This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"Marriage today must... be concerned not with the inviolable commitment of constancy and unending passion, but with the changing patterns of liberty and discovery." - Carolyn Gold Heilbrun, pen name Amanda Cross
"A religious man is a person who holds God and man in one thought at one time, at all times, who suffers harm done to others, whose greatest passion is compassion, whose greatest strength is love and defiance of despair." - Abraham Joshua Heschel
"Poetry begotten of passion is ever debasing; poetry born of real heartfulness, always ennobles and uplifts." - Alphonso A. Hopkins
"‘Tis not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger. ‘Tis not contrary to reason for me to chose my total ruin, to prevent the least uneasiness of an Indian or person wholly unknown to me. ‘Tis as little contrary to reason to prefer even my own acknowledg’d lesser good to my greater, and have a more ardent affection for the former than the latter... In short, a passion must be accompany’d with some false judgment, in order to its being unreasonable; and even then ‘tis not the passion, properly speaking, which is unreasonable, but the judgment." - David Hume
"We speak not strictly and philosophically when we talk of the combat of passion and reason. Reason is, and ought only to be the salve of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them." - David Hume
"The union of the mathematician with the poet, fervor with measure, passion with correctness, this surely is the ideal." - William James
"There is something in obstinacy which differs from every other passion. Whenever it fails, it never recovers, but either breaks like iron, or crumbles sulkily away, like a fractured arch. Most other passions have their periods of fatigue and rest, their suffering and their cure; but obstinacy has no resource, and the first wound is mortal." -
"The paradox is the source of the thinker's passion, and the thinker without a paradox is like a love without feeling; a paltry mediocrity." - Søren Kierkegaard, fully Søren Aabye Kierkegaard
"The most beautiful thing in the world is, precisely, the conjunction of learning and inspiration. Oh, the passion for research and the joy of discovery!" - Wanda Landowska
"There is no passion so contagious as that of fear." - Michel de Montaigne, fully Lord Michel Eyquem de Montaigne
"The love of study is in us the only lasting passion. All others quit us in proportion as this miserable machine which holds them approaches its ruins." - Baron de Montesquieu, fully Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu
"The difference between passion and love is that this is fixed, that volatile. Love grows, passion wastes, by enjoyment; and the reason is that one springs from a union of souls, and other from a union of sense." - William Penn
"There is no greater victory in the life of a human being than victory over the mind. He who has controlled the gusts of passion that arise within him and the violent actions that proceed therefrom is the real hero." - Ramdas, fully Swami Ramdas, born Vittal Rao, aka Beloved Papa NULL
"The great inequality in manner of living, the extreme idleness of some, and the excessive labor of others, the easiness of exciting and gratifying our sensual appetites, the too exquisite foods of the wealthy which overheat and fill them with indigestion, and, on the other hand, the unwholesome food of the poor, often, bad as it is, insufficient for their needs, which induces them, when opportunity offers, to eat voraciously and overcharge their stomachs; all these, together with sitting up late, and excesses of every kind, immoderate transports of every passion, fatigue, mental exhaustion, the innumerable pains and anxieties inseparable from every condition of life, by which the mind of man is incessantly tormented; these are too fatal proofs that the greater part of our ills are our own making, and that we might have avoided them nearly all by adhering to that simple, uniform and solitary manner of life which nature prescribed." - Jean-Jacques Rousseau
"Emulation is a noble and just passion, full of appreciation." - Friedrich Schiller, fully Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller
"Truth is the most powerful thing in the world, since even fiction itself must be governed by it, an can only please by its resemblance. The appearance of reality is necessary to make any passion agreeably represented, and to be able to move others we must be moved ourselves, or at least seem to be so, upon some probably grounds." - Anthony Ashley Cooper, 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury
"The essence of every species of wit is surprise; which, vi termini, must be sudden; and the sensations which wit has a tendency to excite are impaired or destroyed as often as they are mingled with much thought or passion." - Sydney Smith
"Passion is in all great searches and is necessary to all creative endeavors." - W. Eugene Smith, fully William Eugene Smith
"If these little sparks of holy fire which I have thus heaped up together do not give life to your prepared and already enkindled spirit, yet they will sometimes help to entertain a thought, to actuate a passion, to employ and hallow a fancy." - Jeremy Taylor
"Democratic institutions awaken and foster a passion for equality which they can never entirely satisfy." - Alexis de Tocqueville, fully Alexis-Charles-Henri Clérel de Tocqueville
