This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"The true lover of knowledge naturally strives for truth, and is not content with common opinion, but soars with undimmed and unwearied passion till he grasps the essential nature of things." - Plato NULL
"When a man allows music to play upon him and to pour into his soul through the funnel of his ears those sweet and soft and melancholy airs... and his whole life is passed in warbling and the delights of song, in the first stage of the process the passion or spirit which is in him is tempered like iron, and made useful, instead of brittle and useless. But, if he carries on the softening and soothing process, in the next stage he begins to melt and waste, until he has wasted away his spirit and cut out the sinews of his soul." - Plato NULL
"It is an observation no less just than common, that there is no stronger test of a man’s real character than power and authority, exciting, as they do, every passion, and discovering every latent vice." - Plutarch, named Lucius Mestrius Plutarchus after becoming Roman citizen NULL
"When one is transported by rage it is best to observe attentively the effects on those who deliver themselves over to the same passion." - Plutarch, named Lucius Mestrius Plutarchus after becoming Roman citizen NULL
"Authority and place demonstrate and try the tempers of men, by moving every passion and discovering every frailty." - Plutarch, named Lucius Mestrius Plutarchus after becoming Roman citizen NULL
"The soul of man is divided into three parts, intelligence, reason and passion. Intelligence and passion are possessed by other animals, but reason by man alone... Reason is immortal, all else mortal." - Pythagoras, aka Pythagoras of Samos or Pythagoras the Samian NULL
"The profit of books is according to the sensibility of the reader. The profoundest thought or passion sleeps as in a mine, until an equal mind and heart finds and publishes it." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"The profoundest thought or passion sleeps as in a mine, until an equal mind and heart finds and publishes it." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"‘Tis the good reader that makes the good book in every book he finds passages which seem confidences or asides hidden from all else and unmistakably meant for his ear; the profit of books is according to the sensibility of the reader; the profoundest thought or passion sleeps as in a mine, until it is discovered by an equal mind and heart." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"The profit of books is according to the sensibility of the reader. The profoundest thought or passion sleeps as in a mine, until an equal mind and heart finds and publishes it." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Passion, though a bad regulator, is a powerful spring." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"The passion of desire is an agitation of the soul caused by the spirits which dispose it to wish for the future the things which it represents to itself as agreeable. Thus we do not only desire the presence of the absent good, but also the conservation of the present, and further, the absence of evil, both of that which we already have, and of that which we believe we might experience in time to come." - René Descartes
"The most common-place people become highly imaginative when they are in a passion. Whole dramas of insult, injury and wrong pass before their minds, efforts of creative genius, for there is sometimes not a fact to go upon." - Arthur Helps, fully Sir Arthur Helps
"Men live by intervals of reason under the sovereignty of humor and passion." - Thomas Browne, fully Sir Thomas Browne
"Jealousy, passion, vanity drive one out of the world." - Talmud or The Talmud NULL
"We are often moved with passion, and we think it to be zeal." - Thomas Kempis, aka Thomas à Kempis, Thomas von Kempen, Thomas Haemerkken or Hammerlein or Hemerken or Hämerken
"Passion, joined with power, produceth thunder and ruin." - Thomas Fuller
"A Man in Passion rides a Horse that runs away with him." - Thomas Fuller
"Act nothing in a furious passion. It's putting to sea in a storm." - Thomas Fuller
"The heart has its own reasons... The heart is a mystery - not a puzzle that can’t be solved, but a mystery in the religious sense: unfathomable, beyond manipulation, showing traces of the finger of God at work... Everything associated with the heart - relationship, emotion, passion - can only be grasped and appreciated with the tools of religion and poetry." - Thomas Moore
"Our greatness is built upon our freedom - is moral, not material. We have a great ardor for gain; but we have a deep passion for the rights of man." - Woodrow Wilson, fully Thomas Woodrow Wilson
"Envy is the most universal passion. We only pride ourselves on the qualities owe possess, or think we possess; but we envy the pretensions we have, and those which we have not, and do not even wish for. We envy the greatest qualities and every trifling advantage. We envy the most ridiculous appearance or affectation of superiority. We envy folly and conceit; nay, we go so far as to envy whatever confers distinction of notoriety, even vice and infamy." - William Hazlitt
"Principle is a passion for truth and right." - William Hazlitt
"Reflection makes men cowards. There is no object that can be put in competition with life, unless it is viewed through the medium of passion, and we are hurried away by the impulse of the moment." - William Hazlitt
"The essence of poetry is will and passion." - William Hazlitt
