Passion

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.

 

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

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

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

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.

O Love, O fire! once he drew

 

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

 

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.

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 .

Every true passion thinks only of itself.

It’s with my brush that I make love.

The heart is an organ of fire.

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

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.

It is true: we love life, not because we are used to living but because we are used to loving.There is always a certain madness in love. But also there is always a certain method in madness.

In music the passions enjoy themselves.

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.

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

We loved with a love that was more than love.

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

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.

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

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