Passion

O Love, O fire! once he drew

 

Without passion man is a mere latent force and possibility, like the flint which awaits the shock of the iron before it can give forth its spark.

I hate and love. You ask, perhaps, how that can be? / I know not, but I feel the agony.

The heart is an organ of fire.

The happiness of a man in this life does not consist in the absence but in the mastery of his passions.

Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.

Each time one loves is the only time that one has ever loved. Difference of object does not alter singleness of passion. It merely intensifies it.

We loved with a love that was more than love.

It’s with my brush that I make love.

You know these things as thoughts, but your thoughts are not your experiences, they are an echo and after-effect of your experiences: as when your room trembles whe na carriage goes past. I however am sitting in the carriage, and often I am the carriage itself.Ina man who thinks like this, the dichotomy between thinking and feeling, intellect and passion, has really disappeared. He feels his thoughts. He can fall in love with an idea. An idea can make him ill.

True poetry, the best of it, is but the ashes of a burnt-out passion.

The other day we had a long discourse with[Lady Orkney] about love; and she told us asaying . . . which I thought excellent, that inmen, desire begets love ; and in women, love begetsdesire .

The madness of love is the greatest of heaven's blessings.

A man who is master of himself can end a sorrow as easily as he can invent a pleasure. I don’t want to be at the mercy of my emotions. I want to use them, to enjoy them, and to dominate them.

Only connect! … Only connect the prose and the passion.

 

In music the passions enjoy themselves.

The passions that motivate you may change, but it is your work in life that is the ultimate seduction.

Passion, whether violent or not, must never be expressed to the point of exciting disgust, and . . . music, even in the most terrible situations, must never offend the ear.

I think that, as life is action and passion, it is required of a man that he should share the passion and action of his time at peril of being judged not to have lived.

 

I see when men love women they give but a little of their lives, but women, when they love, give everything.

Every true passion thinks only of itself.

There is always some madness in love. But there is also always some reason in madness.

Enthusiasm is a volcano on whose top never grows the grass of hesitation.

He was then in his fifty-fourth year, when even in the case of poets, reason and passion begin to discuss a peace treaty and usually conclude it not very long afterwards.