Noun: ardour
Pronunciation: (aa-du(r))
Ardour meaning:
- Intense feeling of love
- A feeling of strong eagerness (usually in favour of a person or cause)
- Feelings of great warmth and intensity
Synonyms: ardor, elan, zeal, fervour, fervidness, fervency
Derived forms: ardours
Quotations: Abigail Adams – Learning is not attained by chance, it must be sought for with ardour and diligence.
Emma Goldman – The idealists and visionaries, foolish enough to throw caution to the winds and express their ardour and faith in some supreme deed, have advanced mankind and have enriched the world.
Wallace Stevens – It is the unknown that excites the ardour of scholars, who, in the known alone, would shrivel up with boredom.
Henry Beston – The quality of life, which in the ardour of spring was personal and sexual, becomes social in midsummer.
Propertius – Among absent lovers, ardour always fares better.
Charles Baudelaire – It is unfortunately very true that, without leisure and money, love can be no more than an orgy of the common man. Instead of being a sudden impulse full of ardour and reverie, it becomes a distastefully utilitarian affair.
Sample sentences:
- Ardour is the quality that distinguishes love without knowledge.
- If you work with zeal and ardour till the night, you can only make the wasted moments right.
- How little praise warms out of a man the good that is in him, as the sneer of contempt which he feels is unjust chill the ardour to excel.
- Nearly four decades later, his ardour has hardly dimmed. Mr. Hanks starred in the film Apollo 13.
- Whenever our life is stirred by truth, it expresses energy and comes to be filled, as it were, with a creative ardour. This consciousness of the creative urge is evidence of the force of truth on our mind.
- One pits his wits against apparently inscrutable nature, wooing her with ardour but nature is blind justice who cannot recognize personal identity.
- Children are remarkable for their intelligence and ardour, for their curiosity, their intolerance of shams, the clarity and ruthlessness of their vision.
- He is very fond of me, almost too fond. I could do with less caressing and more rationality. I should like to be less of a pet and more of a friend, if I might choose; but I won’t complain of that. I am only afraid his affection loses in depth where it gains in ardour. I sometimes liken it to a fire of dry twigs and branches compared with one of solid coal, very bright and hot; but if it should burn itself out and leave nothing but ashes behind.
- She perceived it every time he looked at her. He was not demonstrative, but his ardour was all the more evident for the reins with which he restrained it, the mask of steel behind which he imprisoned it, his detached demeanour and deliberate gestures that, far from parading a lack of interest, displayed the strength of his self-discipline, that he could so tightly curb the intensity of his passion.
- For in the multitude of middle-aged men who go about their vocations in a daily course determined for them much in the same way as the tie of their cravats, there is always a good number who once meant to shape their own deeds and alter the world a little. The story of their coming to be shapen after the average and fit to be packed by the gross, is hardly ever told even in their consciousness; for perhaps their ardour in generous unpaid toil cooled as imperceptibly as the ardour of other youthful loves, till one day their earlier self walked like a ghost in its old home and made the new furniture ghastly. Nothing in the world more subtle than the process of their gradual change!
- The surge of his ardour swept through him in climatic release, filling her womb with his final, mortal sowing.
- It was a strange staging for death, for the woman on the high bed was dying. Slowly, fighting every inch of the way with a grim tenacity, but indubitably dying. Her vital ardour had sunk below the mark from which it could rise again, and was now ebbing as water runs from a little crack in a pitcher.
- The mysteries of a universe made of drops of fire and clods of mud do not concern us in the least. The fate of humanity condemned ultimately to perish from cold is not worth troubling about. If you take it to heart it becomes an unendurable tragedy. If you believe in improvement you must weep, for the attained perfection must end in cold, darkness and silence. In a dispassionate view the ardour for reform, improvement for virtue, and knowledge, and even for beauty is only a vain sticking up for appearances as though one were anxious about the cut of one’s clothes in a community of blind men.
- For in this respect love is not like war; after the battle is ended we renew the fight with keener ardour, which we never cease to intensify the more thoroughly we are defeated, provided always that we are still in a position to give battle.
- In proportion as the machine is improved and performs man’s work with an ever increasing rapidity and exactness, the labourer, instead of prolonging his former rest times, redoubles his ardour, as if he wished to rival the machine.
- For my part, the more I went forward in the study of letters, and ever more easily, the greater became the ardour of my devotion to them, until in truth I was so enthralled by my passion for learning that, gladly leaving to my brothers the pomp of glory in arms, the right of heritage and all the honours that should have been mine as the eldest born, I fled utterly from the court of Mars that I might win learning in the bosom of Minerva.
- We kissed, then, and the ardour of her kiss stole my breath away. I returned her passion with all the fervour I possessed. A lifetime of vows and heart-felt disciplines had prepared me well, for in that kiss I sealed with all my soul the fate before me, embracing a mystery clothed in warm and yielding female flesh. Holding only the moment, with neither neither thought nor care for the future, I kissed her, and drank deep the strong wine of desire.
- If words had cost money, Tom couldn’t have used them more sparingly. The adjectives were purely descriptive, relating to form and colour, and were used to present the objects under consideration, not the young explorer’s emotions. Yet through this austerity one felt the kindling imagination, the ardour and excitement of the boy, like the vibration in a voice when the speaker strives to conceal his emotion by using only the conventional phrases.
- No, you are not worthy of the love which I have devoted to you. I knew all along that the prize I had set my life on was not worth the winning; that I was a fool, with fond fancies, too, bartering away my all of truth and ardour against your little feeble remnant of love. I will bargain no more.
- Every mental pursuit takes its reality and worth from the ardour of the pursuer.