Impassioned Quotes

In evangelical circles we typically think of preaching as teaching and exhorting. Of course, Scripture informs, instructs, explains, asserts, and commands. Yet for the Reformers, the preaching of the Word is more than a preacher's thoughts, encouragements, advice, and impassioned pleas. Through the lips of a sinful preacher, the triune God is actually judging, justifying, reconciling, renewing, and conforming sinners to Christ's image. God created the world by the words of his mouth and by his speech also brings a new creation into being. In other words, through the proclamation of his Word, God is not just speaking about what might happen if we bring it about but is actually speaking it into being. Hence, Calvin calls preaching the sacramental word: the word as a means of grace. Faith comes by hearing the Word - specifically, the gospel (Rom. 10:17). Thus, the church is the creation of the Word (creatura verbi). ~ Michael S. Horton

One of the surest evidences of an elevated taste is the power of enjoying works of impassioned terrorism, in poetry, and painting. The man who can look at impassioned subjects of terror with a feeling of exultation may be certain he has an elevated taste. ~ Benjamin Haydon

WE END UP with the following situation: on the one hand, we have a news agenda dominated by reports of the workings of a highly complicated social science that wrestles with problems of near cosmic scale and incomprehensible difficulty, upon which it periodically delivers pronouncements at once pessimistic and resigned; and on the other hand, we have a host of inchoate, naive, innocent, impassioned but powerful longings that are carefully concealed and mostly go unmentioned for fear of sacrificing claims to decency and adult seriousness. ~ Alain De Botton

Deconstruction is not meant to be a soft sighing for the future, but a way of deciding now and being impassioned in a moment. ~ John D. Caputo

What is art if not a concentrated and impassioned effort to make something with the little we have, the little we see? ~ Andre Dubus

Here was a flower (the daisy reflected) strangely like itself and yet utterly unlike itself too. Such a paradox has often been the basis for the most impassioned love. ~ Thomas M. Disch

Our President has given symbolic support to the National Day of Prayer but I believe that our nation needs an impassioned call to our collective knees. ~ Jonathan Falwell

We're an odd match. Imagine Ronald Reagan and Jesse Jackson; imagine night and day. George has built nuclear reactors and believes in them fiercely. We stay away from this and other subjects the way I'd stay away from Three Mile Island. After all, I have plenty of friends who share my most impassioned opinions; we can have an orgy of agreement any day at the natural foods restaurant, over a sprout sandwich. But he's the one out here helping. ~ Sy Safransky

Look, de Mazel, you've known him for years - hasn't he been known to sleep for forty hours in two days?'

'Forty hours?'

'Certainly. He awoke at meal times, just to take nourishment, and afterwards fell again into his torpor. And Freneuse had a strange horror of sleep; there was some abnormal phenomenon associated with it, some lesion of the brain or neurotic depression.'

'The troublesome cerebral anaemia which results from excessive debauchery. Another myth! I've never believed, myself, in the supposed debauchery of that poor gentleman. Such a frail chap, with such a delicate complexion! Quite frankly, there was no scope in him for debauchery.

'Pooh! About as much as Lorenzaccio!'

'You associate him with the Medicis! Lorenzaccio was a Florentine impassioned by rancour, a man of energy slowly brooding over his vengeance, caressing it as he might caress the blade of a dagger! There is not the slightest comparison to be drawn between Lorenzaccio and that gall-green, liverish creature Freneuse. ~ Jean Lorrain

Perfection, in the form of a flawless stream of words delivered with cool composure, is never as persuasive as realness. An impassioned but imperfect speech, which shows you care too much to hide flaws, is far more compelling. ~ Charlotte Beers

Marriage, in what is evidently its most popular version, is now on the one hand an intimate 'relationship' involving (ideally) two successful careerists in the same bed, and on the other hand a sort of private political system in which rights and interests must be constantly asserted and defended. Marriage, in other words, has now taken the form of divorce: a prolonged and impassioned negotiation as to how things shall be divided. During their understandably temporary association, the 'married' couple will typically consume a large quantity of merchandise and a large portion of each other.

The modern household is the place where the consumptive couple do their consuming. Nothing productive is done there. Such work as is done there is done at the expense of the resident couple or family, and to the profit of suppliers of energy and household technology. For entertainment, the inmates consume television or purchase other consumable diversion elsewhere.

There are, however, still some married couples who understand themselves as belonging to their marriage, to each other, and to their children. What they have they have in common, and so, to them, helping each other does not seem merely to damage their ability to compete against each other. To them, 'mine' is not so powerful or necessary a pronoun as 'ours.'

