#passions

I now bid farewell to the country of my birth - of my passions - of my death; a country whose misfortunes have invoked my sympathies - whose factions I sought to quell - whose intelligence I prompted to a lofty aim - whose freedom has been my fatal dream. ↗

— Thomas Francis Meagher

#been #bid #birth #country #death

By annihilating the desires, you annihilate the mind. Every man without passions has within him no principle of action, nor motive to act. ↗

— Claude Adrien Helvetius

#action #annihilate #annihilating #desires #every

Long ago we conquered our passions looking at ourselves in the mirror of eternity. ↗

— Dejan Stojanovic

#dejan-stojanovic #eternity #literature #literature-quotes #long-ago

Our enemies are our evil deeds and their memories, our pride, our selfishness, our malice, our passions, which by conscience or by habit pursue us with a relentlessness past the power of figure to express. ↗

— George A. Smith

#deeds #evil #express #figure #habit

I am almost a hundred years old; waiting for the end, and thinking about the beginning. There are things I need to tell you, but would you listen if I told you how quickly time passes? I know you are unable to imagine this. Nevertheless, I can tell you that you will awake someday to find that your life has rushed by at a speed at once impossible and cruel. The most intense moments will seem to have occurred only yesterday and nothing will have erased the pain and pleasure, the impossible intensity of love and its dog-leaping happiness, the bleak blackness of passions unrequited, or unexpressed, or unresolved. ↗

— Meg Rosoff

#death #endings #life #love #passage

Strong passions are the precious raw material of sanctity. Individuals that have carried their sinning to extremes should not despair or say, “I am too great a sinner to change,” or “God would not want me.” God will take anyone who is willing to love, not with an occasional gesture, but with a “passionless passion,” a “wild tranquility.” A sinner, unrepentant, cannot love God, any more that a man on dry land can swim; but as soon as he takes his errant energies to God and asks for their redirection, he will become happy, as he was never happy before. It is not the wrong things one has already done which keep one from God; it is the present persistence in that wrong. ↗

— Fulton J. Sheen

#sin #change

Let us give ourselves indiscriminately to everything our passions suggest, and we will always be happy…Conscience is not the voice of Nature but only the voice of prejudice. ↗

— Marquis de Sade

#nature #passions #nature

The part of me which wanders through my mind and never sees or feels actual objects, but which lives in and moves through my passions and my emotions, experiences this world as a horrible nightmare. ↗

— Jack Henry Abbott

#emotions #experiences #feels #horrible #lives

It is with our passions as it is with fire and water, they are good servants, but bad masters. ↗

— Aesop

#fire #good #masters #our #passions

Ideas devour the ages as men are devoured by their passions. When man is cured, human nature will cure itself perhaps. ↗

— Honore de Balzac

#cure #cured #devour #devoured #human