Quotes About Passion

The test of a vocation is the love of the drudgery it involves.

Work is love made visible. And if you cannot work with love but only with distaste, it is better that you should leave your work and sit at the gate of the temple and take alms of those who work with joy.

The road to happiness lies in two simple principles: find what it is that interests you and that you can do well, and when you find it, put your whole soul into it-every bit of energy and ambition and natural ability you have.

It is only when I am doing my work that I feel truly alive. It is like having sex.

After fifty years of living, it occurs to me that the most significant thing that people do is go to work, whether it is to go to work on their novel or at the assembly plant or fixing somebody's teeth.

The fun of being alive is realizing that you have a talent and you can use it every day, so it grows stronger. ... And if you're in an atmosphere where this talent is appreciated instead of just tolerated, why, it's just as good as sex.

If a man is called to be a streetsweep-er, he should sweep streets even as Michelangelo painted, or Beethoven composed music or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will pause to say, here lived a great streetsweeper who did his job well.

One should stick to the sort of thing for which one was made; I tried to be an herbalist, whereas I should keep to the butcher's trade.

Work is creativity accompanied by the comforting realization that one is bringing forth something really good and necessary, with a conviction that a sudden, arbitrary cessation would cause a sensitive void, produce a loss.

Whenever it is possible, a boy should choose some occupation which he should do even if he did not need the money.

I love Mickey Mouse more than any woman I've ever known.

Give me a man who sings at his work.

Many a fervid man writes books as cold and flat as graveyard stones.

To write is to become disinterested. There is a certain renunciation in art.

For a dyed-in-the-wool author nothing is as dead as a book once it is written ... she is rather like a cat whose kittens have grown up. While they were a-growing she was passionately interested in them but now they seem hardly to belong to her - and probably she is involved with another batch of kittens as I am involved with other writing.

Life cannot defeat a writer who is in love with writing - for life itself is a writer's love until death.

It has been said that writing comes more easily if you have something to say.

I've put my genius into my life; I've only put my talent into my works.

I have cultivated my hysteria with joy and terror.

You have to throw yourself away when you write.

How can you write if you can't cry?

Zeal is very blind, or badly regulated, when it encroaches upon the rights of others.

Blind zeal can only do harm.

My zeal hath consumed me.