quotations about desire
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
Plunge into the world, and then, after a time, when you have suffered and enjoyed all that is in it, will renunciation come; then will calmness come. So fulfill your desire for power and everything else, and after you have fulfilled the desire, will come the time when you will know that they are all very little things; but until you have fulfilled this desire, until you have passed through that activity, it is impossible for you to come to the state of calmness, serenity, and self-surrender.
VIVEKANANDA
The Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda
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 playing field of life is not level, and for you to compete in the game of life, you need an equalizer of some kind. In the old West, the equalizer was the six-shooter. It enabled a little guy to chop a bigger man down to size. Desire is also an equalizer--and nowadays is highly encouraged over a six-shooter!
ZIG ZIGLAR
Born to Win: Find Your Success Code
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
When I desire you a part of me is gone.
ANNE CARSON
Eros the Bittersweet
He is fortunate who wants the things he knows he can have.
LEWIS F. KORNS
Thoughts
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
The curtailing of one's desires is the beginning of wisdom; their entire mastery its consumption.
JAMES ALLEN
Byways of Blessedness
Large natures have usually large desires, and only the small are satisfied with the small.
CHRISTIAN NESTELL BOVEE
Intuitions and Summaries of Thought
Sex ... or lack thereof ... is at the center of everyone's identity, and once you've cracked someone's desires, you understand them in full.
ARIANNE COHEN
Marie Claire Magazine, March 2008
The grave is sooner cloy'd than men's desire.
FRANCIS QUARLES
Emblems
To burn with desire and keep quiet about it is the greatest punishment we can bring on ourselves.
FEDERICO GARCIA LORCA
Blood Wedding
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
Wishes people the world.
EDWARD COUNSEL
Maxims
As long as I have a want, I have a reason for living. Satisfaction is death.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
Overruled
How long can you suppress your own desires? Until you understand that in doing so will destroy yourself.
IVAN KLIMA
Waiting for the Dark
Men quickly find a theory that adapts itself to their desires.
LEWIS F. KORNS
Thoughts
Whatsoever misfortunes there are
Here in this world or in the next,
They all have their root in Ignorance
And in the accumulation of Longing and Desire.
GAUTAMA BUDDHA
Iti-Vuttaka
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