quotations about desire
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
From the unknown, profound desires enter in upon us, and ... the fulfilling of those desires is the fulfilling of creation.
D. H. LAWRENCE
"Love"
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
Those who restrain desire do so because theirs is weak enough to be restrained.
WILLIAM BLAKE
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
People who constantly find new disguises for their desires can easily lie to themselves.
HANS-ULRICH RIEKER
The Secret of Meditation
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
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
The desire of the righteous ends only in good, but the hope of the wicked in wrath.
KING SOLOMON
Proverbs 11:23
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
To the soul's desires
The body listens
What the flesh requires
Keeps the heart imprisoned
DEPECHE MODE
"When the Body Speaks"
We should not desire the impossible.
LEONARDO DA VINCI
Thoughts on Art and Life
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
'Tis much easier to suppress a first desire, than to satisfy all those that follow it.
FRANÇOIS DE LA ROCHEFOUCAULD
Moral Maxims
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
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
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
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
What desire can be contrary to nature, since it was given to man by nature itself?
MICHEL FOUCAULT
Madness & Civilization
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