Quotes about Passion

Find your passion, learn how to add value to it, and commit to a lifetime of learning.

The Soul is a house...Let it burn!

From its abstractionist posture, intellectualism typically conveys the impression that it is chiefly or only from passion that rationality can suffer; the folk-wisdom among rationalists is that emotion is the primary pollutant obstructing rational processes. But it is also, and far more pertinently in our age, from apathy that rationality suffers: when people do not care enough to think about received opinions, when they have no inherent drive to dissociate themselves from the dogmas and biases of their age, when their own freedom and the transcendence of the truth mean so little to them that they will not endure the painful task of self-reflection, when the very scale or profundity of problems the modern age has generated invite a defeatist attitude, then indeed it is truer than ever what Kierkegaard wrote a century and a half ago: "What the age needs is passion," not barbaric but sublimated energy. Hegel's truism about history--that "nothing great is ever accomplished without passion"--explains a great deal about our effete culture, our sterile education and stagnant politics. Like Marx and Nietzsche, Kierkegaard and Hegel wrote out of a prodigious reservoir of passion that did not in the least prevent them from being critical and rational. In our present era--wracked by a morbid boredom and an unshakeable conviction that there is nothing worth learning and preserving--I believe the lesson is clear. Difficult and risky as it may be, heat as well as light is called for.

All human actions have one or more of these seven causes: chance, nature, compulsion, habit, reason, passion, and desire.

"Today a new sun rises for me; everything lives, everything is animated, everything seems to speak to me of my passion, everything invites me to cherish it."

There is a vitality, a life force, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and there is only one of you in all time. This expression is unique, and if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium; and be lost. The world will not have it.

It is not your business to determine how good it is, not how it compares with other expression. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open. You have to keep open and aware directly to the urges that motivate you. Keep the channel open.

No artist is pleased. There is no satisfaction whatever at any time. There is only a queer, divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the others.

The Creative Impulse

When spirit took the leap from formlessness to form, from nothing to something, from being to becoming, it emerged from emptiness as the creative impulse—the urge to become, the desire to exist. This creative impulse expresses itself at all levels of the human experience. Any human being can locate it at the lowest level of their being—at the gross physical level—as the sexual impulse, which is really the presence or movement of the big bang as a biological imperative. But at higher levels of being, humans are the only life forms we know of that are compelled to innovate and to create. We can see this especially in individuals who are pioneers in their fields, whether they are great philosophers, musicians, artists, politicians, or poets. Most individuals who are deeply talented are driven by a sense of urgency, an ecstatically urgent sense that “I must bring into life this potential that I see and experience in the depths of my own being. This must come through me.” If we get to know them, we will usually find that truly great human beings are driven by a passion that transcends their separate self-sense. And in the way I understand it, the highest expression of this creative impulse is the urge to evolve at the level of consciousness itself.

Graze on my lips; and if those hills be dry,
Stray lower, where the pleasant fountains lie.

A life without passion is not living, it's merely existing

Seek patience
and passion
in equal amounts.
 
Patience alone
will not build the temple.
 
Passion alone
will destroy its walls.

Wake up your senses, come to your senses and, in turn, you may fire up your passion in all areas of your life!

I have no special talents.  I am passionately curious.

" A woman practices the art of adventure when she breaks the chain of routine and renews her life through reading new books, trraveling to new places, making new friends, taking up new hobbies, and adopting new viewpoints."

I get to play golf for a living. What more can you ask for - getting paid for doing what you love.

When the first chakra is disconnected from the feminine Earth, we can feel orphaned and motherless.  The masculine principle predominates, and we look for security from material things.  Individuality prevails over relationship, and selfish drives triumph over family, social and global responsibility.  The more separated we become from the Earth, the more hostile we become to the feminine.  We disown our passion, our creativity, and our sexuality.  Eventually the Earth itself becomes a baneful place.  I remember being told by a medicine woman in the Amazon, "Do you know why they are really cutting down the rain forest?  Because it is wet and dark and tangled and feminine.

Love is TANGO and TANGO is love! Yes, it is a dance, yet so much more then just any dance. It is an ongoing conversation between two souls, two hearts and two bodies. It is a sacred dance we enter in with one another, where both "masculine" and "feminine" feel fuly expressed and honored.

All true language is incomprehensible, like the chatter of a beggar's teeth.

A frenzied passion for art is a canker that devours everything else.

"Riding a horse is not a gentle hobby, to be picked up and laid down like a game of Solitaire.  It is a grand passion."

A poet, is before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language. 

Know that there's enough room for everyone
to be passionate, creative & successful.
In fact, there's more than room for everyone;
there is a need for everyone.

If you love your company and love what you do, you will serve your customers better—period!

Do what you love, but be damned sure it’s profitable.  If you do work you love, but it doesn’t generate income, your business will fail.  If you do work you hate, but it generates income, your health will fail… and your business along with it.  If you can’t do what you love and make it profitable, you’ve either got a hobby or a headache, not a sustainable business.  Don’t settle for anything less than passion and profit.

Passion begins with a burden and a split-second moment, when you understand something like never before. That burden is on those who know. Those who don't know are at peace. Those of us who do know get disturbed and are forced to take action.

"Don't ask yourself what the world needs. Ask yourself what makes you come alive, and go do that, because what the world needs is people who have come alive."

The passion in our nature urges a human being to choose "the one precious thing," and urges him to pay for it through poverty, conflict, deprivation, labor, and endurance of anger from rejected divinities. It is the warrior that enables the human being to decide to become a musician only, or a poet only, or a doctor only, or a hermit only, or a painter only. It is the lover in a man or woman who loves the one precious thing, and tells him what it is; but it is the warrior in Rembrandt or Mirabai who agrees to endure the suffering the choice entails.

I'm a maniacal perfectionist. And if I weren't, I wouldn't have this company.... I have proven that being a perfectionist can be profitable and admirable when creating content across the board: in television, books, newspapers, radio, videos.

Ideally, since 80 percent of your life is spent working, you should start your business around something that is a passion of yours. If you're into kite-surfing and you want to become an entrepreneur, do it with kite-surfing.

Look, if you can indulge in your passion, life will be far more interesting than if you're just working. You'll work harder at it, and you'll know more about it. But first you must go out and educate yourself on whatever it is that you've decided to do - know more about kite-surfing than anyone else. That's where the work comes in. But if you're doing things you're passionate about, that will come naturally.

What was the first business idea you came up with?

I set up this magazine called Student when I was 16, and I didn't do it to make money - I did it because I wanted to edit a magazine. There wasn't a national magazine run by students, for students. I didn't like the way I was being taught at school. I didn't like what was going on in the world, and I wanted to put it right.

Of course, a lot of businesses want to reach students, so I funded the magazine by selling advertising. I sold something like $8,000 worth of advertising for the first edition, and that was in 1966. I printed up 50,000 copies, and I didn't even have to charge for them on the newsstand because my costs were already covered.

So I became a publisher by mistake - well, not quite by mistake, because I wanted to be an editor but I had to make sure the magazine would survive. The point is this: Most businesses fail, so if you're going to succeed, it has to be about more than making money.

Nothing great in the world has been accomplished without passion.