quotations about passion
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
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
The passions refuse to be organized on a basis of their own; hostile to personal freedom and one another, they rush precipitately into anarchy and mob rule.
AMOS BRONSON ALCOTT
Table Talk
Who does not believe his first passion eternal?
WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY
The Virginians
There are moments when our passions speak and decide for us ... like a fire kindled within our being to which everything else in us is mere fuel.
GEORGE ELIOT
Romola
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
If love is a child, passion is a man.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Physiology of Marriage
Most marriages recognize this paradox: Passion destroys passion; we want what puts an end to wanting what we want.
JOHN FOWLES
The Aristos: A Self-Portrait in Ideas