quotations about desire
Always there is desire,
only the shape
of what is desired shifts,
each love giving way to another.
JANE HIRSHFIELD
"Lullabye"
Desire is insatiable not because the goods of the world are too few, too uniform, or too bland. Desire burns through the goods of the world, even though these goods are not false or intrinsically unsatisfactory.... Desire shatters the economy of things; it disputes the tyranny of objects. IT longs for the great emptiness, which is beauty and love without limitation.
WENDY FARLEY
The Wounding and Healing of Desire
A human soul devoid of longing was a soul deformed, deprived of its highest good, sick unto death.
SAUL BELLOW
Ravelstein
If we go down into ourselves we find that we possess exactly what we desire.
SIMONE WEIL
Gravity and Grace
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
When the desire is too much to bear, we often bury it beneath frenzied thoughts and activities or escape it by dulling our immediate consciousness of living. It is possible to run away from the desire for years, even decades, at a time, but we cannot eradicate it entirely. It keeps touching us in little glimpses and hints in our dreams, our hopes, our unguarded moments.
GERALD G. MAY
The Awakened Heart
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
Longing alone is singer to the lute.
EDNA ST. VINCENT MILLAY
"Sonnet II"
So long as there is desire or want, it is a sure sign that there is imperfection. A perfect, free being cannot have any desire.
VIVEKANANDA
The Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda
Desire is the ingredient that changes the hot water of mediocrity to the steam of outstanding success.
ZIG ZIGLAR
See You at the Top
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
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
Natural desires are within bounds; but unnatural lust is infinite.
BENJAMIN WHICHCOTE
Moral and Religious Aphorisms
Obsession is so extreme and so hard to imagine with the rational mind that it has a science-fiction-like quality to it--it's almost as if the obsessed one has been taken over by a replica, a pod, a facsimile of the rational person. When one is in the grip of an obsession, everything else--children, regular meals, sleep, work--is swept away. The entire being is one yearning, frothing bath of desire. It's the dirty trick of obsession that getting its way--spending time with the object of desire, having sex with the object of desire--doesn't lessen the obsession, but increases it. Although an addict, while obsessed, truly believes that being with the object of the obsession will cure the obsession, the opposite is true. When an alcoholic promises that all he needs is one last bender to achieve satisfaction, he's chasing a chimera.
SUSAN CHEEVER
Desire: Where Sex Meets Addiction
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"
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"
When I can no more stir my soul to move,
And life is but the ashes of a fire;
When I can but remember that my heart
Once used to live and love, long and aspire--
Oh, be thou then the first, the one thou art;
Be thou the calling, before all answering love,
And in me wake hope, fear, boundless desire.
GEORGE MACDONALD
Diary of an Old Soul
A state of constant fruition would be, according to our present notions, a state truly lamentable, since it would preclude, in a great degree, the pleasing emotions that spring from hope and expectation, and thus extinguish the lights that principally serve to cheer our path through life. Were all our desires satiated at their birth, or were we always satisfied with our present condition, in either case, as there would be nothing to draw forth our active energies, life would stagnate.
WILLIAM MATHEWS
Hints on Success in Life
Desire, both the whispers and the shouts, is the map we have been given to find the only life worth living.
JOHN ELDREDGE
Desire
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