Desire
Desire is a strong wish or craving.
B
- Those who restrain desire do so because theirs is weak enough to be restrained.
- William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790-1793).
- There is no fear for one whose mind is not filled with desires.
- This absoluteness of desire uninhibited by thoughts of virtue … represents the turn in philosophy away from trying to tame or perfect desire by virtue, and toward finding out what one’s desire is and living according to it. This is largely accomplished by criticizing virtue, which covers and corrupts desire. Our desire becomes a kind of oracle we consult; it is now the last word, while in the past it was the questionable and dangerous part of us.
- Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (New York: 1988), p. 175.
C
- I tell you naught for your comfort,
Yea, naught for your desire,
Save that the sky grows darker yet
And the sea rises higher.- G. K. Chesterton, in The Ballad of the White Horse (1911) Book I : The Vision of the King.
E
- The covetous are never satisfied with money, nor lovers of wealth with their gain; so this too is vanity.
- Ecclesiastes, Chapter 5 Verse 9
F
- Everyone believes very easily whatever they fear or desire.
- Jean de La Fontaine, As quoted in Subcontact : Slap the Face of Fear and Wake Up Your Subconscious (2001) by Dian Benson, p. 149
- Variant: Everyone believes very easily whatever he fears or desires.
G
- Remember there is always a limit to self-indulgence, none to restraint. ... Civilization, in the real sense of the term, consists not in the multiplication but in the deliberate and voluntary restriction of wants. This alone promotes real happiness and contentment, and increases the capacity for service.
- Mahatma Gandhi in: Larry Chang Wisdom for the Soul: Five Millennia of Prescriptions for Spiritual Healing, Gnosophia Publishers, 2006, p. 619.
- The ultimate meaning of desire is death.
- Rene Girard, in Mensonge romantique et vérité romanesque [Deceit, Desire and the Novel : Self and Other in Literary Structure] (1961), p. 290.
H
- What the English call “comfortable” is something endless and inexhaustible. Every condition of comfort reveals in turn its discomfort, and these discoveries go on for ever. Hence the new want is not so much a want of those who have it directly, but is created by those who hope to make profit from it.
- Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, S. Dyde, trans. (1896), § 191.
- Anywhere you go,desire is desire. The sun cannot bleach it, nor the tide wash it away.
- Richard, in The Beach (2000) written by John Hodge.
K
What we should desire creeps silently inside us and replaces what we really desire. ... We take jobs, make compromises, and settle down for the long wait, for the arrival of the future that will bring the reward of happiness we so justly deserve for our sacrifice of the pleasures of the moment. The process is so slow we scarcely notice the substitution of plastic for flesh. We forget how the body sang when it ran free; how it rejoiced in stretching, rolling, skipping, dancing, walking, eating, loving, bounding, leaping, resting.
Gradually the body begins to change to protect itself against the intrusion of joy or sorrow. It armors itself against the threat of playfulness and spontaneity. ... The working body is complete when it is thus armed against those emotions that would threaten the primacy of the work ethic and the pattern of delayed gratification upon which it rests.
- Sam Keen, The Passionate Life (1992), pp. 102-103
M
- I would rather be a poor man in a garret with plenty of books than a king who did not love reading.
- Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay, Letter to his Niece (September 15, 1842).
- Normal men retain their childish longing for a woman to mother them. At adolescence a new desire is added. They wanta girl to allure them. When you put these two together, you have the typical male yearning Wonder Woman satisfies.
- William Moulton Marston as quoted in Men of Tomorrow: Geeks, Gangsters, and the Birth of the Comic Book by Gerard Jones
- Desire is sad.
- W. Somerset Maugham, in "Rain".
N
- The church combats passion by means of excision of all kinds. Its practice, its remedy is castration. It never inquires, “How can a desire be spiritualized, beautified, deified.” In all ages it has laid the weight of discipline in the process of extirpation. The extirpation of sensuality, pride, lust of dominion, lust of property, and revenge. But to attack the passions at the roots means attacking life itself at its source. The method of the church is hostile to life.
- Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, Ch. 5 “Morality as Anti-Nature” § 5.1 (Ludovici trans.)
- Science ... cannot conceive of any means of achieving that escape from desires we call "contentment" otherwise than through the satisfaction of those desires; it has not yet learnt that there is no limit to the multiplication of desires, nor that, since different people's desires are often mutually incompatible, an indefinite multiplication of desires increases conflict as well as discontent.
- Walter James, 4th Baron Northbourne, "Intellectual Freedom," Studies in Comparative Religion, Vol. 5, No.1. (Winter 1971).
O
- Nitimur in vetitum semper, cupimusque negata.
- We are always striving for things forbidden, and coveting those denied us.
- Ovid, Amorum (16 BC), III. 4. 17.
P
- The really clever thing, in affairs of this sort, is not to win a woman already desired by everyone, but to discover such a prize while she is still unknown.
- Cesare Pavese, in This Business of Living, 1940-10-07.
- I like desires like children
and their plays
that tease me now and then into
knowing life.- Suman Pokhrel, Desire
- I salute my desires with a bow.,
were it not for them to come and play
mind would be empty just like me.
- The sluggard craves and gets nothing, but the desires of the diligent are fully satisfied.
- Proverbs 13:4, New International Version
S
- I have
Immortal longings in me.- William Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra (1600s), Act V, scene 2, line 282.
- I do desire we may be better strangers.
- William Shakespeare, As You Like It (c.1599-1600), Act III, scene 2, line 274.
- Can one desire too much of a good thing?
- William Shakespeare, As You Like It (c.1599-1600), Act IV, scene 1, line 123.
- Methinks I have a great desire to a bottle of hay: good hay, sweet hay, hath no fellow.
- William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night's Dream (c. 1595-96), Act IV, scene 1, line 36.
- Had doting Priam checked his son's desire,
Troy had been bright with fame and not with fire.- William Shakespeare, The Rape of Lucrece (1594), line 1,490.
- There are two tragedies in life. One is not to get your heart's desire. The other is to get it.
- Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman (1903), Act IV.
T
- On the new earth, enjoyment will replace wanting as the motivating power behind people's actions. Wanting arises from the ego's delusion that you are a separate fragment that is disconnected from the power that lies behind all creation.
- Eckhart Tolle in A New Earth:Awakening to Your Life's Purpose, (2005) Chapter 10
- Boredom: the desire for desires.
- Leo Tolstoy, in Anna Karenina (1877).
W
- If people were told: what makes carnal desire imperious in you is not its pure carnal element. It is the fact that you put into it the essential part of yourself—the need for Unity, the need for God—they wouldn’t believe it. To them it seems obvious that the quality of imperious need belongs to the carnal desire as such. In the same way it seems obvious to the miser that the quality of desirability belongs to gold as such, and not to its exchange value.
- Simone Weil, First and Last Notebooks.
Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations
- Quotes reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 189.
- 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, Book II, Chapter 3.
- Nil cupientium
Nudus castra peti.- Naked I seek the camp of those who desire nothing.
- Horace, Carmina, Book III. 16. 22.
- The thing we long for, that we are
For one transcendent moment.- James Russell Lowell, Longing.
- Velle suum cuique est, nec voto vivitur uno.
- Each man has his own desires; all do not possess the same inclinations.
- Persius, Satires, V, 53.
- As the hart panteth after the water-brooks.
- Psalms. XLII. 1.
- Oh! could I throw aside these earthly bands
That tie me down where wretched mortals sigh—
To join blest spirits in celestial lands!- Petrarch, To Laura in Death, Sonnet XLV.
- The desire of the moth for the star,
Of the night for the morrow,
The devotion to something afar
From the sphere of our sorrow.- Percy Bysshe Shelley, To——, One Word is too Often Profaned.
- We grow like flowers, and bear desire,
The odor of the human flowers.- Richard Henry Stoddard, The Squire of Low Degree, The Princess Answers, I, line 13.
