quotations about passion
The intensity of passion often defies logic. Gripped by its urgency, you feel the heat in your bones. It's an intoxicating drive that can only be appeased with action.
SAMUEL MPAMUGO
"Raw passion can harm go-getters", The Kenya Star, November 19, 2016
I began to realize how important it was to be an enthusiast in life.... If you are interested in something, no matter what it is, go at it at full speed ahead. Embrace it with both arms, hug it, love it and above all become passionate about it. Lukewarm is no good. Hot is no good either. White hot and passionate is the only thing to be.
ROALD DAHL
My Uncle Oswald
Give me to drink the poison of thy breast--
Dark cruel wine from grapes of passion pressed--
Till I am drunk beyond delirium's dream
In that dim utter deep where men may rest.
ELSA BARKER
"The Garden of Rose and Rue", The Book of Love
For the passions of men, which asunder are moderate, as the heat of one brand, in assembly are like many brands that enflame one another, (especially when they blow one another with orations) to the setting of the commonwealth on fire, under pretense of counseling it.
THOMAS HOBBES
Leviathan
Between two beings susceptible of love, the duration of passion is in proportion to the original resistance of the woman, or to the obstacles which the accidents of social life put in the way of your happiness.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Physiology of Marriage
The awful daring of a moment's surrender
Which an age of prudence can never retract
By this, and this only, we have existed.
T. S. ELIOT
The Waste Land
My fault, my failure, is not in the passions I have, but in my lack of control of them.
ALLEN GINSBERG
journal, July 30, 1947
While the happiest retirees have a passion, they leave enough room in their lives for the other spokes of the wheel.
LARRY JACOBSON
"The happiest retirees have learned this lesson", Market Watch, November 23, 2016
What is passion? It is surely the becoming of a person. Are we not, for most of our lives, marking time? Most of our being is at rest, unlived. In passion, the body and the spirit seek expression outside of self. Passion is all that is other from self. Sex is only interesting when it releases passion. The more extreme and the more expressed that passion is, the more unbearable does life seem without it. It reminds us that if passion dies or is denied, we are partly dead and that soon, come what may, we will be wholly so.
JOHN BOORMAN
Projections
Those who have had great passions often find all their lives made miserable in being cured of them.
FRANÇOIS DE LA ROCHEFOUCAULD
Reflections; or Sentences and Moral Maxims
Passion should not, in theory, offer any advantage, but should merely level out the playing field and make sport the spectacle that it so often is; passion is simply an inherently natural part of sport, it is not as the media hype train would like to argue, a phenomenon that raises its head only at those particularly heated derbies and grudge matches.
ADAM HILSENRATH
"The fundamentals of sporting passion", Cherwell Online, December 4, 2016
Men who act under dishonest passions are like men riding fierce horses: they cannot stop when they will, and they ride to ruin.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
It is only with the passions of others that we are ever really familiar, and what we come to discover about our own can only be learned from them.
MARCEL PROUST
Swann's Way
In the human heart there is a perpetual generation of passions; so that the ruin of one is almost always the foundation of another.
FRANÇOIS DE LA ROCHEFOUCAULD
Reflections; or Sentences and Moral Maxims
The greatest mania of all is passion: and I am a natural slave to passion: the balance between my brain and my soul and my body is as wild and delicate as the skin of a Ming vase.
HUNTER S. THOMPSON
The Curse of Lono
If passion is a drug, your startup should be OD'ing on it all the time! If there's something you aren't passionate about, it's really hard to come to work, feel motivated, and full of energy. So, passion is almost an underlying requirement to form great culture as people driven by passion are usually able to do well even in new domains and uncharted territories.
VINOD MUTHUKRISHNAN
"Culture begets success. Or does it?", Your Story, December 10, 2016
We have no more control over the duration of our passions than we do over the duration of our life.
FRANÇOIS DE LA ROCHEFOUCAULD
Reflections; or Sentences and Moral Maxims
Passion is a sort of fever in the mind, which ever leaves us weaker than it found us.... It more than anything deprives us of the use of our judgment; for it raises a dust very hard to see through. Like wine, whose lees fly by being jogg'd, it is too muddy to drink.
WILLIAM PENN
Some Fruits of Solitude
The man who will not give up his passions, who clings to anger, unkindness, sensuality, pride, vanity self-indulgence, for the momentary pleasure which their gratification affords him is a spiritual miser; he cannot have any spiritual comforts.
JAMES ALLEN
Byways of Blessedness
Passion doth sometimes whirl the torch of Love, lest into Friendship fade the waning flame.
RICHARD GARNETT
De Flagello Myrtes