The most common-place people become highly imaginative when they are in a passion. Whole dramas of insult, injury, and wrong pass before their minds,—efforts of creative genius, for there is sometimes not a fact to go upon.—Helps.
As rivers, when they overflow, drown those grounds, and ruin those husbandmen, which, whilst they flowed calmly betwixt their banks, they fertilized and enriched; so our passions, when they grow exorbitant and unruly, destroy those virtues, to which they may be very serviceable whilst they keep within their bounds.—Boyle.
Passion costs too much to bestow it upon every trifle.—Rev. Thomas Adam.
Words may be counterfeit, false coined, and current only from the tongue, without the mind; but passion is in the soul, and always speaks the heart.—Southern.
A genuine passion is like a mountain stream; it admits of no impediment; it cannot go backward; it must go forward.—Bovee.
Passion is the drunkenness of the mind.—South.
Exalted souls
Have passions in proportion violent,
Resistless, and tormenting; they're a tax
Imposed by nature on pre-eminence,
And fortitude and wisdom must support them.
—Lillo.
One master-passion in the breast,
Like Aaron's serpent, swallows up the rest.
—Pope.
Oh how the passions, insolent and strong,
Bear our weak minds their rapid course along;
Make us the madness of their will obey;
Then die and leave us to our griefs a prey!
—Crabbe.
A great passion has no partner.—Lavater.