Pietro Metastasio Quotes

We are never like angels till our passion dies.

Almost every month, I have a day where I get stuck in the mud of me. I used to blame hormones and PMS. After I hit 50, I blamed the lack of hormones. But men get stuck, too, so it must simply be the human condition.

Man is to be found in reason, God in the passions.

The Intellect engages us in the pursuit of Truth. The Passions impel us to Action.

Life is but a daily oscillation between revolt and submission.

Maybe we all have a dark place inside of us, a place where dark thoughts and darker dreams live, but it doesn't have to become who we are.

All life is a struggle in the dark.

Passion. It lies in all of us. Sleeping... waiting... and though unwanted, unbidden, it will stir... open its jaws and howl. It speaks to us... guides us. Passion rules us all. And we obey. What other choice do we have? Passion is the source of our finest moments. The joy of love... the clarity of hatred... the ecstasy of grief. It hurts sometimes more than we can bear. If we could live without passion, maybe we'd know some kind of peace. But we would be hollow. Empty rooms, shuttered and dank. Without passion, we'd be truly dead.

All our life passes in this way: we seek rest by struggling against certain obstacles, and once they are overcome, rest proves intolerable because of the boredom it produces.

A man who has not passed through the inferno of his passions has never overcome them. They then dwell in the house next door, and at any moment a flame may dart out and set fire to his own house. Whenever we give up, leave behind, and forget too much, there is always the danger that the things we have neglected will return with added force.

Watch out for life ... It's harder than it looks.

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.

When I lost my way, and When the road was too long, I was muttering to myself. Life is just that way.

What is life? A gulf of troubled waters, where the soul, like a vexed bark, is tossed upon the waves of pain and pleasure by the wavering breath of passions.

Countless as the sands of sea are human passions, and not all of them are alike, and all of them, base and noble alike, are at first obedient to man and only later on become his terrible masters.

It seemed to Alabama that, reaching her goal, she would drive the devils that had driven her - that, in proving herself, she would achieve that peace which she imagined went only in surety of one’s self - that she would be able, through the medium of the dance, to command her emotions, to summon love or pity or happiness at will, having provided a channel through which they might flow. She drove herself mercilessly, and the summer dragged on.

I go through ups and downs just like everyone does.

I believe that there is one story in the world, and only one. . . . Humans are caught—in their lives, in their thoughts, in their hungers and ambitions, in their avarice and cruelty, and in their kindness and generosity too—in a net of good and evil. . . . There is no other story. A man, after he has brushed off the dust and chips of his life, will have left only the hard, clean questions: Was it good or was it evil? Have I done well—or ill?

The man who is master of his passions is Reason's slave.

Inside each of us is a monster; inside each of us is a saint. The real question is which one we nurture the most, which one will smite the other.

When one read's Kierkegaard's profound analyses of anxiety and despair or Nietzsche's amazingly acute insights into the dynamics of resentment and the guilt and hostility which accompany repressed emotional powers, one might pinch oneself to realize that one is reading works written in the last century and not some new contemporary psychological analysis.

The foes from whom we pray to be delivered are our own passions, appetites, and follies; and against these there is always need that we should war.

Passion makes the will lord of the reason.