This sort of marriage usually has at its heart a household that is to some extent productive. The couple, that is, makes around itself a house ~ Wendell Berry

Surely, the span of time between the placing of an order and the arrival of appetizers is one of the most perilous in all human interaction. What young lovers have not found themselves at this juncture in a silence so sudden, so seemingly insurmountable that it threatens to cast doubt upon their chemistry as a couple? What husband and wife have not found themselves suddenly unnerved by the fear that they might not ever have something urgent, impassioned, or surprising to say to each other again? ~ Amor Towles

I am a teacher born and bred, and I believe in the advocacy of teachers. It's a calling. We want our students to feel impassioned and empowered. ~ Erin Gruwell

And the thorny crown of this sad conception was that she whom he really did prefer in a cursory way to the rest, she who knew herself to be more impassioned in nature, cleverer, more beautiful than they, was in the eyes of propriety far less worthy of him than the homelier ones whom he ignored. ~ Thomas Hardy

The first work of revealed truth is to secure an unconditional surrender of the sinner to the will of God. Until this has been accomplished, nothing really lasting has been done at all. The reader may admire the rich imagery of the Bible, its bold figures and impassioned flights of eloquence; he may enjoy its tender musical passages, and revel in its strong homely wisdom; but until he has submitted to its full authority over his life, he has secured no good from it yet. ~ James L. Snyder

But the young educated adults of the 90s
who were, of course, the children of the same impassioned infidelities and divorces Mr. Updike wrote about so
beautifully
got to watch all this brave new individualism and self-expression and sexual freedom deteriorate into the joyless and anomic self-indulgence of the Me Generation. Today's sub-40s have different horrors, prominent among which are anomie and solipsism and a peculiarly American loneliness: the prospect of dying without once having loved something more than yourself. ~ David Foster Wallace

Former vice president Al Gore has devoted his post-administration years to a mission to tell the world about global warming. It's funny, but in his civilian life Gore has discovered the voice that voters had trouble hearing when he ran for president in 2000. The voice he has found is clear, impassioned, and moving. ~ Graydon Carter

I'd heard a lot of Asian people were rooting for me, but I had no idea. I was stunned. They were ... impassioned, especially compared to Japan. I couldn't even have anticipated that kind of welcome. ~ Ayumi Hamasaki

My students tag tables, walls, and chairs because their greatest fear is that no one will ever remember them. They do not believe they can give impassioned speeches, rally people in protest, paint masterpieces. They think they will die, small and forgotten, and it dictates their every action. ~ Thomm Quackenbush

During challenging times and when impassioned to act, human beings can be capable of miracles. ~ Fabien Cousteau

As for tweeting and texting: impassioned discussions, particularly when they're intimate, don't work in abbreviated script messages. No relationship should begin or end in 140 characters. ~ Mariella Frostrup

We get no good by being ungenerous, even to a book, and calculating profits ... so much help by so much reading. it is rather when we gloriously forget ourselves, and plunge soul-forward, headlong, into a book's profound, impassioned for its beauty and salt of truth
'tis then we get the right good from the book. ~ Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Eric Schlosser's book on the economy and strategies of the fast-food business should be read by anyone who likes to take their children to fast-food restaurants. I shall certainly never do that again. He employs a long, cold burn, a quiet and impassioned accumulation of detail, with calm, wit and clarity. ( ... ) Fast Food Nation is witness to the rigour and seriousness of the best American journalism, readable, reliable and extremely carefully done. ~ Adam Nicolson

I have always been an impassioned advocate for the works of Shakespeare. I regard him as one of the most complete miracles of his or any other age. ~ Stephen Fry

Art is always, even at its most repulsive, an impassioned cry of love. ~ Laurence Overmire

What then? Are we only to buy the books that we read? The question has merely to be thus bluntly put, and it answers itself. All impassioned bookmen, except a few who devote their whole lives to reading, have rows of books on their shelves which they have never read, and which they never will read. I know that I have hundreds such. My eye rests on the works of Berkeley in three volumes, with a preface by the Right Honourable Arthur James Balfour. I cannot conceive the circumstances under which I shall ever read Berkeley; but I do not regret having bought him in a good edition, and I would buy him again if I had him not; for when I look at him some of his virtue passes into me; I am the better for him. A certain aroma of philosophy informs my soul, and I am less crude than I should otherwise be. This is not fancy, but fact.

[…..]

