Dissipativity, as a natural mechanism of energy interchange is common to many physical systems that form the basis of modern automated control applications. Over the last decades it has turned out as a useful concept that can be generalized and applied in an abstracted form to very different system setups, including ordinary and partial differential equation models. In this monograph, the basic notions of stability, dissipativity and systems theory are connected in order to establish a common basis for designing system monitoring and control schemes. The approach is illustrated with a set of application examples covering finite and infinite-dimensional models, including a ship steering model, the inverted pendulum, chemical and biological reactors, relaxation oscillators, unstable heat equations and first-order hyperbolic integro-differential equations.