quotations about desire
The real trouble comes from not knowing what we really want in the first place.
CHARLES DE LINT
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"Where Desert Spirits Crowd the Night", The Ivory and the Horn
Natural desires are within bounds; but unnatural lust is infinite.
BENJAMIN WHICHCOTE
Moral and Religious Aphorisms
It is of the nature of desire not to be satisfied, and most men live only for the gratification of it.
ARISTOTLE
Politics
God has given you these desires ... He gives us carnal love for a purpose, for mutual delight, to produce children, and the sanctification of the soul. Cast yourself headlong on God's love, begging His grace to help you in the perfection of the nature He gave you. To love another so deeply that we seek union with the beloved, by that to bring an immortal soul into this world and care for and shape it ... that is to imitate God Himself in His splendor!
S. M. STIRLING
The Sunrise Lands
Whenever we confront an unbridled desire we are surely in the presence of a tragedy-in-the-making.
QUENTIN CRISP
Manners from Heaven
The curtailing of one's desires is the beginning of wisdom; their entire mastery its consumption.
JAMES ALLEN
Byways of Blessedness
Wants, like birds, flutter till they have found a place of rest.
EDWARD COUNSEL
Maxims
Yeah
Lover I'm off the streets
Gonna go where the bright lights
And the big city meet
With a red guitar, on fire
Desire
U2
"Desire", Rattle and Hum
It belongs to the imperfection of everything human that man can only attain his desire by passing through its opposite.
SOREN KIERKEGAARD
The Journals of Soren Kierkegaard
If we go down into ourselves we find that we possess exactly what we desire.
SIMONE WEIL
Gravity and Grace
It is only by frequent deaths of ourselves and our self-centered desires that we can come to live more fully.
MOTHER TERESA
A Gift for God
As long as I have a want, I have a reason for living. Satisfaction is death.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
Overruled
Whatsoever misfortunes there are
Here in this world or in the next,
They all have their root in Ignorance
And in the accumulation of Longing and Desire.
GAUTAMA BUDDHA
Iti-Vuttaka
It is a miserable state of mind to have few things to desire and many things to fear.
FRANCIS BACON
Essays
When we have the means to pay for what we desire, what we get is not so much what is best, as what is costliest.
CHRISTIAN NESTELL BOVEE
Intuitions and Summaries of Thought
Venus, queen of soft desire,
Leading Hymen's happy choir.
ANACREON
"Ode XVIII", Odes
It is the thing that is most remote from the world in which we ourselves live that attracts us most. We are under the spell of what is distant from us. It is not our nature to desire passionately what is near at hand.
ALEC WAUGH
On Doing What One Likes
Plunge into the world, and then, after a time, when you have suffered and enjoyed all that is in it, will renunciation come; then will calmness come. So fulfill your desire for power and everything else, and after you have fulfilled the desire, will come the time when you will know that they are all very little things; but until you have fulfilled this desire, until you have passed through that activity, it is impossible for you to come to the state of calmness, serenity, and self-surrender.
VIVEKANANDA
The Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda
Desire rules over men, those half-gods vain,
And is the tyrant of their heart and brain.
FERNAND GREGH
"Desire"
Very often one “pushes away” the very thing that one most wants to grab, like a lover. This is a common, although distressing, psychological mechanism, having to do (in my opinion) with the fact that what is presented is not presented “purely”, that there is a little canker or grim place in it somewhere.
DONALD BARTHELME
"Rebecca"