Sloth is a sneaky sin that quietly creeps into the lives of people, even religious ones, and gradually chokes out true spirituality. It diverts our attention from the things of heaven to a myriad of other things until we find ourselves bored with God, making only routine and mechanical efforts to “fulfill our Sunday obligation.” There is no passion, no zeal, no desire. Just lots of excuses.
It is another of the miraculous things about mankind that there is no pain nor passion that does not radiate to the ends of the earth. Let a man in a garret but burn with enough intensity and he will set fire to the world.
These limbs, whence had we them; this stormy force; this life-blood with its burning passion? They are dust and shadow: a shadow-system gathered round our Me; wherein through some moments or years, the divine essence is to be revealed in flesh.
Jesus suffered in his passion the torments which men inflicted on him, but in his agony he suffered torments which he inflicted on himself: _turbare semetipsum_. This is a suffering from no human, but an almighty hand, and he who bears it must also be almighty.
In her first passion woman loves her lover: In all the others, all she loves is love.
Yeah, we’ll be retreating from now on. Giving ground, instead of taking it. It’ll be like this today—losing fights, draws. Stalemates and worse.” He raised his feverish eyes toward the ceiling of the little metal housing unit, face wild with passion and misery. “But, by God, we’ll give them a run for their money. All the way back! Every inch!
Words may be counterfeit, false coined, and current only from the tongue, without the mind; but passion is in the soul, and always speaks the heart.
Literature consists of all the books--and they are not many--where moral truth and human passion are touched with a certain largeness, sanity, and attraction of form.
All musical people seem to be happy; it is the engrossing pursuit; almost the only innocent and unpunished passion.--_Sydney Smith._
No figure will be admirable if the gesture which expresses the passion of the soul is not visible in it. The most admirable figure is that which best expresses the passion of its mind.
It is much more easy to inspire a passion than a faith.
No more subtle master under heaven / Than is the maiden-passion for a maid, / Not only to keep down the base in man, / But teach high thought, and amiable words / And courtliness, and the desire of fame, / And love of truth, and all that makes a man.
I have for the first time found what I can truly love–I have found you. You are my sympathy–my better self–my good angel–I am bound to you with a strong attachment. I think you good, gifted, lovely: a fervent, a solemn passion is conceived in my heart; it leans to you, draws you to my centre and spring of life, wrap my existence about you–and, kindling in pure, powerful flame, fuses you and me in one.
One must wage war against his predominant passion, and not retreat, until, with God's help, he has been victorious.--ST. ALPHONSUS.
On life's vast ocean diversely we sail, / Reason the card, but passion is the gale.
Without passion, you don’t have energy. Without energy, you have nothing.
Ultimately, leadership requires action: daring to take steps that are necessary but unpopular, challenging the status quo in order to reach a brighter future. And to push for peace is ultimately personal sacrifice, for leadership is not easy. It is born of a passion, and it is a commitment. Leadership is a commitment to an idea, to a dream, and to a vision of what can be. And my dream is for my land and my people to cease fighting and allow our children to reach their full potential regardless of sex, status, or belief.
Delicacy of taste has the same effect as delicacy of passion; it enlarges the sphere both of our happiness and misery, and makes us sensible to pain as well as pleasures, which escape the rest of mankind.
the poet, his presence ursine and kind, shifting his weight in a chair too small for him, quietly says, and shyly: "The Poet never must lose despair." Then our eyes indeed meet and hold. All of us know, smiling in common knowledge — even the palest spirit among us, burdened as he is with weight of abstractions — all of us know he means we mustn't, any of us, lose touch with the source, pretend it's not there, cover over the mineshaft of passion...
Love is the magician, the enchanter, that changes worthless things to Joy, and makes royal kings and queens of common clay. It is the perfume of that wondrous flower, the heart, and without that sacred passion, that divine swoon, we are less than beasts; but with it, earth is heaven, and we are gods.
Men still are what they always have been, a medley= (_Gemisch_) =of strength and weakness, often obedient to reason, and oftener to passion; so have they come down the stream of time for six thousand years, and mostly in such shape as the moment has fashioned them.
Marriage, indeed, may qualify the fury of his passion, but it very rarely mends a man's manners.
L'amour est une passion qui vient souvent sans savoir comment, et qui s'en va aussi de meme=--Love is a passion which comes often we know not how, and which goes also in like manner.
Serene, and safe from passion's stormy rage, how calm they glide into the port of age!--_Shenstone._
Love is a secondary passion in those who love most, a primary in those who love least. He who is inspired by it in a high degree is inspired by honour in a higher; it never reaches its plenitude of growth and perfection but in the most exalted minds.
