Montesquieu Quotes

When I'm carried away, isn't it clear that my heart contradicts my mouth?

Anger, lust and such other evil passions raging in the heart are the real untouchables.

Saw so much of the wickedness of my heart that I longed to get away from myself...I felt almost pressed to death with my own vileness. Oh what a body of death is there in me...Oh the closest walk with God is the sweetest heaven that can be enjoyed on earth!

But can they [great works] get rid of the worm that lies gnawing at the roots of my heart? No, never.

Attempting to satisfy the passions that rage inside us and the longings that motivate us, we invent spirituality, lean on political solutions, create new villains, turn our backs on Jesus, and blame a thousand tyrannies- but we never come to terms with the source of the problem deep within the heart and inclination of every human being.

My demons and I are not compatible. We never have been and never will be.

Everyone has monsters and demons within themselves. They're metaphors for the human condition.

i swore i could feel my lies slithering inside me like snakes, wrapping themselves around me and constricting. i felt they were squeezing the air from my lungs, tightening around my heart.

She was owner and captive, both, of a bitterly divided heart.

A divided heart offers a strange sensation.

Conscience is the voice of the soul, the passions are the voice of the body. It is strange that these voices often contradict each other?

I suddenly realized. The zebra. It is not something outside of us. The zebra is something inside of us. Our fears. Our own self-destructive nature. The zebra is the worst part of us when we are face-to-face with our worst times. The demon is us!

The greatest mania of all is passion: and I am a natural slave to passion: the balance between my brain and my soul and my body is as wild and delicate as the skin of a Ming vase.

What you call passion is not spiritual force, but friction between the soul and the outside world.

Your soul is oftentimes a battlefield, upon your reason and your judgment wage war against your passion and your appetite.

How do men feel whose whole lives (and many men's lives are) are lies, schemes, and subterfuges? What sort of company do they keep when they are alone? Daily in life I watch men whose every smile is an artifice, and every wink is an hypocrisy. Doth such a fellow where a mask in his own privacy, and to his own conscience?

Sin and the devil will always find helpers in our hearts.

I am terrified by this dark thing That sleeps in me; All day I feel its soft, feathery turnings, its malignity.

Within my heart is lurking suspicion, and base fear, and shame and hate; but above all, tyrannous love sits throned, crowned with her graces, silent and in tears.

In the human heart there is a ceaseless birth of passions, so that the destruction of one is almost always the establishment of another.

There was a disturbance in my heart, a voice that spoke there and said, I want, I want, I want! It happened every afternoon, and when I tried to suppress it it got even stronger.

My heart says one thing. My head says another. Very hard to get your heart and head together in life.

A man never lies with more delicious languor under the influence of a passion than when he has persuaded himself that he shall subdue it to-morrow.