"The most sublime labor of poetry is to give sense and passion to insensate things; and it is characteristic of children to take inanimate things in their hands and talk to them in play as if they were living persons... in the world's childhood, men were by nature sublime poets." - Giovanni Battista Pergolesi
"The heart commonly govern the head; and any strong passion, set the wrong way, will soon infatuate even the wisest of men; therefore the first part of wisdom is to watch the affections." - Daniel Cosgrove Waterland
"We live in a biochemical, neurophysiological, resonant quantum soup. If this is true, the responsibility for what we have for our inner life is enormous, and extends far beyond one’s own personal and spiritual development. Whatever our inner experience might be in terms of love and passion, hate and greed, abundance and longing, or any other human qualities may well not be ours alone." - Jeanne Achterberg
"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
"The waves of human passion rise and fall; worldly things are as transitory as passing clouds." - Cao Ba-Quat
"What the public wants is the image of passion, not passion itself." - Roland Barthes, fully Roland Gérard Barthes
"Not from anything in the world would I be free from God; I wish to be free in God and for God. It is needful that my passion for a freedom without bounds should involve a conflict with the world, but not with God." - Nikolai Berdyaev, fully Nikolai Alexandrovich Berdyaev, also spelled Nichlas Berdiaev
"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 from 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." - John Elof Boodin
"Life is a paradise for those who love many things with a passion." - Leo Busacaglia
"The seven traits of successful people: passion, belief, strategy, clarity of values, energy, bonding power, and mastery of communication." - Tom Butler-Bowdon
"Hope arouses, as nothing else can arouse, a passion for the possible." - William Sloane Coffin, Jr.
"If people could learn from history, what lessons it might teach us! But passion and party blind our eyes, and the light which experience gives is a lantern on the stern, which shines only on the waves behind us!" - Samuel Taylor Coleridge
"Truth needs not the service of passion; yea, nothing so deserves it, as passion when set to serve it. The Spirit of Truth is the Spirit of Meekness." - Samuel Taylor Coleridge
"Truth needs not the service of passion; yea, nothing so dis-serves it, as passion when set to serve it. The Spirit of Truth is the Spirit of Meekness." - Samuel Taylor Coleridge
"Develop a passion for learning. If you do, you will never cease to grow." - Anthony J. D'Angelo
"Never let your persistence and passion turn into stubbornness and ignorance." - Anthony J. D'Angelo
"There is no fire like passion, no shark like hatred, no snare like folly, and no torrent like greed." - Dhammapada NULL
"The astonishing thing about the human being is not so much his intellect and bodily structure, profoundly mysterious as they are. The astonishing and least comprehensible thing about him is his range of vision; his gaze into the infinite distance; his lonely passion for ideas and ideals." - W. Macneile Dixon, fully William Macneile Dixon
"Even while we mourn the death of a loved one, there is room in our hearts for thankfulness for that life… Sober reflection can also lead us to a more sympathetic appreciation of the vital role death plays in the economy of life. Life’s significant and zest issue from our awareness of its transiency, its “fragile contingency.” The urge to create, the passion to perfect, the will to heal and cure – all the noblest of human enterprises grow in the soil of human mortality." - Sidney Greenberg
"Love is the highest form of energy… Love is much more than just a feeling of affection or of passion. Love is making choices in ways that can help others (and ourself) to have a more joyful and creative journey. Love is a way of life. It is the path of compassion, respect and kindness for all people and living things. Love is honoring the connection to each other." - Tom Gregory
"Ambition is not a reprehdnsible quality, nor are ambitious men to be censured, if they seek glory through honorable and honest means. In fact, it is they who produce great and excellent works. Those who lack this passion are cold spirits, inclined towards laziness than activity. But ambition is pernicious and detestable when it has as its sole end power." - Francesco Guicciardini
"Our passion is to know we’re fulfilling the purpose for which we’re here on earth. We all desire to make a difference. We long to leave a legacy. We yearn, as Ralph Waldo Emerson put it, “to leave the world a bit better.”" - Os Guiness
"No clear thinking is possible in a passion – any more than it is possible to see clearly through glasses that are covered with steam." - B. H. Liddell Hart, fully Captain B. H. Liddell
"It is our first duty to serve society, and, after we have done that, we may attend wholly to the salvation of our own souls. A youthful passion for abstracted devotion should not be encouraged." - Samuel Johnson, aka Doctor Johnson
"Were it not for the leaping and twinkling of the soul, man would rot away in his greatest passion, idleness." - Carl Jung, fully Carl Gustav Jung