See Also: DESIRE, LOVE, SEX

1. As passionate as shredded wheat —Lawrence Gilman
2. The echoes of passion in the emptiness of a lonely heart is like the murmurings of wind and water in the silence of the wilderness —Francois Rene de Chateaubriand
3. Genuine passion is like a mountain stream; it admits of no impediment; it cannot go backward; it must go forward —Christian Nestell Bovee
4. Hot as a forty-balled tomcat —Rita Mae Brown
5. Instant passion is like instant coffee; it’s cheap and it’s quick and it makes you wish you had a percolator —Carla Lane, dialogue for heroine of English television sit-com “Solo,” broadcast April 7, 1987
6. Our passions are in truth, like the phoenix. The old one burns away, the new one rises out of its ashes at once —Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
7. Our passions are like convulsion fits, which, though they make us stronger for the time, leave us the weaker ever after —Jonathan Swift
8. Our world passions are like so many lawyers wrangling and brawling at a bar —Owen Feltham

   The comparison continues as follows: “Discretion is the lord-keeper of man that sits as judge, and moderation their contestations.”

9. The passionate are like men standing on their heads; they see all things the wrong way —Plato
10. Passionate men, like fleet hounds, are apt to over-run the scent —H. G. Bohn’s Handbook of Proverbs
11. Passion burned through her like a sunrise —Ellen Glasgow
12. Passion is like crime; it does not thrive on the established order —Thomas Mann
13. Passion is like genius: a miracle —Romain Rolland
14. Passionless as a clam —Gertrude Atherton
15. Passion … like a fire on the prairie that devours everything around it —W. Somerset Maugham
16. Passion … like other violent excitements … throws up not only what is best, but what is worst and smallest, in men’s characters —Robert Louis Stevenson
17. Passions and desires, like the two twists of a rope, mutually mix one with the other, and twine inextricably round the heart —Richard E. Burton
18. Passions are like fire and water, good servants but bad masters —Alexander Pope
19. Passions are like fire, useful in a thousand ways and dangerous only in one, through their excess —Francois due de La Rochefoucauld
20. Passions are like the trout in a pond: one devours the others until only one fat old trout is left —Otto von Bismarck
21. A passion that had moved into his body, like a stranger —Arthur Miller
22. Passion … went over him like an ocean wave —Jean Stafford

    At another point in her novel, The Mountain Lion, Stafford used the ocean waves comparison to describe the powerful smell of flowers.