quotations about desire
Not wingless is Desire, as feigned by some:
For, though he mostly pace this nether earth
Seasons there are when he can lift to heaven.
RICHARD GARNETT
De Flagello Myrtes
Plant the seed of desire in your mind and it forms a nucleus with power to attract to itself everything needed for its fulfillment.
ROBERT J. COLLIER
attributed, Wisdom for the Soul
The curtailing of one's desires is the beginning of wisdom; their entire mastery its consumption.
JAMES ALLEN
Byways of Blessedness
A human soul devoid of longing was a soul deformed, deprived of its highest good, sick unto death.
SAUL BELLOW
Ravelstein
Desire rules over men, those half-gods vain,
And is the tyrant of their heart and brain.
FERNAND GREGH
"Desire"
It is the thing that is most remote from the world in which we ourselves live that attracts us most. We are under the spell of what is distant from us. It is not our nature to desire passionately what is near at hand.
ALEC WAUGH
On Doing What One Likes
Men quickly find a theory that adapts itself to their desires.
LEWIS F. KORNS
Thoughts
Unsatisfied desire is the characteristic feature of human life. That is the common fact out of which both pessimism and optimism are constructed. Dwell on the impossibility of ever getting a state of complete and permanent satisfaction with what you have, and you become a pessimist. Dwell on the opportunity for endless growth and conquest which this same fact makes possible, and you become an optimist.
WILLIAM DEWITT HYDE
The Art of Optimism
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 is of the nature of desire not to be satisfied, and most men live only for the gratification of it.
ARISTOTLE
Politics
It is only by frequent deaths of ourselves and our self-centered desires that we can come to live more fully.
MOTHER TERESA
A Gift for God
Large natures have usually large desires, and only the small are satisfied with the small.
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
The more unharmonious and inconsistent your objects of desire, the more inconsequent, inconstant, unquiet, the more ignoble, idiotical, and criminal yourself.
JOHANN CASPAR LAVATER
Aphorisms on Man
Yeah
Lover I'm off the streets
Gonna go where the bright lights
And the big city meet
With a red guitar, on fire
Desire
U2
"Desire", Rattle and Hum
As long as I have a want, I have a reason for living. Satisfaction is death.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
Overruled
Desire, both the whispers and the shouts, is the map we have been given to find the only life worth living.
JOHN ELDREDGE
Desire
Natural desires are within bounds; but unnatural lust is infinite.
BENJAMIN WHICHCOTE
Moral and Religious Aphorisms
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
God has given you these desires ... He gives us carnal love for a purpose, for mutual delight, to produce children, and the sanctification of the soul. Cast yourself headlong on God's love, begging His grace to help you in the perfection of the nature He gave you. To love another so deeply that we seek union with the beloved, by that to bring an immortal soul into this world and care for and shape it ... that is to imitate God Himself in His splendor!
S. M. STIRLING
The Sunrise Lands