"Taking Berkeley simply as an instance, I will utilise him a little further. I ought to have read Berkeley, you say; just as I ought to have read Spenser, Ben Jonson, George Eliot, Victor Hugo. Not at all. There is no 'ought' about it. If the mass of obtainable first-class literature were, as it was perhaps a century ago, not too large to be assimilated by a man of ordinary limited leisure _in_ his leisure and during the first half of his life, then possibly there might be an 'ought' about it. But the mass has grown unmanageable, even by those robust professional readers who can 'grapple with whole libraries.' And I am not a prof ~ Arnold Bennett

She wanted to run her hands over him as he whispered the impassioned corollaries of non-Euclidean geometry. ~ Sherry Thomas

Like all who are impassioned, I take blissful delight in losing myself, in fully experiencing the thrill of surrender. And so I often write with no desire to think, in an externalized reverie, letting the words cuddle me like a baby in their arms. They form sentences with no meaning, flowing softly like water I can feel, a forgetful stream whose ripples mingle and undefine, becoming other, still other ripples, and still again other. Thus ideas and images, throbbing with expressiveness, pass through me in resounding processions of pale silks on which imagination shimmers like moonlight, dappled and indefinite. ~ Fernando Pessoa

portrayed, in the most glowing and impassioned hues, their virtue and magnanimity, the imperishable honor they acquired for themselves, and the great services ~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

We have come to think that duty should come first. I disagree. Duty should be a by-product. Writing, the creative effort, the use of the imagination, should come first – at least, for some part of every day of your life. It is a wonderful blessing if you use it. You will become happier, more enlightened, alive, impassioned, light-hearted and generous to everybody else. Even your health will improve. Colds will disappear and all the other ailments of discouragement and boredom. ~ Brenda Ueland

My piano is to me what a ship is to the sailor, what a steed is to the Arab. It is the intimate personal depository of everything that stirred wildly in my brain during the most impassioned days of my youth. It was there that all my wishes, all my dreams, all my joys, and all my sorrows lay. ~ Franz Liszt

These women are, quite simply, alive; they know that the source of true values is not in external things but in human hearts. This gives its charm to the world they live in: they banish ennui by the simple fact of their presence, with their dreams, their desires, their pleasures, their emotions, their ingenuities. The sanseverina, that 'active soul' dreads ennui more than death. To stagnate in ennui 'is to keep from dying, she said, not to live'; she is ' always impassioned over something, always in action and gay too '. Thoughtless, childish or profound, gay or grave, daring or secretive, they all reject the heavy sleep in which humanity is mired. And these women who have been able to maintain their liberty- empty as it has been- will rise through passion to heroism once they find an objective worthy of them; their spiritual power, their energy, suggest the fierce purity of total dedication ~ Simone De Beauvoir

Endymion

The rising moon has hid the stars;
Her level rays, like golden bars,
Lie on the landscape green,
With shadows brown between.

And silver white the river gleams,
As if Diana, in her dreams,
Had dropt her silver bow
Upon the meadows low.

On such a tranquil night as this,
She woke Endymion with a kiss,
When, sleeping in the grove,
He dreamed not of her love.

Like Dian's kiss, unasked, unsought,
Love gives itself, but is not bought;
Nor voice, nor sound betrays
Its deep, impassioned gaze.

It comes,--the beautiful, the free,
The crown of all humanity,--
In silence and alone
To seek the elected one.

It lifts the boughs, whose shadows deep
Are Life's oblivion, the soul's sleep,
And kisses the closed eyes
Of him, who slumbering lies.

O weary hearts! O slumbering eyes!
O drooping souls, whose destinies
Are fraught with fear and pain,
Ye shall be loved again!

No one is so accursed by fate,
No one so utterly desolate,
But some heart, though unknown,
Responds unto his own.

Responds,--as if with unseen wings,
An angel touched its quivering strings;
And whispers, in its song,
"Where hast thou stayed so long? ~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

But the Spain which emerged around 1960, beginning with its economic miracle, created by the invasion of tourists, can no longer result in impassioned dedication on the part of its intellectuals, and even less on the part of foreign intellectuals. ~ Juan Goytisolo

Two pure souls fused into one by an impassioned love-friends, counselors-a mutual support and inspiration to each other amid life's struggles, must know the highest human happiness;-this is marriage; and this is the only cornerstone of an enduring home. ~ Elizabeth Cady Stanton

Indifferent souls never part. Impassioned souls part, and return to one another, because they can do no better. ~ Sophie Swetchine

Then give me your answer." He crushed a brief, impassioned kiss against her lips. "Say it, or I'll have to keep kissing you until you surrender. ~ Lisa Kleypas

To nineteenth-century leaders the principle was not just an optional revelation - they viewed it as the most important revelation in Joseph Smith's life, which is what he undoubtedly taught them. If they accepted him as an infallible prophet, and if they wanted full exaltation, they had no recourse but to marry many plural wives. Their devotion to Joseph the seer outweighed their experience of polygamy's impracticality and tragic consequences for women, which many men probably did not even recognize.

