Passion versus Responsibility:

The following quotes illustrate the topic's ambiguity.  Use these to establish the scope of your topic--to begin to specify the subtopics that verbalize various differing opinions on the same issue--to begin to develop a guide to your reading.

"Passion is the mob of the man, that commits a riot upon his reason."    William Penn

"Passion, though a bad regulator, is a powerful spring."    Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Passion is universal humanity. Without it religion, history, romance and art would be useless."    Honoré de Balzac

"Our passions are like convulsion fits, which, though they make us stronger for the time, leave us the weaker  ever after."    Jonathan Swift

"Passion persuades me one way, reason another. I see the better and approve it, but I follow the worse."    Ovid (Publius Ovidius Naso) (43 B.C.?A.D. 17/18), Roman poet. Metamorphoses, 7. 19-21.

"For passion, be it observed, brings insight with it; it can give a sort of intelligence to simpletons, fools, and idiots, especially during youth."    Honoré De Balzac (1799?1850), French novelist. Narrator, in A Bachelorís Establishment, originally named Les Célibataires, first part was published as Les Deux Frères in La Presse (1841); included in the Comédie humaine first under the title Un Ménage de Garìon and finally as La Rabo.
 

Barthelme, Donald.  "The Emerald."  The Best American Short Stories  1980. Ed. Stanley Elkin.  Boston, MA:  Houghton Mifflin                  Company,1980. Pages 1-26.
Como, Mario.  "A Farewell to Public Office." Representative American  Speeches 1994-1995. Ed.  Owen Peterson.  NY:  Dublin, 1995. 
Golding, William.  Lord of the Flies.
Puller, Lewis B.  Fortunate Son.  New York:  Grove Weidenfeld, 1991.
Adrienne Rich.  The Introductory Essay to The Work of a Common   Woman by Judy Grahn.
Thoreau, Henry David. Walden and Civil Disobedience.  New York:
New American Library, 1980.
Twain, Mark.  The Adventuresof Huckleberry Finn.