quotations about desire
But how long before this desperate wickedness overruns the qualms of good people? Before the desire for the smell of cooking meat, the softness of flesh, breaks us all?
CHRIS ABANI
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Hands Washing Water
Some desire is necessary to keep life in motion, and he whose real wants are supplied must admit those of fancy.
SAMUEL JOHNSON
The History of Rasselas
To burn with desire and keep quiet about it is the greatest punishment we can bring on ourselves.
FEDERICO GARCIA LORCA
Blood Wedding
A human soul devoid of longing was a soul deformed, deprived of its highest good, sick unto death.
SAUL BELLOW
Ravelstein
When the desire is too much to bear, we often bury it beneath frenzied thoughts and activities or escape it by dulling our immediate consciousness of living. It is possible to run away from the desire for years, even decades, at a time, but we cannot eradicate it entirely. It keeps touching us in little glimpses and hints in our dreams, our hopes, our unguarded moments.
GERALD G. MAY
The Awakened Heart
The grave is sooner cloy'd than men's desire.
FRANCIS QUARLES
Emblems
The strong desires of man's insatiate breast may stand possess'd
Of all that earth can give; but earth can give no rest.
FRANCIS QUARLES
Emblems
We are puppets of our subconscious desires.
CARLOS RUIZ ZAFON
The Shadow of the Wind
Ignore what a man desires and you ignore the very source of his power.
WALTER LIPPMANN
A Preface to Politics
We are ruined, not by what we really want, but by what we think we do.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON
Lacon
Our desires cut across one another, and in this confused existence it is rare for happiness to coincide with the desire that clamoured for it.
MARCEL PROUST
Within a Budding Grove
Desire is the ingredient that changes the hot water of mediocrity to the steam of outstanding success.
ZIG ZIGLAR
See You at the Top
It is said that desire is a product of the will, but the converse is in fact true: will is a product of desire.
DENIS DIDEROT
Elements of Physiology
We are never further from our wishes than when we fancy we possess the object of them.
JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE
The Maxims and Reflections of Goethe
It is of the nature of desire not to be satisfied, and most men live only for the gratification of it.
ARISTOTLE
Politics
The real trouble comes from not knowing what we really want in the first place.
CHARLES DE LINT
"Where Desert Spirits Crowd the Night", The Ivory and the Horn
The first set of facts to be adduced against the common sense view of desire are those studied by psycho-analysis. In all human beings, but most markedly in those suffering from hysteria and certain forms of insanity, we find what are called "unconscious" desires, which are commonly regarded as showing self-deception. Most psycho-analysts pay little attention to the analysis of desire, being interested in discovering by observation what it is that people desire, rather than in discovering what actually constitutes desire. I think the strangeness of what they report would be greatly diminished if it were expressed in the language of a behaviourist theory of desire, rather than in the language of every-day beliefs. The general description of the sort of phenomena that bear on our present question is as follows: A person states that his desires are so-and-so, and that it is these desires that inspire his actions; but the outside observer perceives that his actions are such as to realize quite different ends from those which he avows, and that these different ends are such as he might be expected to desire. Generally they are less virtuous than his professed desires, and are therefore less agreeable to profess than these are. It is accordingly supposed that they really exist as desires for ends, but in a subconscious part of the mind, which the patient refuses to admit into consciousness for fear of having to think ill of himself. There are no doubt many cases to which such a supposition is applicable without obvious artificiality. But the deeper the Freudians delve into the underground regions of instinct, the further they travel from anything resembling conscious desire, and the less possible it becomes to believe that only positive self-deception conceals from us that we really wish for things which are abhorrent to our explicit life.
BERTRAND RUSSELL
The Analysis of Mind
How long can you suppress your own desires? Until you understand that in doing so will destroy yourself.
IVAN KLIMA
Waiting for the Dark
The best joke of all is to give someone just what they've wanted.
TONY BALLANTYNE
Recursion
Desire, like the atom, is explosive with creative force.
PAUL VERNON BUSER
attributed, Webster's Quotations