This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Frances Hodgson Burnett, fully Frances Eliza Hodgson Burnett
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.
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.
G. M. Trevelyan, fully George Macaulay Trevelyan
Anger is a momentary madness, so control your passion or it will control you.
Friedrich Nietzsche, fully Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
Nothing on earth consumes a man more completely than the passion of resentment.
George Marshall, fully George Catlett Marshall, Jr.
An essential part of any successful action on the part of the United States is an understanding on the part of the people of America of the character of the problem and the remedies to be applied. Political passion and prejudice should have no part.
Action | Character | Passion | People | Prejudice | Understanding |
There is a Passion natural to the Mind of man, especially a free Man, which renders him impatient of Restraint.
The great advantage of our system of government over all others, is, that we have a written constitution, defining its limits, and prescribing its authorities; and that, however, for a time, faction may convulse the nation, and passion and party prejudice sway its functionaries, the season of reflection will recur, when calmly retracing their deeds, all aberrations from fundamental principle will be corrected.
Government | Passion | Prejudice | Reflection | System | Will | Government |
Horace, full name Quintus Horatius Flaccus NULL
Subdue your passion or it will subdue you.
Henry Adams, aka Henry Brooks Adams
Young men have a passion for regarding their elders as senile.
Joris-Karl "J.K." Huysmans, pseudonym for Charles-Marie-Georges Huysmans
In this game he had acquired a great deal of muddled knowledge, more than one approximation and less than one certitude. And absence of energy, a curiosity that was too sharp to be crushed immediately, a lack of order in his ideas, a weakening of his spiritual boundaries, which were promptly twisted, an excessive passion for running along forked roads and wearying of the path as soon as he had started on it, mental indigestion demanding varied dishes, quickly tiring of the foods he desired, digesting almost all, but badly, was his state
Absence | Curiosity | Indigestion | Order | Passion |
Our response to sorrow is a reaction. We respond by trying to explain the cause of sorrow, or by escaping from sorrow, but our sorrow doesn't end. Sorrow ends only when we face the fact of sorrow, when we understand and go beyond both the cause and the effect. To try to be free of sorrow through a particular practice, or by deliberate thought, or by indulging in any of the various ways of escaping from sorrow, doesn't awaken in the mind the extraordinary beauty, the vitality, the intensity of that passion which includes and transcends sorrow.
Osho, born Chandra Mohan Jain, also known as Acharya Rajneesh and Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh NULL
Compassion is not against anger. When anger disappears, compassion is. Compassion is not to be fought for; it is not against passion. When passion disappears, compassion is. Compassion is your nature.
Anger | Compassion | Passion |
We are incredibly heedless in the formation of our beliefs, but find ourselves filled with an illicit passion for them when anyone proposed to rob us of their companionship.
Passion |
James Baldwin, fully James Arthur Baldwin
Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, the only fact we have. It seems to me that one ought to rejoice in the fact of death--ought to decide, indeed, to earn one's death by confronting with passion the conundrum of life.
Beauty | Death | Order | Passion | Sacrifice | Will | Beauty |
Each human reality is at the same time a direct project to metamorphose its own For-itself into an In-itself-For-itself, a project of the appropriation of the world as a totality of being-in-itself, in the form of a fundamental quality. Every human reality is a passion in that it projects losing itself so as to found being and by the same stroke to constitute the In-itself which escapes contingency by being its own foundation, the Ens causa sui, which religions call God. Thus the passion of man is the reverse of that of Christ, for man loses himself as man in order that God may be born. But the idea of God is contradictory and we lose ourselves in vain. Man is a useless passion.
God | Man | Order | Passion | Reality | Time | World | God |
John Fowles, fully John Robert Fowles
Most marriages recognize this paradox: Passion destroys passion; we want what puts an end to wanting what we want.
Passion |
Reaching the top is a monumental achievement, but remaining there may be the most spectacular feat of all. The biggest detriment to tomorrow's success is today's success. Passion creates energy and magnetically pulls co-workers and customers into a shared vision, and it is exceptionally strong when linked with a leader's values. Leaders don't rise to the pinnacle of success without developing the right set of attitudes and habits; they make every day a masterpiece. The best leaders are humble enough to realize their victories depend upon their people.