“A man is entitled to only one great passion in a lifetime. Whether it’s music or a profession or a woman, everything else pales in its afterglow. The searing shock so changes one’s chemistry that if the object is lost, the experience can never be repeated. Only anticlimax remains.”
Source: The Hercules Text (1986), Chapter 14 (p. 209)
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Jack McDevitt 125
American novelist, Short story writer 1935Related quotes
“Men experience many passions in a lifetime. One passion drives away the one before it.”
Quoted in Paul Newman: A Life in Pictures, ed. Yann-Brice Dherbier and Pierre-Henri Verlhac (2006), p. 93

Letter by Mozart, as quoted in a journal entry (12 December 1856) The Journal of Eugene Delacroix as translated by Walter Pach (1937), p. 521. The quote is not found in any authentic letter by Mozart.
“The only problem with one-man woman was that he was not a one-woman man.”
Source: I'm In No Mood For Love

1860s, Our Composite Nationality (1869)
Context: The theory that each race of men has some special faculty, some peculiar gift or quality of mind or heart, needed to the perfection and happiness of the whole is a broad and beneficent theory, and, besides its beneficence, has, in its support, the voice of experience. Nobody doubts this theory when applied to animals or plants, and no one can show that it is not equally true when applied to races. All great qualities are never found in any one man or in any one race. The whole of humanity, like the whole of everything else, is ever greater than a part. Men only know themselves by knowing others, and contact is essential to this knowledge. In one race we perceive the predominance of imagination; in another, like the Chinese, we remark its almost total absence. In one people we have the reasoning faculty; in another the genius for music; in another exists courage, in another great physical vigor, and so on through the whole list of human qualities. All are needed to temper, modify, round and complete the whole man and the whole nation.

“The Day Before the Revolution” p. 265 (originally published in Galaxy, August 1974)
Nebula Award for Best Short Story in 1974
Hugo nominee for Best Short Story in 1975
Short fiction, The Wind’s Twelve Quarters (1975)

Alexander Bogdanov, cited in: Kenneth M. Stokes. Paradigm Lost: A Cultural and Systems Theoretical Critique of Political Economy. p. 1995

in Karl Marx and World Literature (1976) by S. S. Prawer, p. 2.
Reflections of a Youth on Choosing an Occupation (1835)

“It is a great good fortune, as Stendhal said, for one “to have his passion as a profession.””
Source: In Praise of Philosophy (1963), p. 4