But it is worth noting that the women who suffered so much under polygamy gave it their unqualified support in public rallies and wrote impassioned defenses of it. They too were devoted to the idea that their church was led by practically infallible, authoritative prophets, especially Joseph Smith. ~ Todd M. Compton

Impassioned characters never attain their mark till they have overshot it. ~ Sophie Swetchine

World's freakiest bloodsucker, right here," I went on. "And you know what? If it makes some of you uncomfortable, too bad. If it makes some of you so uncomfortable you want to start shit with me about it, step right up and see if I don't eat the hell out of you next!"
I'd meant that last part as a threat, but somewhere in my impassioned declaration of independence from hiding what I was, I'd neglected to think through my phrasing. I saw Bones raise a brow, a muffled snicker broke out from Ian, and then Vlad laughed loud and hearty.
"With that sort of invitation, Reaper, you might want to suggest the line form to your right."
"That's not ... I meant eat them in a bad way," I sputtered. ~ Jeaniene Frost

I do not mean merely in its adding to enthusiasm that intellectual basis which in its strength, or that more obvious influence about which Wordsworth was thinking when he said very nobly that poetry was merely the impassioned expression in the face of science, and that when science would put on a form of flesh and blood the poet would lend his divine spirit to aid the transfiguration. Nor do I dwell much on the great cosmical emotion and deep pantheism of science to which Shelley has given its first and Swinburne its latest glory of song, but rather on its influence on the artistic spirit in preserving that close observation and the sense of limitation as well as of clearness of vision which are the characteristics of the real artist. ~ Oscar Wilde

The artist is a spectator, indifferent or impassioned, at the birth of his work, and observes the phases of its development. ~ Max Ernst

For the first time, she recognized the symptoms of infatuation which she had felt incipiently as a child, as a girl in her early teens, and later as a young woman. The recognition did not lessen the reality, the poignancy of the revelation by any suggestion or promise of instability. The past was nothing to her; offered no lesson which she was willing to heed. The future was a mystery which she never attempted to penetrate. The present alone was significant; was hers, to torture her as it was doing then with the biting conviction that she had lost that which she had held, she had been denied that which her impassioned, newly awakened being demanded. ~ Kate Chopin

I think pain is the best feeling for song writing. You can write good happy songs, but I think the kind of bruiting, depressing ones are more effective. They are easier to write when I am impassioned and angry. It is a good way to channel that negative energy. ~ Adam Levine

Poetry must be simple, sensuous, or impassioned. ~ Emma Lazarus

The world is ruled by such dreams, dreams of impassioned hearts, and improvisations of warm lips, not by cold words linked in chains of iron sequence,
not by logic. The heart with its passions, not the understanding with its reasoning, sways, in the long run, the actions of mankind. ~ William Kirby

An impassioned spirit truly paints the gray world with color. ~ Krista Ritchie

Listen to a woman speak at a public gathering (if she hasn't painfully lost her wind). She doesn't "speak," she throws her trembling body forward; she lets go of herself, she flies; all of her passes into her voice, and it's with her body that she vitally sup- ports the "logic" of her speech. Her flesh speaks true. She lays herself bare. In fact, she physically materializes what she's thinking; she signifies it with her body. In a certain way she inscribes what she's saying, because she doesn't deny her drives the intractable and impassioned part they have in speaking. Her speech, even when "theoretical" or political, is never simple or linear or "objectified," generalized: she draws her story into history. ~ Helene Cixous

When Steinbeck was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962, only five Americans had previously been so honored. Accepting the prize in Stockholm, he gave an impassioned speech in which he argued that "the ancient commission of the writer has not changed. He is charged with exposing our many grievous faults and failures, with dredging up to the light our dark and dangerous dreams for the purpose of improvement. ~ John Steinbeck

I'm attracted to people. To the words they speak, to the actions they take, to their full-bodied mannerisms and soulful gaits. I am attracted to people. To impassioned hearts that beat out of sync, the ones that skip a measure, heard in hushed places and violent spaces - I am attracted to people. ~ Krista Ritchie

He reached forward to cup my cheek, the touch surprising me. "Please understand that no matter what I am or what has happened in the past, I am yours. I am devoted to you above all else, including my own life."
I exhaled after holding my breath for what felt like forever. "That's pretty heavy, Will."
His expression was impassioned, and the backs of his fingers brushed the side of my neck.
"It is a burden I am glad to carry. ~ Courtney Allison Moulton

It was the talk that mattered supremely: the impassioned exchange of talk. Love was only a minor accompaniment. ~ D.H. Lawrence

The fundamental tension of the profession is the struggle between bold advocacy of the client's interests and the need to establish and hold to limits that prevent advocacy from leading to irrational and inequitable results; and thus the lawyer's job in practice is to be on one hand the impassioned representative of his client to the world, and on the other the wise representative to his client of the legal system, and the society, explaining and upholding the demands and restrictions which that system places on them both. ~ Scott Turow

