Quotes About Passion

The caring, protective elements that foster love often block the unselfconsciousness that fuels erotic pleasure.

If you trade passion for stability, you basically trade one fiction for another. Both are products of our imagination.

At one time you pursued Stephanie with great creativity, but no more. There's an assumption—and you're not alone—that we need only pursue what we don't yet possess. The trick is that in order to keep our partner erotically engaged we have to become more seductive, not less.

It's hard to experience desire when you're weighted down by concern.

When we cordon off our erotic interiors, we are left with sex that is truncated, devoid of vibrancy, and not particularly intimate. What people fail to see is that dull, boring sexual relationships are often a consequence of shutting down the imagination in just this way.

Erotic intelligence is about creating distance, then bringing that space to life.

If intimacy grows through repetition and familiarity, eroticism is numbed by repetition. It thrives on the mysterious, the novel, and the unexpected. Love is about having; desire is about wanting. An expression of longing, desire requires ongoing elusiveness. It is less concerned with where it has already been than passionate about where it can still go. But too often, as couples settle into the comforts of love, they cease to fan the flame of desire. They forget that fire needs air.

Some relationships originate in feelings of warmth, tenderness, and nurturance, and the partners choose to remain in these calmer waters. They prefer a love that is built on patience more than on passion. To them, finding serenity in a lasting bond is what counts. There is no one way, and there is no right way.

Today we have sex because we're in the mood, we feel like it—hopefully, with each other; preferably, at the same time; and ideally, with unflagging passion for decades on end.

Passion is unpredictable; it doesn't follow the dictates of cause and effect. What works on Monday might not work on Thursday. The solution is often a surprise, not the result of the kind of work you've been doing until now.

Falling in love, as Francesco Alberoni writes, "rearranges all our priorities, throws the superfluous overboard, projects a glaring light onto what is superficial and instantly discards it.

The romantics refuse a life without passion; they

the élan vital

Instead, many of my patients describe swinging back and forth in a rapid succession of contradictory emotions. "I love you! I hate you! Hold me! Don't touch me! Take your shit and get out! Don't leave me! You scumbag! Do you still love me? Fuck you! Fuck me!" Such a blitz of reactions is to be expected and is likely to go on for some time.

Ralph found himself fantasizing every time they made love: his beloved Sharon kept getting replaced by a seventeen-year-old vixen in a darkened movie theater.

We interpret the lack of sexual interest as proof that women's sexual drive is inherently less strong. Perhaps it would be more accurate to think that it is a drive that needs to be stoked more intensely and more imaginatively—and first and foremost by her, not only by her partner.

Romantics value intensity over stability; realists value security over passion. But both are often disappointed, for few people can live at either extreme.

Call me an idealist, but I believe that love and desire are not mutually exclusive; they just don't always take place a the same time. In fact, security and passion are two separate fundamental human needs that spring from different motives and tend to pull us in different directions.

In my decades of working with couples, I've observed that those who are most successful in keeping the erotic spark alive are those who are comfortable with the mystery in their midst.

The one theme that I hear above all else from those who have bitten into the forbidden apple is this: It makes them feel alive.

These stories make a critical point—many affairs are less about sex than about desire: the desire to feel desired, to feel special, to be seen and connected, to compel attention. All these carry an erotic frisson that makes us feel alive, renewed, recharged. It is more energy than act, more enchantment than intercourse.

Love enjoys knowing everything about you; desire needs mystery. Love likes to shrink the distance that exists between me and you, while desire is energized by it.

At their peak, affairs rarely lack imagination. Nor do they lack desire, abundance of attention, romance, and playfulness. Shared dreams, affection, passion, and endless curiosity—all these are natural ingredients found in the adulterous plot.

Being a mistress suited Rose—in the words of novelist Susan Cheever, "I had my freedom and I was someone else's fantasy.