Curiosity, n. An objectionable quality of the female mind. The desire to know whether or not a woman is cursed with curiosity is one of the most active and insatiable passions of the masculine soul.
Ambrose Bierce

Every man hath a general desire of his own happiness; and likewise a variety of particular affections, passions, and appetites to particular external objects.
Joseph Butler

Every man without passions has within him no principle of action, nor motive to act.
Claud-Adrian Helvetius

Every one of our passions and affections hath its natural stint and bound, which may easily be exceeded; whereas our enjoyments can possibly be but in a determinate measure and degree.
Joseph Butler

Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.
John Adams

Few people have ever seriously wished to be exclusively rational. The good life which most desire is a life warmed by passions and touched with that ceremonial grace which is impossible without some affectionate loyalty to traditional form and ceremonies.
Joseph Wood Krutch

From their experience or from the recorded experience of others (history), men learn only what their passions and their metaphysical prejudices allow them to learn.
Aldous Huxley

Good habits, which bring our lower passions and appetites under automatic control, leave our natures free to explore the larger experiences of life. Too many of us divide and dissipate our energies in debating actions which should be taken for granted.
Ralph W. Sockman

Great passions may give us a quickened sense of life, ecstasy and sorrow of love, the various forms of enthusiastic activity, disinterested or otherwise, which comes naturally to many of us.
Walter Pater

Great passions, my dear, don't exist: they're liars fantasies. What do exist are little loves that may last for a short or a longer while.
Anna Magnani

Great souls are not those who have fewer passions and more virtues than others, but only those who have greater designs.
Francois de La Rochefoucauld

Happiness or satisfaction consists only in the enjoyment of those objects which are by nature suited to our several particular appetites, passions, and affections.
Joseph Butler

He who is incapable of feeling strong passions, of being shaken by anger, of living in every sense of the word, will never be a good actor.
Sarah Bernhardt

He who reigns within himself and rules passions, desires, and fears is more than a king.
John Milton

Houses are one of my passions. I probably should have been an interior decorator.
Gene Tierney

I believe that music is connected by human passions and curiosities rather than by marketing strategies.
Elvis Costello

I deliberately wrote a poem in my last book where I was suggesting that there are other passions as great as or more important than the passion of sex.
Thom Gunn

I had too many big passions in life and it gets in the way of work. You can't concentrate properly on the one thing.
Omar Sharif

I have lived and slept in the same bed with English countesses and Prussian farm women... no woman has excited passions among women more than I have.
Florence Nightingale

I now bid farewell to the country of my birth - of my passions - of my death; a country whose misfortunes have invoked my sympathies - whose factions I sought to quell - whose intelligence I prompted to a lofty aim - whose freedom has been my fatal dream.
Thomas Francis Meagher