Endurance is the crowning quality, And patience all the passion of great hearts.
Tenderness is the repose of passion.
These two visions of Christianity—one emphasizing the next world and what we must believe and do in order to get there, the other emphasizing God’s passion for the transformation of this world—are very different. Yet they use the same language and share the same sacred scripture, the same Bible. What separates them is how the shared language is understood—whether within the framework of heaven-and-hell Christianity or within the framework of God’s passion for transformation in this world. The latter framework, I am convinced, is more biblical, ancient, and traditional (even as it is not conventional, but subversive). It takes seriously the ancient meanings of Christian language in ancient context. The former is the product of a process that began when Christianity became allied with dominant culture, initially in the Roman Empire in the fourth century and then gradually in all of Europe and parts of the Middle East. The result was that Christianity became largely a religion of the afterlife and the postmortem fate of us as individuals. It was no longer about changing the way the world is, for the world was now ruled by Christian authorities. Heaven-and-hell Christianity domesticates—indeed, commonly eliminates—the political passion of the Bible.
Male cuncta ministrat / Impetus=--Violence (of passion) conducts everything badly.
Now were we not slaves to passion, a week and a hundred years would seem one and the same thing.
There are two basic motivating forces: fear and love. When we are afraid, we pull back from life. When we are in love, we open to all that life has to offer with passion, excitement, and acceptance. We need to learn to love ourselves first, in all our glory and our imperfections. If we cannot love ourselves, we cannot fully open to our ability to love others or our potential to create. Evolution and all hopes for a better world rest in the fearlessness and open-hearted vision of people who embrace life.
The mind profits by the wreck of every passion, and we may measure our road to wisdom by the sorrows we have undergone.--_Bulwer-Lytton._
As reason is a rebel unto faith, so is passion unto reason.
Without passion man is a mere latent force and possibility.
He submits himself to be seen through a microscope who suffers himself to be caught in a fit of passion.
The ocean beats against the stern dumb shore, / The stormy passion of its mighty heart.
Great spirits and great business do keep out this weak passion= (love).
Great ambition is the passion of a great character. He who is endowed with it may perform very good or very bad actions; all depends upon the principles which direct him.
Alas! it is not till time, with reckless hand, has torn out half the leaves from the Book of Human Life to light the fires of passion with from day to day, that man begins to see that the leaves which remain are few in number.
Sturm-und Drang-Periode=--The storm-and-stress period. A literary period in Germany, the productions of which were inspired by a love of strong passion and violent action.
Vivitur parvo bene, cui paternum / Splendet in mensa tenui salinum; / Nec leves somnos timor aut cupido / Sordidus aufert=--He lives well on little on whose frugal board the paternal salt-cellar shines, and whose soft slumbers are not disturbed by fear or the sordid passion for gain.
It is the last mystery of the passion and the redemption.
In spite of difference of soil and climate, of language and manners, of laws and customs — in spite of things silently gone out of mind, and things violently destroyed, the Poet binds together by passion and knowledge the vast empire of human society, as it is spread over the whole earth, and over all time.
Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer. Only connect, and the beast and the monk, robbed of the isolation that is life to either, will die.
Speech is a laggard and a sloth, but the eyes shoot forth an electric fluid that condenses all the elements of sentiment and passion in one single emanation.
Never yet, since the proud selfish race / Of men began to jar, did passion give, / Nor can it ever give, a right decision.
Les haines sont si longues et si opiniatres, que le plus grand signe de mort dans un homme malade, c'est la reconciliation=--The passion of hatred is so long-lived and obstinate a malady, that the surest prognostic of death in a sick man is his desire for reconciliation.
To be without passion is worse than a beast; to be without reason is to be less than a man.
This civil war between reason and passion divides those who desire peace into two sects, the one, of those who would renounce their passions and become gods, the other, of those who would renounce their reason and become brute beasts.--Des Barreaux.--But neither has succeeded, and reason still exists, to condemn the baseness and injustice of the passions, and to trouble the repose of those who give themselves over to their sway, and the passions are still vigorous in those who desire to renounce them.
And you, brave Cobham! to the latest breath Shall feel your ruling passion strong in death.
The pleasure of talking is the inextinguishable passion of woman, coeval with the act of breathing.
There is an evening twilight of the heart, When its wild passion-waves are lulled to rest.
Die Leidenschaft flieht, / Die Liebe muss bleiben; / Die Blume verbluht, / Die Frucht muss treiben=--Passion takes flight, love must abide; the flower fades, the fruit must ripen.
Some might consider him as too fond of fame; for the desire of glory clings even to the best men longer than any other passion.
