Quotes about Passions

Just because you think you found the right person for you, doesn’t always mean that they feel you are the right person for them. That’s the challenge and the risk of opening up to someone, allowing yourself to become comfortable, even fall in love. And then one can ask and question, “I’m here, but you’re not? Where did you go left & I went right?” You can’t dial down feelings and we can’t turn back time. We can hope, even pray, that these intense feelings, desires & passions for that person, will subside if denied. That the ache in the heart will go away, that it will be filled with some other feeling, other than the love & happiness it once possessed. And then there’s the fear. The fear that if you close that door, that you will never allow it be reopened, even for that ‘imperfect’ perfect person, shall they discover that you are the one later in time. So you say to yourself, “Ok, I know the circumstances, I know they will never change, no matter how sincere the words.” So either accept it & be happy now or decide to change it, which would mean changing yourself, how you act, what you feel, what your dreams are, starting over. Is that a risk or a reward? No one knows the true definition of love or can one name the many different forms of love. Each and every one of us, only knows what we feel, what we define love to be. And the beauty of that…we don’t have to explain it to anyone but the one we love. You risk everything sometimes to come out with nothing. And so I’m going to go out on a limb here and say…I’m madly in love with you. ~ msg

"To yield and give way to our passions is the lowest slavery, even as to rule over them is the only liberty." 
-- St. Justin the Philosopher

If we resist our passions, it is more due to their weakness than our strength,

"In general, Loquacity (rambling talk) opens the doors of the soul, and the devout warmth of the heart at once escapes.  Empty talk does the same, but even more so... Empty talk is the door to criticism and slander, the spreader of false rumors and opinions, the sower of discord and strife.  It stifles the taste for mental work and almost always serves as a cover for absence of sound knowledge..."

Saint Theophan the Recluse

The aristic thrust and conception of "contra natura" lie in our power finitely to extend our self-mastery, to GROW in will and spirit; but as Nietzsche repeatedly teaches in ZARATHUSTRA, such ends must be WILLABLE, achievable. There is nothing to be learned from the human-all-too-human impulse for self-deification or wholesale transcendence over the vicissitudes of life -- even though this aims at something contra natura, it is not truly concretely WILLABLE, it is just a fantasy of our imagination. We cannot BECOME a God. But we can learn to hold our deepest passions in check for the sake of a higher morality, if indeed we are aristoi. Willing and valuing must become an art, must be made consonant or coherent with the fabric of our natures. Mere megalomaniacal extravagance does not truly increase our charge of concentrated power; on the contrary it fires up our ambition with inflationary abstractions that give no traction or purchase to our actual wills. That way lies radical frustration and a metaphysics of depression: an inevitable life-pattern of self-delusion, as we suffer over and over from the necessity that "it would not be better if men got what they wanted," and yet will not permit ourselves ever to see or to learn anything from this self-deception and self-betrayal.

 "Own up to your passions, then step out and grab them with both hands."   Vickie Milazzo, from her book, Inside Every Woman

Most humans know their own "reason" only in the sense that Hume defined it, as "a slave to the passions"--and by "passions" he meant not moral passions or the passions of transcendent genius, but only low appetites or base desires, which society and economy ultimately shape and spur on in us.

However innumerable sentient beings are, I vow to save them; however inexhaustible the passions are, I vow to master them; however limitless the teachings are, I vow to study them; however infinite the Buddha-truth is, I vow to attain it.

We notice that the mind is a restless bird; the more it gets the more it wants, and still remains unsatisfied. The more we indulge our passions the more unbridled they become. Our ancestors, therefore, set a limit to our indulgences. They saw that happiness was largely a mental condition. A man is not necessarily happy because he is rich, or unhappy because he is poor.... Millions will always remain poor.

[The] path of self-purification is hard and steep. [One] has to become absolutely passion-free in thought, speech and action to rise above the opposing currents of love and hatred, attachment and repulsion. I know that I have not in me as yet that triple purity in spite of constant ceaseless striving for it. That is why the world's praise fails to move me, indeed it very often stings me. To conquer the subtle passions seems to me to be harder far than the physical conquest of the world by the force of arms.

The hunger of passions is the greatest disease.