Passion (philosophy)

“ Here, again, the analysis is delicate and true, but the mind, fatigued by the futility of the theme, recoils from such minute dissection of emotion. Passion, being comparatively rare, is always interesting, but sentiment does not bear prolonged contemplation.
Finally come the remedies to be applied to the evils worked by passion. They consist in philosophy, in study, and the practice of benevolence, joined, if possible, to a child-like faculty of extracting from each hour just the amount of happiness that it contains. ”

“ It is now taught, not only that physical passion stands for, or rather is, the Love of which it forms only a part; but that the fire of sudden desire is the only true, or natural, expression of love itself. ”

“ Nothing great has been and nothing great can be accomplished without passion. ”

“ But the great difficulty is to distinguish the passions which belong solely to man, from those which he possesses in common with the brutes. Is it certain, or probable, that the latter have passions? Is it not, on the contrary, allowed, that every passion is an emotion of the soul? Ought we, therefore, to search any where else, but in this spiritual principle, for the seeds of pride, envy, ambition, avarice, and of every other passion by which we are governed? ”

“ It is this exacting, tyrannic, and exclusive principle which forms the generic character of a true and unmixed passion: it is this feeling by which we seek and expect to master and possess the whole existence of the object beloved, which distinguishes a strong, ardent, and overwhelming sentiment, from those faint modifications of the vital feeling, which serve rather to amuse than to occupy life; to interest rather than absorb existence. ”

“ A love, whose root is in passion, and only in passion, cannot be supposed to survive the first ardour of that passion. It is only when above and beyond that passion, giving it force and perpetually renewing it as from a central fire, there exists what I should call a moral passion,—an intense moral desire,—that the love can be durable. ”

“ Passion, when we contemplate it through [Pg 25] the medium of imagination, is like a ray of light transmitted through a prism; we can calmly, and with undazzled eye, study its complicate nature, and analyze its variety of tints; but passion brought home to us in its reality, through our own feelings and experience, is like the same ray transmitted through a lens,—blinding, burning, consuming where it falls. ”

“ I must love with passion or not at all.' And there had risen up before his mind the dreary spectacle of a degraded beauty that he once had worshipped, and which had power to charm him to the very last. ”

“ Whatever is placed beyond the reach of sense and knowledge, whatever is imperfectly discerned, the fancy pieces out at its leisure; and all but the present moment, but the present spot, passion claims for its own, and brooding over it with wings outspread, stamps it with an image of itself. Passion is lord of infinite space, and distant objects please because they border on its confines and are moulded by its touch. ”

“ Therefore let your soul exalt your reason to the height of passion, that it may sing; And let it direct your passion with reason, that your passion may live through its own daily resurrection, and like the phoenix rise above its own ashes. ”

“ This sentiment, this need of the infinite, is at the foundation of the greatest passions, and the most trifling desires. A sigh of the soul in the presence of the starry heavens, the melancholy attached to the passion of glory, to ambition, to all the great emotions of the soul, express it better without doubt, but they do not express it more than the caprice and mobility of those vulgar loves, wandering from object to object in a perpetual circle of ardent desires, of poignant disquietudes, and mournful disenchantments. ”

“ Great passions may give us this quickened sense of life, ecstasy and sorrow of love, the various forms of enthusiastic activity, disinterested or otherwise, which come naturally to many of us. Only be sure it is passion—that it does yield you this fruit of a quickened, multiplied consciousness. ”

“ From exchanging glances, they advance to acts of courtesy, of gallantry, then to fiery passion, to plighting troth, and marriage. Passion beholds its object as a perfect unit. The soul is wholly embodied, and the body is wholly ensouled. ”

“ The passion which was sleeping at the deepest bottom of my heart had at once broken loose, like a flame getting air. And if joy and pleasure are well suited for the first producing and the silent nourishing of love, yet this passion, bold by nature, is most easily impelled by terror to decide and to declare itself. ”

“ The essence, then, of virtue and of happiness is to be placed, not in passion or in pleasure itself, but in the limiting act by which passion is subjugated, and by which pleasure is moderated and restrained. ”

“ In this poem he has endeavoured to establish and exemplify his favourite theory of the ruling passion, by which he means an original direction of desire to some particular object, an innate affection which gives all action a determinate and invariable tendency, and operates upon the whole system of life, either openly, cut more secretly by the intervention of some accidental or subordinate propension. Of any passion, thus innate and irresistible, the existence may reasonably be doubted. Human characters are by no means constant; men change by change of place, of fortune, of acquaintance. ”

“ Passion is, in the first instance, the subjective and therefore the formal side of energy, will, and activity—leaving the object or aim still undetermined. And there is a similar relation of formality to reality in merely individual conviction, individual views, individual conscience. It is always a question of essential importance—what is the purport of my conviction, what the object of my passion—in deciding whether the one or the other is of a true and substantial nature. ”

“ Love, when founded in the heart, will show itself in a thousand unpremeditated sallies of fondness; but every cool deliberate exhibition of the passion only argues little understanding or great insincerity. ”

“ These feelings antecedent to passion, and which seem to be the causes of passion, shall be distinguished by the name of emotions.
What is now said about the production of passion, resolves into a very simple proposition, That we love what is pleasant, and hate what is painful. And indeed it is evident, that without antecedent emotions we could not have any passions; for a thing must be pleasant or painful, before it can be the object either of love or of hatred. ”

“ How many an unhappy wretch has awakened from a dream of passion, to find that after all it was only his enthusiasm which dignified the object which dignified his passion, and threw around it the lustre of immortal youth! ”

“ My reply would be, passion is a worthy possession; most men, who are any good, are capable of passion.
You all enjoy ardent and passionate love in art and literature. Why not give it a place in real life? ”

“ There was always wanting that fine shock of genuine passion, striking home to kindred passions in the breasts of his auditors, and sending through every nerve a magnetic shiver of delight,—that subtile, mysterious element of genius, playing like quick flame along the dullest lines of the poet and charging them with its own life and fire. ”

“ These passions that may be suddenly excited, and are of short duration, as anger, fear, and oftentimes jealousy, may in this manner be fully represented; but those great masters of the soul, ambition, hatred, love, every passion that is permanent in its nature, and varied in progress, if represented to us but in one stage of its course, is represented imperfectly. ”

“ So with respect to moral truth (as distinct from mathematical) , whether a thing is good or evil, depends on the quantity of passion, of feeling, of pleasure and pain connected with it, and with which we must be made acquainted in order to come to a sound conclusion, and not on the inquiry, whether it is round or square. Passion, in short, is the essence, the chief ingredient in moral truth; and the warmth of passion is sure to kindle the light of imagination on the objects around it. ”

“ And therefore we can say that this enkindling of love is in the will—that is, it enkindles the desire of the will; and thus, as we say, this is called passion of love rather than the free work of the will. And, because the receptive passion of the understanding can receive intelligence only in a detached and passive way (and this is impossible without its having been purged) , therefore until this happens the soul feels the touch of intelligence less frequently than that of the passion of love. ”

“ Having attempted to assign the final causes of emotions and passions considered as pleasant or painful, we proceed to the final causes of the desires involved in them. This seems a work of some difficulty; for the desires that accompany different passions have very different aims, and seldom or never demand precisely the same gratification. One passion moves us to cling to its object, one to fly from it; one passion impels to action for our own good, and one for the good of others ”

“ He seems to grasp at whatever words come first to hand while the enthusiasm is upon him, as if all other must be inadequate to the divine meaning. But passion (the all in all in poetry) is everywhere present, raising the low, dignifying the mean, and putting sense into the absurd. He makes his readers glow, weep, tremble, take any affection which he pleases, be moved by words, or in spite of them, be disgusted, and overcome their disgust. ”

“ So much being said, consider again the place and the meaning of the passion of love in any human life. It is essentially a period of idealism, of imagining better things and conditions than are possible in this world. ”

“ It is a sentimental drama, it is a romantic drama, but it is not a tragedy, in the best sense of the word. That is to say, the passion described does not arise naturally out of the previous circumstances, nor lead necessarily to the consequences that follow. Mere sentiment is voluntary, fantastic, self-created, beginning and ending in itself; true passion is natural, irresistible, produced by powerful causes, and impelling the will to determinate actions. ”

“ When I see the effects of passion in the voice and gesture of any person, my mind immediately passes from these effects to their causes, and forms such a lively idea of the passion, as is presently converted into the passion itself. ”

“ Discourse on the true nature of Passion (hawá) . You must know that, according to the opinion of some, passion is a term applied to the attributes of the lower soul, but, according to others, a term denoting the natural volition (irádat-i ṭab`) whereby the lower soul is controlled and directed, just as the spirit is controlled by the intelligence. ”

“ Yet more: her honours where nor Beauty claims,
Nor shows of good the thirsty sense allure,
From passion's power alone [Endnote R] our nature holds
Essential pleasure. Passion's fierce illapse
Rouses the mind's whole fabric ”

“ As the true knowledge is disciplined and tested knowledge,—not the first thought that comes,—so the true passion is disciplined and tested passion,—not the first passion that comes."
When we add to this deep feeling and sympathy the versatile poetic imagination which freely constructs all phases of social life and conduct, we have that union of the great powers of the mind and heart which give such concentrated ethical energy to the best literature. ”

“ All the expressions on the subject go to show that there is something mean and contemptible in the tender passion, which men otherwise profess to be the most heavenly of the passions—as if, indeed, heaven had any thing to do with any of them. ”

“ The same philosopher in counselling self-restraint adds:
"The mind's power over the emotions consists, first, in the actual knowledge of the emotions." Again: "An emotion which is a passion ceases to be a passion as soon as we form a clear and distinct idea of it." ”

“ Through passion, which is the exaggeration of activities that, in a normal form, are good, man is led into a struggle for false happiness, just as the concepts under which his passions arise are false. ”

“ The foregoing distinctions among passions and emotions, may serve the common affairs of life, but they are not sufficient for the critical art. The qualities of pleasant and painful are too familiar to carry us far into human nature, or to form an accurate judgement in the fine arts. It is further{135} necessary, that we be made acquainted with the several modifications of these qualities, with the modifications at least that make the greatest figure. Even at first view every one is sensible, that the pleasure or pain of one passion differs from that of another. ”

“ Life comes out of life. You must paint with passion and the passion will stimulate your intellect to create the right formal relations. And to paint with passion, you must paint things that passionately interest you, moving things, human things. ”

“ But is it not possible that passion clouds your reason, as much as it does mine?—and ought you not to doubt, whether those principles are so "exalted," as you term them, which only lead to your own gratification? In other words, [24] whether it be just to have no principle of action, but that of following your inclination, trampling on the affection you have fostered, and the expectations you have excited? ”

“ What we commonly understand by passion is a violent and sensible emotion of mind, when any good or evil is presented, or any object, which, by the original formation of our faculties, is fitted to excite an appetite. ”

“ "Believe me, there is none fraught with such deep, such vital interest. If you talk, indeed, of the capricious inclination awakened by the mere charm of perishable beauty, I grant it to be idle in the extreme; but that love which springs from the concordant sympathies of virtuous hearts; that love which is awakened by the perception of moral excellence, and fed by meditation on intellectual as well as personal beauty; that is a passion which refines and ennobles the human heart. ”