Passion Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

To whom can I expose the urgency of my own passion?…There is nobody—here among these grey arches, and moaning pigeons, and cheerful games and tradition and emulation, all so skilfully organised to prevent feeling alone.

I know I began as a passion and have ended as a habit, like all husbands.

George Bernard Shaw

Her face was working and twitching with passion, but his looked up at the sky, still quiet, neither angry nor afraid, but a little sad.

Her face seems ravaged by both lightning and hail. But on yours there is something like the promise of a storm: one day passion will burn it to the bone.

Jean-Paul Sartre

The fate of the architect is the strangest of all. How often he expends his whole soul, his whole heart and passion, to produce buildings into which he himself may never enter.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

One should not think slightly of the paradoxical; for the paradox is the source of the thinker's passion, and the thinker without a paradox is like a lover without feeling: a paltry mediocrity.

Søren Kierkegaard

I felt no passion, no jealousy, no nostalgia. I was hollow, clear-headed, clean, and as emotionless as an aluminum pot.

What am I in the eyes of most people — a nonentity, an eccentric, or an unpleasant person — somebody who has no position in society and will never have; in short, the lowest of the low. All right, then — even if that were absolutely true, then I should one day like to show by my work what such an eccentric, such a nobody, has in his heart.
That is my ambition, based less on resentment than on love in spite of everything, based more on a feeling of serenity than on passion.
Though I am often in the depths of misery, there is still calmness, pure harmony and music inside me. I see paintings or drawings in the poorest cottages, in the dirtiest corners. And my mind is driven towards these things with an irresistible momentum.

Vincent van Gogh

Where rose the mountains, there to him were friends;
Where rolled the ocean, thereon was his home;
Where a blue sky, and glowing clime, extends,
He had the passion and the power to roam.

Behind the perfection of a man's style, must lie the passion of a man's soul.

We could have built a colony on the moon and moved on to Mars. We need something larger than ourselves — that's a real religious activity. That's what space travel can be — relating ourselves to the universe. … NASA is to blame — the entire government is to blame — and the end of the Cold War really pulled the plug, draining any passion that remained.

The Indians, whom we call barbarous, observe much more decency and civility in their discourses and conversation, giving one another a fair silent hearing till they have quite done; and then answering them calmly, and without noise or passion. And if it be not so in this civiliz'd part of the world, we must impute it to a neglect in education, which has not yet reform'd this antient piece of barbarity amongst us.

They fight for the sake of ambition, which is so powerful a passion in the human breast that, no matter the rank to which a man may rise, he never abandons it.

Niccolò Machiavelli

There is no passion, more spectral or fantastical than hate, not even its opposite, love, so peoples air, with phantoms, as this madness of the heart.

Medievalism, with its saints and martyrs, its love of self-torture, its wild passion for wounding itself, its gashing with knives, and its whipping with rods - Medievalism is real Christianity, and the medieval Christ is the real Christ.

The artist's life cannot be otherwise than full of conflicts, for two forces are at war within him [or her]-on the one hand, the common human longing for happiness, satisfaction and security in life, and on the other a ruthless passion for creation which may go so far as to override every personal desire... There are hardly any exceptions to the rule that a person must pay dearly for the divine gift of creative fire.

Though written constitutions may be violated in moments of passion or delusion, yet they furnish a text to which those who are watchful may again rally and recall the people; they fix too for the people the principles of their political creed.

Thomas Jefferson

[Memory] is a passion no less powerful or pervasive than love. It is [the ability] to live in more than one world, to prevent the past from fading, and to call upon the future to illuminate it.

Mere communion with nature, mere contact with the free air, exercise a soothing yet strengthening influence on the wearied spirit, calm the storm of passion, and soften the heart when shaken by sorrow to its inmost depths.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

However far-fetched it may sound, experience shows that many neuroses are caused by the fact that people blind themselves to their own religious promptings because of a childish passion for rational enlightenment.

Shakespeare might have met Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in the white streets of London, or seen the serving-men of rival houses bite their thumbs at each other in the open square; but Hamlet came out of his soul, and Romeo out of his passion.

Proud of my broken heart since thou didst break it,
Proud of the pain I did not feel till thee,
Proud of my night since thou with moons dost slake it,
Not to partake thy passion, my humility.

Emily Dickinson

GALILEO:...Knowledge will become a passion and research an ecstasy.

We seek our friend not sacredly, but with an adulterate passion which would appropriate him to ourselves.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

From Bard, to Bard, the frigid Caution crept,
Till Declamation roar'd, while Passion slept.