetry? A full heart, brimful of one noble passion." - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
"Where a man has a passion for meditating without the capacity of thinking, a particular idea fixes itself fast, and soon creates a mental disease." - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
"We live in a spelling bee culture where the demand is factual accuracy and everybody overlooks the absence of art or meaning in what's said. Too many people sent letters to Nero telling him he was fingering his fiddle wrong. This passion for data is a way of avoiding coming to terms with things." - Mark Harris