Quotes About Intensity

I do not wish to give the impression by what I have said that, behind all the intemperance and extravagance of these men, there is not a vein of genuine feeling and even at times of something like real heroism. The trouble is that all this fervor and intensity is wasted on side issues and trivial matters. It does not connect itself with anything that is helpful and constructive. These crusaders, as nearly as I can see, are fighting windmills.

I love you wildly, insanely, infinitely.

A man must live like a great brilliant flame and burn as brightly as he can. In the end he burns out. But this is far better than a mean little flame.

Successful minds work like a gimlet--to a single point.

The best people in a dying culture are the outcasts considered crazy by the leaders; the ones most disillusioned with their own culture. In Yeats' phrase, "the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity." Intense emotional attachment to any value, any virtue, any set of "shoulds" is a disease, a mental illness, a condition of self-murder and cultural assassination.

Steve Jobs was known for the clarity of his insights about what customers wanted, but he was also known for his volatility with coworkers. Apple's founder reportedly fired employees in the elevator and screamed at underperforming executives. Perhaps there is something endemic in the fast-paced technology business that causes this behavior, because such intensity is not exactly rare among its CEOs.

If you're not good, Jeff will chew you up and spit you out. And if you're good, he will jump on your back and ride you into the ground.

During one memorable meeting, a female employee pointedly asked Bezos when Amazon was going to establish a better work-life balance. He didn't take that well. "The reason we are here is to get stuff done, that is the top priority," he answered bluntly. "That is the DNA of Amazon. If you can't excel and put everything into it, this might not be the place for you.

they have an absolute willingness to torch the landscape around them to emerge the winner

Saul Strauss used to be what Gavin would consider committed and passionate in a namby-pamby, Kumbaya-like, eco-green, granola-y, unrealistic sort of way, but more and more, the Sauls of the world had raised their rhetoric to the dangerously hysterical

Times Square is an assault on every sense, and somehow that includes not only scent but taste. Everything is in motion and swirling and you want to give the entire square a giant Adderall. There

Hester walked back and forth. She was a small woman, but she didn't look small. She looked compact and powerful and sort of dangerous. She didn't pace, Tia thought, so much as stalk. She gave off heat, a sense of power. "I

His eyes still had the ice blue of youth, and he aimed them my way.

When the putt dropped into the cup, there was no polite golf clap. The crowd erupted like Vesuvius in the last days.

The fathers in the corner had a group conniption: "Are you kidding me, ref?" "Bad call!" "You gotta be blind!" "That's BS!" "Call them both ways, ref!" The

My kick had landed on Bob's skull with force, jerking his head to the side. Bob's hands instinctively leapt off the steering wheel. The car veered sharply, sending Otto and me—and the gun—into a rolling heap. It was on.

She turned and stared at the young D.A. as though he were a bleeding boar and she was a panther with an industrial-sized case of piles.

But good old Albert, aka Vic, whooped and howled like a Belgian wolfhound getting a glucose enema.

AM said it with the shriek of babies being ground beneath blue–hot rollers.

No one dies halfway through the last act. – Heinrich Ibsen

He was letting you reduce him to the status of a human being." I love you. As you please. Where she would have had a spirited argument only, an exchange of ideas, a clash of hard and different points of view with a friend, with him she had tried to destroy. She had tried to tear him to pieces, to wreck him, to obliterate him. Childe Roland to the dark tower came.

he found something so intensely feminine about her that he fell in love. She was easy to look at and easy to be with most of the time, but she was in no sense of the word an easy person. She was afflicted with a restlessness of spirit he could not guess at, but he knew she was the one for him. He would protect her; he would marry her.

I wasn't in love with her. And she didn't love me. For me the question of love was irrelevant. What I sought was the sense of being tossed about by some raging, savage force, in the midst of which lay something absolutely crucial. I had no idea what that was. But I wanted to thrust my hand right inside her body and touch it, whatever it was.

What I feel for her is a wholly different emotion. It stands and walks on its own, living and breathing and throbbing and shaking me to the roots of my being.