W. Somerset Maugham Quotes

Passion is very destructive.

This is why dreams can be such dangerous things: they smolder on like a fire does, and sometimes they consume us completely.

What a strange world it is where you can have as much sex as you like but love is taboo. I'm talking about the real thing, the grand passion, which may not allow affection or convenience or happiness. The truth is that love smashes into your life like an ice floe, and even if your heart is built like the Titanic you go down. That's the size of it, the immensity of it. It's not proper, it's not clean, it's not containable.

What I love I destroy. What I destroy, I love.

Jump out the window if you are the object of passion. Flee it if you feel it. Passion goes, boredom remains.

Love makes the most careful man wreckless.

Passion makes idiots of the cleverest men, and makes the biggest idiots clever.

Anything I do, I do fanatically.

I've always been somebody who sort of throws himself, you could say, obsessively into whatever thing I'm passionate about.

Love can make us fiends as well as angels.

Life is beautiful, as long as it consumes you. When it is rushing through you, destroying you, life is gorgeous, glorious. It's when you burn a slow fire and save fuel, that life's not worth having.

Yield to that strange passion which sends you madly whirling round the room.

Passion alone could destroy passion. All the thinking in the world could not make so much as a dent in its surface.

Ambition, like a torrent, ne'er looks back; And is a swelling, and the last affection A high mind can put off; being both a rebel Unto the soul and reason, and enforceth All laws, all conscience, treads upon religion, and offereth violence to nature's self.

Love is every bit as violent and dangerous as murder.

I see love, like art, as an obsession. Maybe that's an overly romantic view of human existence, but I'm an overly romantic human being. If love, like rock and roll, doesn't consume me 24-7, it's not love. It can be respect, appreciation, admiration, wonderment, it can be a world of glory and a lifetime of peace, but I can't call it love. Love burns me and confuses me. Love's a light that can't be extinguished.

I want you bad like a natural disaster. You are all I see. You are the only one I want to know.

With subtle and finely-wrought temperaments it is always so. Their strong passions must either bruise or bend. They either slay the man, or themselves die. Shallow sorrows and shallow loves live on. The loves and the sorrows that are great are destroyed by their own plenitude.

He looked at her Something Turned cancerous He was in love.

Excellent wretch! Perdition catch my soul But I do love thee! and when I love thee not, Chaos is come again.

I am the slave of those who hunger and thirst after me and treat everything else as unimportant.

Like love, destruction can be ecstatic.

What Reason weaves, by Passion is undone.

My only love sprung from my only hate.