Aristotle Passion Quotations

All human actions have one or more of these seven causes: chance, nature, compulsions, habit, reason, passion, desire.

The vices respectively fall short of or exceed what is right in both passions and actions, while virtue both finds and chooses that which is intermediate.

Even the best of men in authority are liable to be corrupted by passion. We may conclude then that the law is reason without passion, and it is therefore preferable to any individual.

The true end of tragedy is to purify the passions.

Whereas the law is passionless, passion must ever sway the heart of man.

Music imitates (represents) the passions or states of the soul, such as gentleness, anger, courage, temperance, and their opposites.

Young men have strong passions and tend to gratify them indiscriminately. Of the bodily desires, it is the sexual by which they are most swayed and in which they show absence of control...They are changeable and fickle in their desires which are violent while they last, but quickly over: their impulses are keen but not deep rooted.

Therefore the good man ought to be a lover of self, since he will then both benefit himself by acting nobly and aid his fellows; but the bad man ought not to be a lover of self, since he will follow his base passions, and so injure both himself and his neighbors. With the bad man therefore, what he does is not in accord with what he ought to do, but the good man does what he ought, since intelligence always chooses for itself that which is best, and the good man obeys his intelligence.

And, speaking generally, passion seems not to be amenable to reason, but only to force.

Irrational passions would seem to be as much a part of human nature as is reason.

A young man is not a proper hearer of lectures on political science; for he is inexperienced in the actions that occur in life, but its discussions start from these and are about these; and, further, since he tends to follow his passions, his study will be vain and unprofitable, because the end that is aimed at is not knowledge but action. And it makes no difference whether he is young in years or youthful in character.

The law is reason, free from passion.

Music directly imitates the passions or states of the soul...when one listens to music that imitates a certain passion, he becomes imbued withthe same passion; and if over a long time he habitually listens to music that rouses ignoble passions, his whole character will be shaped to an ignoble form.

Music directly represents the passions of the soul. If one listens to the wrong kind of music, he will become the wrong kind of person.

It is easy to fly into a passion - anybody can do that - but to be angry with the right person to the right extent and at the right time with the right object and in the right way - that is not easy, and it is not everyone who can do it