Auch die Kunst ist Himmelsgabe, / Borgt sie gleich von ird'scher Glut=--Art is a gift of Heaven, yet does it borrow its fire from earthly passion.
Next to love, sympathy is the divinest passion of the human heart.--_Burke._
Without passion there is no geniality.
Nor do not saw the air too much with your hand, thus, but use all gently; for in the very torrent, tempest, and, as I may say, the whirlwind of passion, you must acquire and beget a temperance that may give it smoothness. Oh, it offends me to the soul to hear a robustious periwig-pated fellow tear a passion to tatters, to very rags, to split the ears of the groundlings, who for the most part are capable of nothing but inexplicable dumb-shows and noise. I would have such a fellow whipped for o'erdoing Termagant; it out-herods Herod.
Misled by fancy's meteor ray, By passion driven; But yet the light that led astray Was light from heaven.
I have but one passion: to enlighten those who have been kept in the dark, in the name of humanity which has suffered so much and is entitled to happiness. My fiery protest is simply the cry of my very soul.
A book about a lady knight with purple eyes and a passion for justice—one of her few treasured possessions—lay near the window. So far she’d paid Amanda at the Green Inn twice to read it to her. It was that precious. With her mind made up to leave Vaneis, she packed the three dresses she owned, the scarf, the book, some herbs for soap mix, and thirty shillings for the road in her satchel. The next morning, she made sure to pay the innkeeper five shillings for her month's rent. She filled a small rucksack full of food for her journey and left the inn with a smile on her face. Once outside, Ciardis squinted, looking up and down the caravan line. There were six wagons attached to huraks – large, ponderous beasts that looked like oxen with claws. The huraks were all clearly anxious to go as they snorted and pawed the fresh snow with the three dagger-shaped claws on each foot. You and me both, friend. She clutched her two cloth bags and stared around for Lady Serena, trying not to seem too obvious. "All riders up!" rang the call down the line. Ciardis gave up her nonchalant look in favor of panic and began to search frantically. She didn't see Lady Serena anywhere. What if it had all been a cruel joke?
Why remain sad and idle? Why exhaust thyself in the anguish of melancholy? Have courage, do violence to thyself; meditate on the passion of Jesus Christ, and thou shalt overcome thy sorrow.--BL. HENRY SUSO.
L'amour-propre est un ballon gonfle de vent, dont il sort des tempetes quand on lui fait une piqure=--Self-love is a balloon blown up with wind, from which tempests of passion issue as soon as it is pricked into.
Men / Can counsel, and speak comfort to that grief / Which they themselves not feel; but, tasting it, / Their counsel turns to passion, which before / Would give preceptial medicine to rage, / Fetter strong madness in a silken thread, / Charm ache with air and agony with words.
Unstat treiben die Gedanken / Auf dem Meer der Leidenschaft=--Unsteady is the course of thought on the sea of passion.
The death of a child occasions a passion of grief and frantic tears, such as your end, brother reader, will never inspire.--_Thackeray._
Even in times of war, you can see current events in their historical perspective, provided that your passion for the truth prevails over your bias in favor of your own nation.
We work in the dark — we do what we can — we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.
When a man gives himself up to the government of a ruling passion--or, in other words, when his hobby-horse grows headstrong--farewell cool reason and fair discretion!
We must not forget that if earthly love has in the vulgar mind been often degraded into mere animal passion, it still remains in its purest sense the highest mystery of our existence, the most perfect blessing and delight on earth, and at the same time the truest pledge of our more than human nature. To be able to feel the same unselfish devotion to the Deity which the human heart is capable of, if filled with love for another human soul, is something that may well be called the best religion.
I would rather die of passion than of boredom
So on the tip of his subduing tongue All kinds of arguments and questions deep, All replication prompt, and reason strong, For his advantage still did wake and sleep. To make the weeper laugh, the laugher weep, He had the dialect and different skill, Catching all passion in his craft of will.
~Art.~--Rules may teach us not to raise the arms above the head; but if passion carries them, it will be well done: passion knows more than art.--_Baron._
The florid, elevated, and figurative way is for the passions; for love and hatred, fear and anger, are begotten in the soul by showing their objects out of their true proportion, either greater than the life, or less; but instruction is to be given by showing them what they naturally are. A man is to cheated into passion, but reasoned into truth.--_Dryden._
It is observed in the golden verses of Pythagoras, that power is never far from necessity. The vigor of the human mind quickly appears when there is no longer any place for doubt and hesitation, when diffidence is absorbed in the sense of danger, or overwhelmed by some resistless passion.--_Johnson._
He was a man with a chest, and he wanted to give thoughtful expression to the passion of his heart.