I want to suggest to you that citizens of free societies, democracies, do not preserve their freedom by pussyfooting around their fellow-citizen's opinions, even their most cherished beliefs. In free societies, you must have the free play of ideas. There must be argument, and it must be impassioned and untrammeled. A free society is not calm and eventless place - that is the kind of static, dead society dictators try to create. Free societies are dynamic, noisy, turbulent, and full of radical disagreements. Skepticism and freedom are indissolubly linked; and it is the skepticism of journalists, their show-me, prove-it unwillingness to be impressed, that is perhaps their most important contribution to the freedom of the free world. It is the disrespect of journalists-for power, for orthodoxies, for party lines, for ideologies, for vanity, for arrogance, for folly, for pretension, for corruption, for stupidity, maybe even for editors-that I would like to celebrate...and that I urge you all, in freedom's name, to preserve. ~ Salman Rushdie

And Eleanor's husband was the man who did the interning. And I think they - Governor Warren, who was later to become such an impassioned Chief Justice on all sorts of human rights issues, was very big in the internment process. And I think that we simply sometimes tend not to understand or remember how people felt. ~ William A. Rusher

The wife carries the burden of the marriage on her shoulders," his mother said. "Her husband, herself, both of them, their covenant, and everything else that gets added over the years. And all that is very, very heavy. It is in her power to keep the marriage alive and thriving, but also to drive it to the brink of crisis and back again. For whatever reason, men have not taken this role upon themselves. Perhaps they are not capable. Now, as you know, every empty space, every abyss created in nature fills itself, and this one is filled by women out of a sense of responsibility and maybe also the will to control. It's a simple matter, really, but in case you haven't understood, I'll explain it: your wife must be happy, satisfied, fulfilled, and impassioned, and then the burden of marriage will not be heavy for her. She'll be prepared to take it upon herself for better and for worse until the very day that one of you shuts your eyes for good. ~ Anat Talshir

he shewed himself so intimately acquainted with all the tenderest songs of the one poet, and all the impassioned descriptions of hopeless agony of the other; he repeated, with such tremulous feeling, the various lines which imaged a broken heart, or a mind destroyed by wretchedness, and looked so entirely as if he meant to be understood, that she ventured to hope he did not always read only poetry; and to say, that she thought it was the misfortune of poetry, to be seldom safely enjoyed by those who enjoyed it completely; and that the strong feelings which alone could estimate it truly, were the very feelings which ought to taste it but sparingly...she ventured to recommend a larger allowance of prose in his daily study. ~ Jane Austen

Men are failures, not because they are stupid, but because they are not sufficiently impassioned. ~ Maxwell Struthers Burt

And this love of definite conception, this clearness of vision, this artistic sense of limit, is the characteristic of all great work and poetry; of the vision of Homer as of the vision of Dante, of Keats and William Morris as of Chaucer and Theocritus. It lies at the base of all noble, realistic and romantic work as opposed to the colourless and empty abstractions of our own eighteenth-century poets and of the classical dramatists of France, or of the vague spiritualities of the German sentimental school: opposed, too, to that spirit of transcendentalism which also was root and flower itself of the great Revolution, underlying the impassioned contemplation of Wordsworth and giving wings and fire to the eagle- like flight of Shelley, and which in the sphere of philosophy, though displaced by the materialism and positiveness of our day, bequeathed two great schools of thought, the school of Newman to Oxford, the school of Emerson to America. Yet is this spirit of transcendentalism alien to the spirit of art. For the artist can accept no sphere of life in exchange for life itself. For him there is no escape from the bondage of the earth: there is not even the desire of escape. He is indeed the only true realist: symbolism, which is the essence of the transcendental spirit, is alien to him. The metaphysical mind of Asia will create for itself the monstrous, many-breasted idol of Ephesus, but to the Greek, pure artist, that work is most instinct with spiritual life which conforms ~ Oscar Wilde

The true function of art is to criticize, embellish and edit nature ... the artist is a sort of impassioned proof-reader, blue penciling the bad spelling of God. ~ H.L. Mencken

Poetry is the breath and finer spirit of knowledge ~ William Wordsworth

The person who gives himself over to evil thoughts cannot keep his outer self free from sin; and if evil thoughts have not been uprooted from the heart, they are .bound to manifest themselves in evil actions. We look on things adulterously because the inner eye has become adulterous and darkened; and we want to hear about foul things because our soul's ears have listened to what the foul demons inside us have whispered to us. Consequently, with the Lord's help, we must cleanse ourselves - within and without. We must guard our senses and free each of them from impassioned and sinful influences. And just as, ignorant and full of futility, we used to live in the world with intellect and senses enslaved to the deceit of sin, so now, having changed to the life according to God, we must dedicate intellect and senses to the service of the living and true God, and of God's justice and will. ~ St. Philotheos Of Sinai