"A strong passion for any object will ensure success, and it is the desire of the end that will point out the means." - William Hazlitt
"Unless love is passion, it's not love, but something else; and passion thrives not on satisfaction but on impediment." - W. Somerset Maugham, fully William Somerset Maugham
"The despotism of will in ideas is styled plan, project, character, obstinacy; its despotism in desires is called passion." - Antoine de Rivarol, also known as Comte de Rivarol
"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. " - Bertrand Russell, fully Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell
"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." - Alexis de Tocqueville, fully Alexis-Charles-Henri Clérel de Tocqueville
"We must learn that competence is better than extravagance, that worth is better than wealth, that the golden calf we have worshipped has no more brains than that one of old which the Hebrews worshipped. So beware of money and money’s worth as the supreme passion of the mind. Beware of the craving for enormous acquisition." - Cyrus Augustus Bartol
"Perhaps misguided moral passion is better than confused indifference." - Iris Murdoch, aka Dame Jean Iris Murdoch
"All, all is theft, all is unceasing and rigorous competition in nature; the desire to make off with the substance of others is the foremost -- the most legitimate -- passion nature has bred into us and, without doubt, the most agreeable one." - Marquis de Sade, born Donatien Alphonse François de Sade
"The only sin passion can commit is to be joyless. " - Dorothy Leigh Sayers
"Let us examine more closely the significance of this vague word, reality. It may have several meanings, according to the different points of view which one takes. We may regard it as embodied in the physical world, the world of land and sea, of sky and trees, of sunshine and of storm. The real therefore will be to us that which we can touch and see, smell and taste, as one will say, "I know that is real for I can see it with my eyes." Seeing is believing, and the testimony of the senses is the superior court of appeal in controverted questions. But the world of reality may be regarded from quite a different point of view, as the world of consciousness, the mind of man, the experiences of the inner self, the Ego. Here is a world of phenomena interrelated and reciprocally dependent. It is a realm of ideas, of memory images, of fancy, of will, and of desire. The verities in this world cannot be seen, or measured, or weighed, and yet we do not hesitate to speak of them as realities; they are real as the love of friends is real, or the anger of a foe. The passion of a Romeo, the will of a Napoleon, the genius of a Goethe ... these are realities." - John Grier Hibben
"One person with passion is better than forty people merely interested. " - E. M. Forster, fully Edward Morgan Forster
"Prejudice and passion and suspicion are more dangerous than the incitement of self-interest or the most stubborn adherence to real differences of opinion regarding rights. " - Elihu Root
"How do I love thee? Let me count the ways. I love thee to the depth and breadth and height My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight For the ends of being and ideal grace. I love thee to the level of every day's Most quiet need, by sun and candle-light. I love thee freely, as men strive for right. I love thee purely, as they turn from praise. I love thee with the passion put to use In my old griefs, and with my childhood's faith. I love thee with a love I seemed to lose With my lost saints. I love thee with the breath, Smiles, tears, of all my life; and, if God choose, I shall but love thee better after death." - Elizabeth Browning, fully Elizabeth Barrett Browning
"One of the marks of a truly vigorous society is the ability to dispense with passion as a midwife of action - the ability to pass directly from thought to action." - Eric Hoffer
"This, indeed, is one of the eternal paradoxes of both life and literature-that without passion little gets done; yet, without control of that passion, its effects are largely ill or null. " - F. L. Lucas, fully Frank Laurence "F. L." Lucas
"When you will not fly into a passion people know you are stronger than they are, because you are strong enough to hold in your rage, and they are not, and they say stupid things they wish they hadn't said afterward. There's nothing so strong as rage, except what makes you hold it in--that's stronger. It's a good thing not to answer your enemies." - Frances Hodgson Burnett, fully Frances Eliza Hodgson Burnett
"It is worthy the observing, that there is no passion in the mind of man, so weak, but it mates, and masters, the fear of death; and therefore, death is no such terrible enemy, when a man hath so many attendants about him, that can win the combat of him. Revenge triumphs over death; love slights it; honor aspireth to it; grief flieth to it; fear preoccupieth it." - Francis Bacon
"Whatever each man worships inwardly is his God, whether he knows it or not. He who has a ruling passion worships one God, good or evil. He who is carried at random by impulses has many gods; perhaps as shiftless, as shapeless, as unworthy, as any heathen divinities." - Francis William Newman
"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?" - Frederick William Faber
"Nothing on earth consumes a man more completely than the passion of resentment. " - Friedrich Nietzsche, fully Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche