The mind profits by the wrecks of every passion.
In how large a proportion of creatures is existence composed of one ruling passion, the most agonizing of all sensations--fear.
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 marked 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.
As it has been finely expressed, "Principle is a passion for truth." And as an earlier and homelier writer hath it, "The truths we believe in are the pillars of our world.
There are two avenues from the little passions and the drear calamities of earth; both lead to the heaven and away from hell-Art and Science. But art is more godlike than science; science discovers, art creates.
It is the misfortune of all miscellaneous political combinations, that with the purest motives of their more generous members are ever mixed the most sordid interests and the fiercest passions of mean confedes.
The object of ambition, unlike that of love, never being wholly possessed, ambition is the more durable passion of the two.
Revenge is a common passion; it is the sin of the uninstructed.
Revenge is a common passion; it is the sin of the uninstructed. The savage deems it noble;but the religion of Christ, which is the sublime civilizer, emphatically condemns it. Why? Because religion ever seeks to ennoble man; and nothing so debases him as revenge.
What a mistake to suppose that the passions are strongest in youth! The passions are not stronger, but the control over them is weaker! They are more easily excited, they are more violent and apparent; but they have less energy, less durability, less intense and concentrated power than in maturer life.
In solitude the passions feed upon the heart.