I am notorious for making impassioned speeches about things nobody cares about. ~ Mindy Kaling

I breathed in a deep dose of night air, trying to calm my schoolgirl nervousness. "I, umm…" I began. "I decided to stick around here a little while." There. I'd said it. This was all officially real.
Without a moment of hesitation, Marlboro Man wrapped his ample arms around my waist. Then, in what seemed to be less than a second, he hoisted me from my horizontal position on the bed of his pickup until we were both standing in front of each other. Scooping me off my feet, he raised me up to his height so his icy blue eyes were level with mine.
"Wait…are you serious?" he asked, taking my face in his hands. Squaring it in front of his. Looking me in the eye. "You're not going?"
"Nope," I answered.
"Whoa," he said, smiling and moving in for a long, impassioned kiss on the back of his Ford F250. "I can't believe it," he continued, squeezing me tightly.
Our knees buckled under the heat, and before I knew it we were back where we'd been before, rolling around and kissing manically in the bed of his diesel pickup. Occasionally my arm would hit a crowbar and my head would slam against a spare tire or a cattle prod or a jack; I didn't care, of course. I'd said what I wanted to say that night. Everything else--even minor head injuries--was a piece of cake.
We stayed there a long, long time, the balmy night air giving us no good reason to leave. Under the innumerable stars, amidst all the embraces and kisses and sounds from the surrounding livestock, I sudde ~ Ree Drummond

Enlighten me, Lord Blackmoor, how should I be wooed, as you put it? I am intrigued by your obvious expertise."
He was quick to respond, "You're too vibrant for them. Too strong. You have a sharp mind and an exciting personality and an unexpected sense of humor. If these men were half the man you deserve, they would have already recognized all those things and they would be romancing you accordingly. They would be working to intrigue and amuse and inspire you
just as you do them. And they would know that only when they have won your mind will they even have a chance at winning your heart."
The room felt much warmer all of a sudden, and Alex resisted the urge to fan herself, trying to ignore the rapid increase in her pulse as color flooded her cheeks. In the silence that followed his impassioned speech, Gavin stood and walked over to her. A cocky grin spread across his face. "That's how I write to the women I hope to interest, Alex. ~ Sarah MacLean

Insomniac is an impassioned work-an inspired amalgam of academic and first-hand research, memoir, analysis, and the kind of obsessive brooding we associate with the insomniac state. Much here is fascinating, and much is upsetting; here is a cri de coeur from a lifetime insomniac that is sure to appeal to the vast army of fellow insomniacs the world over. ~ Joyce Carol Oates

You are the untold story. You are the impassioned truth wanting to scream its existence, to be forever trapped by a strong hand clapped firmly over the mouth of my soul. ~ Henry Rollins

It is rather when
We gloriously forget ourselves, and plunge
Soul-forward, headlong, into a book's profound,
Impassioned for its beauty and salt of truth
'Tis then we get the right good from a book. ~ Elizabeth Barrett Browning

As she walked slowly down the hall, she could hear them arguing - nothing violent, nothing impassioned. But then, she'd not have expected that. Cavendish tempers ran cold, and they were far more likely to attack with a frozen barb than a heated cry. ~ Julia Quinn

There are so many impassioned winemakers. I think there are more impassioned winemakers than chefs. ~ Alain Ducasse

Democracy wasn't a set of dry documents nicely laid out on office stationary - it brimmed in the lips of thousands of souls and debated in dozens of accents as it crossed the street from one neighborhood to the next. It was the smell of stale coffee and bodies packed into an old community center. It was the typos in the fliers. It was exasperation, realization, illumination - a knockdown, drag out, sweaty, tearful, impassioned process of people making decisions together. ~ Rivera Sun

It is quite natural, then, that the solidly unionized professional paraphrast experiences a surge of dull hatred and fear, and in some cases real panic, when confronted with the possibility that a shift in fashion, or the influence of an adventurous publishing house, may suddenly remove from his head the cryptic rosebush he carries or the maculated shield erected between him and the specter of inexorable knowledge. As a result the canned music of rhymed versions is enthusiastically advertised, and accepted, and the sacrifice of textual precision applauded as something rather heroic, whereas only suspicion and bloodhounds await the gaunt, graceless literalist groping around in despair for the obscure word that would satisfy impassioned fidelity and accumulating in the process a wealth of information which only makes the advocates of pretty camouflage tremble or sneer. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

In time, we found a common interest in poetry. He reads nothing else. Day in, day out. Never happier he is than when reading impassioned descriptions of hopeless agony or sundered hearts destroyed by wretchedness. ~ Jane Austen

