A Quote by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Passions are defects or virtues in the highest power.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Quote Topics

Defects Highest Passions Power Virtues

Quote Author

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
German - Novelist
August 28, 1749 - March 22, 1832

Passions are vices or virtues to their highest powers.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

You implanted your highest goal into the heart of those passions: then they became your virtues and joys.

Friedrich Nietzsche

The defects of human nature afford us opportunities of exercising our philosophy, the best employment of our virtues. If all men were righteous, all hearts true and frank and loyal, what use would our virtues be?

Moliere

Women are as they are; they necessarily have the defects of their virtues.

Honore de Balzac

Thank you for accepting me as I am, with my virtues and defects.

Jenni Rivera

People are drawn deeper into tragedy not by their defects but by their virtues.

Haruki Murakami

I have a deep fascination with human nature, with all its virtues and all its defects.

Edgar Ramirez

It is a mistake to imagine, that the violent passions only, such as ambition and love, can triumph over the rest. Idleness, languid as it is, often masters them all; she influences all our designs and actions, and insensibly consumes and destroys both passions and virtues.

Francois de La Rochefoucauld

Court-virtues bear, like gems, the highest rate, Born where Heav'n influence scarce can penetrate. In life's low vale, the soil the virtues like, They please as beauties, here as wonders strike.

Alexander Pope

Thus, experience has ever shown, that education, as well as religion, aristocracy, as well as democracy and monarchy, are, singly, totally inadequate to the business of restraining the passions of men, of preserving a steady government, and protecting the lives, liberties, and properties of the people . . . . Religion, superstition, oaths, education, laws, all give way before passions, interest, and power, which can be resisted only by passions, interest, and power.

John Adams

We are all of us more or less echoes, repeating involuntarily the virtues, the defects, the movements, and the characters of those among whom we live.

Joseph Joubert

I know now that true charity consists in bearing all our neighbors'defects--not being surprised at their weakness, but edified at their smallest virtues.

Thérèse of Lisieux

God's highest gifts--talent, beauty, feeling, imagination, power--they carry with them the possibility of the highest heaven and the lowest hell. Be sure that it is by that which is highest in you that you may be lost.

Frederick William Robertson

There is a holy love and a holy rage, and our best virtues never glow so brightly as when our passions are excited in the cause. Sloth, if it has prevented many crimes, has also smothered many virtues; and the best of us are better when roused.

Charles Caleb Colton

Every fiction since Homer has taught friendship, patriotism, generosity, contempt of death. These are the highest virtues; and the fictions which taught them were therefore of the highest, though not of unmixed, utility.