Nicolas Chamfort Passion Quotations

When a man and a woman have an overwhelming passion for each other, it seems to me, in spite of such obstacles dividing them as parents or husband, that they belong to each other in the name of Nature, and are lovers by Divine right, in spite of human convention or the laws.

All passions exaggerate; and they are passions only because they do exaggerate.

It is passion that makes man live; wisdom makes one only last.

Men of reason have endured;men of passion have lived.

His passions make man live, his wisdom merely makes him last.

All passions are exaggerated, otherwise they would not be passions.

Nature in causing reason and the passions to be born at one and the same time apparently wished by the latter gift to distract man from the evil she had done him by the former, and by only permitting him to live for a few years after the loss of his passions seems to show her pity by early deliverance from a life that reduces him to reason as his sole resource.

It is when their age of passions is past that great men produce their masterpieces, just as it is after volcanic eruptions that the soil is most fertile.

The philosopher who would fain extinguish his passions resembles the chemist who would like to let his furnace go out.