Just as in the great moment of resignation one does not mediate but chooses, now the task is to gain proficiency in repeating the impassioned choice and, existing, to express it in existence. ~ Soren Kierkegaard

I couldn't stop thinking about that hand, gone mottled seemingly overnight. Even at ninety, his nails were clean and square. Though I'd never watched his hands purposefully, I realized I knew their habitual gestures better than my own: the way the shelf of his pinkie moved crumbs around on the tablecloth while he spoke on the phone; the way he kept his palm on his forehead as he slept, occasionally opening it as if reasoning with someone, or calculating the make on a deal; the way he spat on his fingertips when he was counting money. Sometimes he dismissed things by pushing air away with four fingers, as if hey weren't worth the trouble of an impassioned rejection. Sometimes by smacking the air left to right with the back of his hand. And sometimes, he ridged his hand as if he was about to shake someone else's but then rotated it and opened the fingers slightly in a Yiddish-like gesture that meant Just look at that a*****e. ~ Boris Fishman

The concerto's beauty was even more impassioned than he remembered, and also more piteous and quiet and restrained, and he clasped his hands together to absorb both the grief and joy in his body. ~ Madeleine Thien

In the natural, spontaneous course of events, the first [political] system to arise is monarchy, and this is followed by kingship, but it takes the deliberate correction of the defects of monarchy for it to develop into kingship. Kingship changes into its congenital vice--that is, into tyranny--and then it is the turn of aristocracy, after the dissolution of tyranny, Aristocracy necessarily degenerates into oligarchy, and when the general populace gets impassioned enough to seek redress for the crimes committed by their leaders, democracy is born. And in due course of time, once democracy turns to violating and breaking the law, mob-rule arises and completes the series. ~ Polybius

It becomes your impassioned belief that you can have a conversation and turn this wrongheadedness around. ~ Susan J Elliott

Petty things become unimportant when people are impassioned about a purpose higher than self. ~ Stephen Covey

I no longer wished to have a diluted life, made faint by living according to the norms and values of an older generation who'd forgotten what it felt like to have the impassioned representatives of soul and spirit lobby their vessel with an unrelenting persistence to take them on an adventure. ~ Ken Ilgunas

A good orator is pointed and impassioned. ~ Marcus Tullius Cicero

Stories trace their roots to impassioned human interactions with the world. I always sense a storyline as an emotional yearning embedded in a deep fissure waiting to erupt. ~ Kilroy J. Oldster

William Butler Yeats's "Second Coming" seems perfectly to render our present predicament: "The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity." This is an excellent description of the current split between anaemic liberals and impassioned fundamentalists. "The best" are no longer able to fully engage, while "the worst" engage in racist, religious, sexist fanaticism.
However, are the terrorist fundamentalists, be they Christian or Muslim, really fundamentalists in the authentic sense of the term? Do they really believe? What they lack is a feature that is easy to discern in all authentic fundamentalists, from Tibetan Buddhists to the Amish in the U.S.: the absence of resentment and envy, the deep indifference towards the non-believers' way of life. If today's so-called fundamentalists really believe they have their way to truth, why should they feel threatened by non-believers, why should they envy them? When a Buddhist encounters a Western hedonist, he hardly condemns him. He just benevolently notes that the hedonist's search for happiness is self-defeating. In contrast to true fundamentalists, the terrorist pseudo-fundamentalists are deeply bothered, intrigued, fascinated by the sinful life of the non-believers. One can feel that, in fighting the sinful Other, they are fighting their own temptation. These so-called Christian or Muslim fundamentalists are a disgrace to true fundamentalists.
It is here that Yeats's diagnosis falls short ~ Slavoj Zizek

The spring of 1942 was given over to a very impassioned, strategic debate about where we should first attack in counterpunching against the Germans and Italians. The British argued very persuasively on the part of Winston Churchill, prime minister, that this was a very green American Army, green soldiers, green commanders. ~ Rick Atkinson

I am a spiritual being. After this body is dead, my spirit will soar. I refuse to let what will rot, rule the eternal. I choose self-control. I will be drunk only by joy. I will be impassioned only by my faith. I will be influenced only by God. I will be taught only by Christ. I choose self-control. ~ Max Lucado

Tal was looking at Hank when he said, "Just a moment. I want to hear it one more time."
As they watched, Bernice found her way to Hank and Mary. She began to week openly, and spoke some quiet but impassioned words to them. Hank and Mary listened, as did the others nearby, and as they listened, they began to smile. They put their arms around her, they told her about Jesus, and then they began to weep as well. Finally, as the saints were gathered and Bernice was surrounded with loving arms, Hank said the words, "Let's pray ... ~ Frank E. Peretti

