A Quote by Christian Nestell Bovee

The passions are like fire, useful in a thousand ways and dangerous only in one, through their excess.

Christian Nestell Bovee

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Dangerous Excess Fire Like Only Passions Thousand Through Useful Ways

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Christian Nestell Bovee
American - Author
February 22, 1820 - January 18, 1904

It is difficult to say which is the greatest evil--to have too violent passions, or to be wholly devoid of them. Controlled with firmness, guided by discretion, and hallowed by the imagination, the passions are the vivifiers and quickeners of our being. Without passion there can be no energy of character. Indeed, the passions are like fire, useful in a thousand ways, and dangerous only in one--through their excess.

Christian Nestell Bovee

Substances like LSD, which give away a secret about the nature of the social game - the human game and what underlies it - are potentially dangerous, of course, like any good thing is. Electricity is dangerous, fire is dangerous, cars are dangerous, planes are dangerous, but not so dangerous as driving on the freeway. The only way to handle danger is to face it. If you start getting frightened of it, then you make it worse. Because you project onto it all kinds of bogeys and threats which don't exist in it at all.

Alan Watts

Most humans know their own "reason" only in the sense that Hume defined it, as "a slave to the passions"-and by "passions" he meant not moral passions or the passions of transcendent genius, but only low appetites or base desires, which society and economy ultimately shape and spur on in us.

Kenny Smith

There is an ancient Indian saying that something lives only as long as the last person who remembers it. My people have come to trust memory over history. Memory, like fire, is radiant and immutable while history serves only those who seek to control it, those who douse the flame of memory in order to put out the dangerous fire of truth. Beware these men for they are dangerous themselves and unwise. Their false history is written in the blood of those who might remember and of those who seek the truth.

Floyd Red Crow Westerman

I am bound to add that the excess in too little has ever proved in me more dangerous than the excess in too much; the last may cause indigestion, but the first causes death.

Giacomo Casanova

There are a thousand ways to kneel and kiss the ground; there are a thousand ways to go home again.

Rumi

I have great admiration for power, a great terror of weakness, especially in my own sex, yet feel that my love is for those who overcome the mental and moral suffering and temptation through excess of tenderness rather than through excess of strength.

Anna Brownell Jameson

Through every trial we grow. All suffering we experience has a meaning. Though it seems very cruel, it is like the fire that smelts the iron ore: the steel that emerges from that furnace is beautifully strong, useful for many purposes.

Paramahansa Yogananda

Are not laws dangerous which inhibit the passions? Compare the centuries of anarchy with those of the strongest legalism in any country you like and you will see that it is only when the laws are silent that the greatest actions appear.

Marquis de Sade

We cannot live without trade. A society can neither advance nor improve without excess of disposable income. This excess can only be amassed through the production of goods and services necessary or attractive to the mass. A financial system which allows this leads to inequality; one that does not leads to mass starvation.

David Mamet

Excess of liberty, whether it lies in state or individuals, seems only to pass into excess of slavery.

Plato

Autobiographies are only useful as the lives you read about and analyze may suggest to you something that you may find useful in your own journey through life.

Eleanor Roosevelt

What is more useful than fire? Yet if any one prepares to burn a house, it is with fire that he arms his daring hands.

Ovid

True men" ... are strong willed, have dignity in their demeanor, serenity in their expression. They are cool like autumn, warm like spring. Their passions arise like the four seasons, in harmony with the ten thousand creatures, and no one knows their limits.

Zhuangzi

My advice to girls: first, don't smoke - to excess; second, don't drink - to excess; third, don't marry - to excess.

Mark Twain

Today's Gypsies, who have lived in Prague for only two generations, light a ritual fire wherever they work, a nomads' fire crackling only for the joy of it, a blaze of roughhewn wood like a child's laugh, a symbol of the eternity that preceded human thought, a free fire, a gift from heaven, a living sign of the elements unnoticed by the world-weary pedestrian, a fire in the ditches of Prague warming the wanderer's eye and soul.

Bohumil Hrabal

A Quote by Christian Nestell Bovee

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