quotations about desire
As long as I have a want, I have a reason for living. Satisfaction is death.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
Overruled
It is easy for desire to be caught like a bird in a net, its wings fouled and twisted, no longer free to cross back and forth between silence and word. Desire may also find itself so amputated by tradition and community that it wanders in a void with nothing to orient it, to shape or discipline it. Desire must find ways to navigate its bitter and sweet paradox: it moves toward but also always through and beyond every object.
WENDY FARLEY
The Wounding and Healing of Desire
It would be helpful if the universe would give us one big clue, or a giant compass, if you will, pointing to the direction we should be taking. In fact, the compass is there. To find it, you need only look inside yourself to discover your soul's purest desire, its dream for your life.
DEEPAK CHOPRA
The Spontaneous Fulfillment of Desire
Large natures have usually large desires, and only the small are satisfied with the small.
CHRISTIAN NESTELL BOVEE
Intuitions and Summaries of Thought
Natural desires are within bounds; but unnatural lust is infinite.
BENJAMIN WHICHCOTE
Moral and Religious Aphorisms
We cannot be free of nagging desires through suppression. This is like trying to keep a rubber boat beneath the water. But we remove compulsive desires altogether by understanding their nature.
VERNON HOWARD
attributed, Treasury of Spiritual Wisdom
Desire rules over men, those half-gods vain,
And is the tyrant of their heart and brain.
FERNAND GREGH
"Desire"
Man's many desires are like the small metal coins he carries about in his pocket. The more he has the more they weight him down.
SATYA SAI BABA
Sai Baba: Man of Miracles
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
The man of desire needs the promise of reward to urge him to action. He is as a child working for the possession of a toy.
JAMES ALLEN
Byways of Blessedness
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"
She's the candle burnin' in my room
Yeah, I'm like the needle
The needle and spoon
Over the counter, with a shotgun
Pretty soon, everybody's got one
I'm in a fever, when I'm beside her
Desire
Desire
U2
"Desire"
Always there is desire,
only the shape
of what is desired shifts,
each love giving way to another.
JANE HIRSHFIELD
"Lullabye"
If I cross the line
If I run this red light
I can't help myself
Gotta satisfy my desire
HOLLY VALANCE
"Desire", State of Mind
If we go down into ourselves we find that we possess exactly what we desire.
SIMONE WEIL
Gravity and Grace
We trifle when we assign limits to our desires, since nature has set none.
CHRISTIAN NESTELL BOVEE
Intuitions and Summaries of Thought
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
The natural wants are few, and easily gratified: it is only those which are artificial that perplex us by their multiplicity.
CHRISTIAN NESTELL BOVEE
Intuitions and Summaries of Thought
There is a strange feeling of longing that I have always had, always a desire to be someplace better than where I am. But the world I want to enter is always disappearing before I get there.
LINDSAY AHL
Desire
Venus, queen of soft desire,
Leading Hymen's happy choir.
ANACREON
"Ode XVIII", Odes