Home > Topic > passionless
1 " I suffered most from the feeling that custom was daily petrifying our lives into one fixed shape, that our minds were losing their freedom and becoming enslaved to the steady passionless course of time. "
― Leo Tolstoy , Family Happiness
2 " The aim of the gospel is the creation of people who are passionate for doing good rather than settling for the passionless avoidance of evil. "
― John Piper , Bloodlines: Race, Cross, and the Christian
3 " Every death even the cruelest deathdrowns in the total indifference of NatureNature herself would watch unmovedif we destroyed the entire human raceI hate Naturethis passionless spectator this unbreakable iceberg-facethat can bear everythingthis goads us to greater and greater acts "
― Peter Weiss , The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade
4 " What is more tragic than to see a person who has risen to the disciplined heights of tough-mindedness but has at the same time sunk to the passionless depths of hard-heartedness? "
― Martin Luther King Jr. , Strength to Love
5 " In those years I did not care to enjoy sex, only to have it. That is what seeing Alex again on Fifth Avenue brought back to me - a youth of fascinated, passionless copulation. There they are, figures in a discoloured blur, young men and not so young, the nice ones with automobiles, the dull ones full of suspicions and stinginess. By asking a thousand questions of many heavy souls, I did not learn much. You receive biographies interesting mainly for their coherence. So many are children who from the day of their birth are growing up to be their parents. Look at the voting records, inherited like flat feet. "
― Elizabeth Hardwick , Sleepless Nights
6 " In comparison, young unmarried women in America were fortunate: They had a certain measure of sexual freedom. Eighteenth-century parents allowed their daughters to spend tie with suitors unsupervised, and courting couples openly engaged in " bundling," the practice of sleeping together without undressing, in the girls' homes. (Theoretically, that is, they were sleeping together without undressing: in fact, premarital pregnancy boomed during the period of 1750 to 1780, when bundling was nearly universal.) But by the turn of the century, in a complete reversal of previous beliefs about women's sexuality, the idea took hold that only men were carnal creatures; women were thought to be passionless and therefore morally superior. "
7 " Calm, gentle, passionless as he appeared, there was yet, we fear, a quiet depth of malice, hitherto latent, but active now, in this unfortunate old man, which led him to imagine a more intimate revenge than any mortal had ever wreaked upon an enemy. "
― Nathaniel Hawthorne , The Scarlet Letter
8 " Caution is the path to mediocrity. Gliding, passionless mediocrity is all that most people think they can achieve. "
― Frank Herbert , God Emperor of Dune (Dune, #4)
9 " The world is truly a terrible place. Every one of my generation is lost, filling the holes which are their lives with seditious and yet passionless acts of unnecessary drama. It is a world of hypocrisy and whispers, a dark mine shaft of overfed, spoiled, and thankless slaves too stupid to realize that, despite their steady stream of shallow luxuries, they are still slaves. "
― Jason S. Hornsby , Every Sigh, the End
10 " Human nature if it healthy demands excitement and if it does not obtain its thrilling excitement in the right way it will seek it in the wrong. God never makes bloodless stoics He makes no passionless saints. "
11 " The voice of passion is better than the voice of reason. The passionless cannot change history. "
― Czesław Miłosz
12 " History, whether sacred or profane, hides her teaching from those who study her through coloured glasses. She only reveals truth to those who look through the cold clear medium of passionless inquiry, who seek the Truth without determining first the masquerade in which alone they will receive it. "