This misfortune is, no doubt, greater and more common in the higher classes, but lesser men are not exempt from it, since there is always an interest in making men love us. Thus human life is but a perpetual illusion, an interchange of deceit and flattery. No one speaks of us in our presence as in our absence. The society of men is founded on this universal deceit: few friendships would last if every man knew what his friend said of him behind his back, though he then spoke in sincerity and without passion.
Sua cuique Deus fit dira cupido=--Each man makes his own dire passion a god.
By whatever means it is accomplished, the prime business of a play is to arouse the passions of its audience so that by the route of passion may be opened up new relationships between a man and men, and between men and Man. Drama is akin to the other inventions of man in that it ought to help us to know more, and not merely to spend our feelings.
Life is a disease of the spirit; a working incited by passion. Rest is peculiar to the spirit.
It is folly to pretend that one ever wholly recovers from a disappointed passion. Such wounds always leave a scar.
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._
Genius is not a single power, but a combination of great powers. It reasons, but it is not reasoning; it judges, but it is not judgment; imagines, but it is not imagination; it feels deeply and fiercely, but it is not passion. It is neither, because it is all.
We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.
Difficile est longum subito deponere amorem=--It is difficult to relinquish at once a long-cherished passion.
The bravery of his grief did put me Into a towering passion.
What is reason now was passion formerly.
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._
The mind profits by the wrecks of every passion, and we may measure our road to wisdom by the sorrows we have undergone.
Envy is a passion so full of cowardice and shame, that nobody ever had the confidence to own it.
The ruling passion, be it what it will, The ruling passion conquers reason still.
We are ne'er like angels till our passion dies.
The essence of poetry is will and passion.
Waiting for their time to come. For us to lose and go away again. Where we came from.” Joe Rossi paced back and forth. “Yeah, we’ll be retreating from now on. Giving ground, instead of taking it. It’ll be like this today—losing fights, draws. Stalemates and worse.” He raised his feverish eyes toward the ceiling of the little metal housing unit, face wild with passion and misery. “But, by God, we’ll give them a run for their money. All the way back! Every inch!
Skill is the united force of experience, intellect and passion in their operation on manual labour.
As long as the “I” is there, love cannot be. All that we call love is only desire, longing, passion and attachment; as long as ego is there, all these bind one.
He only employs his passion who can make no use of his reason.
Culture is the passion for sweetness and light, and (what is more) the passion for making them prevail.
The sounding cataract Haunted me like a passion; the tall rock, The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood, Their colours and their forms, were then to me An appetite,--a feeling and a love, That had no need of a remoter charm By thoughts supplied, nor any interest Unborrowed from the eye.
Malice is a passion so impetuous and precipitate, that it often involves the agent and the patient.
He who does not overcome his predominant passion is in great danger of being lost. He who does overcome it will easily conquer all the rest.-- ST. ALPHONSUS.
We are ne'er like angels till our passion dies.
It is most unreasonable to be offended at the lowliness of Jesus Christ, as if this lowliness were in the same order as was the greatness which he came to display. Let us consider this greatness in his life, in his passion, in his obscurity, in his death, in the choice of his disciples, in their desertion of him, in the secrecy of his resurrection, and the rest, and it will seem so vast as to give no room for offence at a lowliness in another order.
There is no one for spying on people's actions like those who are not concerned in them. . . . They will follow up such and such a man or woman for whole days; they will do sentry duty for hours at a time on the corners of the streets, under alley-way doors at night, in cold and rain; they will bribe errand-porters, they will make the drivers of hackney-coaches and lackeys tipsy, buy a waiting-maid, suborn a porter. Why? For no reason. A pure passion for seeing, knowing, and penetrating into things. A pure itch for talking. And often these secrets once known, these mysteries made public, these enigmas illuminated by the light of day, bring on catastrophies, duels, failures, the ruin of families, and broken lives, to the great joy of those who have "found out everything," without any interest in the matter, and by pure instinct. A sad thing.
In their first passion women love their lovers, in all the others they love love.
Nine times out of ten it is over the Bridge of Sighs that we pass the narrow gulf from youth to manhood. That interval is usually occupied by an ill-placed or disappointed affection. We recover and we find ourselves a new being. The intellect has become hardened by the fire through which it has passed. The mind profits by the wrecks of every passion, and we may measure our road to wisdom by the sorrows we have undergone.
For the last time in his life he allowed passion to usurp cunning and reason,
We eagerly lay hold of a law that serves as a weapon to our passion.
In some men there is a malignant passion to destroy the works of genius, literature, and freedom.
What persons are by starts, they are by nature. You see them at such times off their guard. Habit may restrain vice, and virtue may be obscured by passion, but intervals best discover the man.