quotations about desire
People who constantly find new disguises for their desires can easily lie to themselves.
HANS-ULRICH RIEKER
The Secret of Meditation
'Tis much easier to suppress a first desire, than to satisfy all those that follow it.
FRANÇOIS DE LA ROCHEFOUCAULD
Moral Maxims
Desire is the source of our most noble aspirations and our deepest sorrows. The pleasure and the pain go together; indeed, they emanate from the same region in our hearts. We cannot live without the yearning, and yet the yearning sets us up for disappointment--sometimes deep and devastating disappointment.
JOHN ELDREDGE
Desire
Human nature, at its best, had always been based on a deep heroic restlessness, on wanting something--something else, something more, whether it be true love or a glimpse just beyond the horizon. It was the promise of happiness, not the attainment of it, that had driven the entire engine, the folly and glory of who we are.
WILL FERGUSON
Happiness
Men will gamble and plot and fight and fall, all for the winning of a trophy. A woman's heart, a piece of land, a kingdom, a lordship, a contract, a ship, an egg -- it hardly matters the which or the what, as soon as it is seen to be desired by one, another will make a prize of it.
JEANETTE WINTERSON
The Stone Gods
From the unknown, profound desires enter in upon us, and ... the fulfilling of those desires is the fulfilling of creation.
D. H. LAWRENCE
"Love"
We abandon the most important journey of our lives when we abandon desire. We leave our hearts by the side of the road and head off in the direction of fitting in, getting by, being productive, what have you. Whatever we might gain--money, position, the approval of others, or just absence of the discontent itself--it's not worth it.
JOHN ELDREDGE
Desire
We should not desire the impossible.
LEONARDO DA VINCI
Thoughts on Art and Life
The first and most practical step in getting what one wants in this world is wanting it. One would think that the next step would be expressing what one wants. But it almost never is. It generally consists in wanting it still harder.
GERALD STANLEY LEE
Crowds
Passing into higher forms of desire, that which slumbered in the plant, and fitfully stirred in the beast, awakes in the man.
HENRY GEORGE
Progress and Poverty
Everything that is in agreement with our personal desires seems true; everything that is not puts us in a rage.
ANDRÉ MAUROIS
An Art of Living
That is the worst moment, when you feel you have lost
The desires for all that was most desirable,
Before you are contented with what you can desire;
Before you know what is left to be desired;
And you go on wishing that you could desire
What desire has left behind. But you cannot understand.
How could you understand what it is to feel old?
T. S. ELIOT
The Cocktail Party
The desire of the righteous ends only in good, but the hope of the wicked in wrath.
KING SOLOMON
Proverbs 11:23
If men could regard the events of their lives with more open minds, they would frequently discover that they did not really desire the things they failed to obtain.
ANDRÉ MAUROIS
The Art of Living
As all-consuming as a young girl's fancies were ... a woman's desires could be twice as dangerous.
TERESA MEDEIROS
The Vampire Who Loved Me
It is not poverty which produces sorrow, but desire.
EPICTETUS
Fragments
The central fire is desire, and all the powers of our being are given us to see, to fight for, and to win the object of our desire. Quench that fire and man turns to ashes.
BASIL W. MATURIN
Laws of the Spiritual Life
Each person discovers a field of allurements, the totality of which bears the unique stamp of that person's personality. Destiny unfolds in the pursuit of individual fascinations and interests ... By pursuing your allurements, you help bind the universe together. The unity of the world rests on the pursuit of passion.
BRIAN SWIMME
The Universe is a Green Dragon
Man is the only animal whose desires increase as they are fed; the only animal that is never satisfied.
HENRY GEORGE
Progress and Poverty
We are encouraged to believe, for example, that there are consensual objects of desire, that every man wants a certain woman. Well, actually, every man doesn't want that certain woman. The really frightening thing about desire is how idiosyncratic it is. We may desire people whom we might not like, or want, or whom other people might not think beautiful. So idiosyncratic is it that we want to pool this feeling, foreclose it, into consensual objects. The culture is encouraging the belief that there's more consensus than there in fact is.
ADAM PHILLIPS
Bomb Magazine, fall 2010