How was it that he could move soldiers to great acts of heroism and sacrifices with impassioned speeches, yet his mouth went as dry as the northern desert when he thought to tell Malinali that he'd enjoyed their afternoon together? ~ T.L. Morganfield

I can't do this anymore, Allie. I can't keep pretending two weeks will be enough." His impassioned voice was barely a whisper. "The thought of you leaving tears me apart, a knife twisting into my soul. ~ Ann Marie Walker

I don't even know how to say it." "You just say it. That's how you say something that's hard. You put one foot in front of the other. You take it step by step. You say the words. There is no magic formula. There is no secret sauce. But there are words," she says emphatically, as if she's delivering an impassioned speech. As if she's saying something that matters deeply to her. "And words are all we have. That's all there really is between people. At the end of the day, we have our actions, and we have our words. And you simply say them." I try them on for size, as if I'm talking about what I did today. Casual, ~ Lauren Blakely

The highly respected macroeconomist Jeffrey Sachs has recently made an impassioned and well-argued case in his book The Price of Civilization that mindfulness needs to be at the heart of any attempt to resolve the major problems we face as a country and, by implication, as a world. ~ Jon Kabat-Zinn

Jesus taught that perseverance is the essential element of prayer. Men must be in earnest when they kneel at God's footstool. Too often we get faint-hearted and quit praying at the point where we ought to begin. We let go at the very point where we should hold on strongest. Our prayers are weak because they are not impassioned by an unfailing and resistless will. ~ Edward McKendree Bounds

Thirdly, the existent individual is impassioned, impassioned with a passionate thought; he is inspired; he is a kind of incarnation of the infinite in the finite. This passion which animates the existent (and this brings us to the fourth characteristic) is what Kierkegaard calls the passion of freedom. ~ Jean-Paul Sartre

On the second floor was the office in which Houston pounded an ancient typewriter with two fingers, always setting an example of unceasing hard work for his admiring students. They had no hint of the fact that their hard-driving dean had contracted tuberculosis while serving as a GI in France in Word War I. Houstan always seemed vibrant and impassioned in the chase for justice as he tried to expose his students to everything relating to the law that might give them an advantage.
...
"I never worked hard until I got to the Howard Law School and met Charlie Houston," Marshal told me. "I saw this man's dedication, his vision, his willingness to sacrifice, and I told myself, 'You either shape up or ship out.' When you are being challenged by a great human being, you know that you can't ship out."
So Houston rescued Marshall and launched him into a career as one of the greatest lawyers in American history. ~ Carl T. Rowan

Flushed with his impassioned gibberish, he saw himself standing alone on the last barrier of civilization. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

Silence accompanies the most significant expressions of happiness and unhappiness: those in love understand one another best when silent, while the most heated and impassioned speech at a graveside touches only outsiders, but seems cold and inconsequential to the widow and children of the deceased. ~ Anton Chekhov

And the fifteenth century was an impassioned age, so ardent and serious in its pursuit of art that it consecrated everything with which art had to ad as a religious object. ~ Walter Pater

Did she think ginger cookies a substitute for impassioned longings and mad, wild, glamorous adventures? ~ L.M. Montgomery

We must express the view, based on our empirical observations, that a substantial number of journalists are ignorant, lazy, opinionated, and intellectually dishonest. The profession is heavily cluttered with aged hacks toiling through a miasma of mounting decrepitude and often alcoholism, and even more so with arrogant and abrasive youngsters who substitute 'commitment' for insight. The product of their impassioned intervention in public affairs is more often confusion than lucidity. ~ Conrad Black

J was white, and a young white man identifying himself as J's cousin and fellow street performer has been deeply involved in the Hollywood and Highland protests against police violence. This led to an impassioned, but respectful debate among participants at a protest on December 7, over whether the movement should use the slogan #BlackLivesMatter or #AllLivesMatter. While most participants agreed that "Black Lives Matter" correctly reflects the overwhelming reality that police forces in the U.S. target Black Americans more than anybody else for harassment, arrest and violence, the LAPD's needless killing of a young white street performer shows that this system will direct its murderous violence against all manner of impoverished and marginalized people. ~ Anonymous

Deep in ourselves resides the religious impulse. Out of the passions of our clay it rises.
We have religion when we stop deluding ourselves that we are self-sufficient, self-sustaining or self-derived.
We have religion when we hold some hope beyond the present, some self-respect beyond our failures.
We have religion when our hearts are capable of leaping up at beauty,
when our nerves are edged by some dream in our heart.
We have religion when we have an abiding gratitude for all that we have received.
We have religion when we look upon people with all their failings and still find in them good; when we look beyond people to the grandeur in nature and to the purpose in our own heart.
We have religion when we have done all that we can, and then in confidence entrust ourselves to the life that is
larger than ourselves. ~ Ralph Helfer