quotations about lust
Lust is, of all the frailties of our nature, what most we ought to fear; the headstrong beast rushes along, impatient of the course; nor hears the rider's call, nor feels the rein.
NICHOLAS ROWE
The Royal Convert: A Tragedy
But there was little heart to our lust,
only the confusion of not knowing
how long we'd have in our bodies.
JOSEPH BATHANTI
This Metal
Lust-bred diseases rot thee.
JOHN DONNE
"The Bracelet", The Complete English Poems
Call it not love, for Love to heaven is fled,
Since sweating Lust on earth usurp'd his name.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Venus and Adonis
What's wrong with lust? You fancy your neighbor's husband so what are you supposed to do? Poke your eyes out so that you can't see him anymore? Acting on it is maybe a sin ... but my God, just lusting after someone? Is that so bad?
EMMA GOLD
Hard
Disdain to warm thee at lust's smoky fires,
Scorn, scorn to feed on thy old bloat desires:
Come, come, my soul, hoist up thy higher sails,
The wind blows fair; shall we still creep like snails,
That glide their ways with their own native slimes?
FRANCIS QUARLES
Emblems
Love is the lotus, lust is the mud the lotus arises out of.
OSHO
Love, Freedom, and Aloneness
For men, I think, love is a thing formed of equal parts lust and astonishment. The astonishment part women understand. The lust part they only think they understand.
STEPHEN KING
Bag of Bones
Nature is content with little; grace with less; lust with nothing.
MATHEW HENRY
Commentary on the Whole Bible
Tis better to have love and lust
Than to let our apparatus rust.
KURT VONNEGUT
God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian
Her breath was hurried. Her eyes were fixed on the sinewy wrist with its little golden hairs and on that long, delicate, but powerful hand, and I have never seen on a human countenance such a hungry concupiscence as I saw then on hers. It was a mask of lust. I would never have believed that her beautiful features could assume an expression of such unbridled sensuality. It was animal rather than human. The beauty was stripped from her face; the look upon it made her hideous and frightening. It horribly suggested the bitch in heat and I felt rather sick.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM
The Razor's Edge
Lust is the oldest lion of them all.
MARJORIE ALLEN SEIFFERT
"Lorenzo's Bas Relief for a Florentine Chest"
Sexual lust is a murderous sword.
CHINESE PROVERB
Maybe spring is the season of love and fall the season of mad lust. Spring for flirting but fall for the untamed delicious wild thing.
ELIZABETH COHEN
The Hypothetical Girl
Lust is a mysterious wound in the side of humanity; or rather, at the very source of its life! To confound this lust in man with that desire which unites the sexes is like confusing a tumor with the very organ which it devours, a tumor whose very deformity horribly reproduces the shape.
GEORGES BERNANOS
The Diary of a Country Priest
He dared to grow wild with his shadowy love and he daily watered by daily littles the ground under his face and beerbibbing did not lay siege to his spirit and he was continent and he was not sustenant and many of his months have since run out with him the pestilent person to take him from behind his crooked back and set him before his ulcerous gob in the boiling over of his fornications and in chambering and wantonness and in deafness and death and bitter and blind bawling against the honey what honey bloody well you know the honey and in canvassing and getting and weltering in filth and scratching off the scabies of lust.
SAMUEL BECKETT
"Sedendo et Quiescendo", Samuel Beckett: Poems, short fiction, and criticism
Consider, for example, lust versus love. When we lust after someone or something, we think in terms of what they (or it) can do for us. When we love, however, our thoughts are immersed in what we can give to someone else. Giving makes us feel good, so we do it happily. But when we lust, we only want to take. When someone we love is in pain, we feel pain. When someone whom we lust is in pain, we only think in terms of what that loss or inconvenience means to us.
DAVID J. LIEBERMAN
Find Out Who's Normal and Who's Not
When I saw him look at me with lust, I dropped my eyes but, in glancing away from him, I caught sight of myself in the mirror. And I saw myself, suddenly, as he saw me, my pale face, the way the muscles in my neck stuck out like thin wire. I saw how much that cruel necklace became me. And, for the first time in my innocent and confined life, I sensed in myself a potentiality for corruption that took my breath away.
ANGELA CARTER
The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories
It's a curious, wanting thing.
SARAH WINTERS
Fingersmith
The mind of lust is just as degraded today as in the days of Sodom and Gomorrah. The mind of lust has been the same in all ages. It has been the same ever since it deceived Eve. It is in the consciousness of the race, now as then, and the mind of the lust of the flesh must be overcome before the mind of the Christ and heaven can be obtained.
SIDNEY CALHOUN TAPP
What Every Man and Woman Should Know about the Bible