Key Difference:  Passion is an emotion of intense feelings. These strong feelings can be about a person or a thing, whereas lust can be defined as a passionate desire or craving that primarily focuses on pleasing itself.

Both passion and lust deal with the strong emotions. Passion has been derived from Latin verb ‘pati’ meaning ‘to suffer’. Passion is strongly related with enthusiasm. If someone is passionate about something then he will definitely be equally enthusiastic about it. It can be a positive attraction or love. Passion makes you livelier and gives you reasons to work hard to fulfill the desire to live with the passion. A phrase like: “I am passionate about my work" conveys that the person enjoys his work and is always enthusiastic about the job. Passion always excites the deepest emotions of a person and he gets livelier.

Passion can be for a lover, for a car, for a job, anything. It is usually used in context to positive emotions. Passion means focusing your energy for the things that excite you. Love and passion go hand in hand. Passion develops interest, and if this interest is channeled properly then it can lead to great results. A person, who does things with passion, enjoys performing passion related tasks. Passion also makes you restless at times especially when you are facing any trouble about the things you are passionate about. In such a situation, one needs to be careful and find out the solution rather than turning it into a negative feeling.

Lust is a kind of craving or a great desire. It is important to mention that the definition of lust does not indicate anything negative about it, but as lust creeps into the minds, it tends to grow into a negative emotion and thus this is the way it is generally perceived in the society.  Crave or desire may or may not be logical or reasonable. It is usually associated with a strong desire of a sexual nature. Lust focuses on pleasing oneself. Lust can be the reason of certain actions with no regard to the consequences or results. Lust is usually associated with a negative emotion as it is overpowered by selfishness. Lust craves for things that bring personal enjoyment to it and it hardly considers about the other things that may get sorely affected by it.

Passion is regarded as a positive feeling. It depicts love, enthusiasm, excitement and zeal, whereas lust is supposed to be primarily guided by greed. Lust is all about possession. The craving is so intense that the person forgets to think about consequences and is just motivated to conquer or to achieve the subject of interest. Passion also craves for the subject of interest but it considers the consequences and is not guided primarily by greed. Passion is primarily guided by self-happiness. Now, one can say that both passion and lust aims to achieve self-happiness.  Yes, it is right but lust can even reach to sins in order to achieve happiness whereas passion becomes cautious at this stage.  A person lives with the passion throughout his life and even after achieving that moment of possessing, the person is still equally interested in the thing, whereas in lust, it may totally disappear after the fulfillment of desire. Another major difference between the two is that passion gets attached with other positive emotions, whereas lust segregates itself from other emotions and thus gets stronger day by day. Lust rarely recalls the moments after the desire is completed, whereas passion retains memory of every moment related to it.

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