quotations about desire
To burn with desire and keep quiet about it is the greatest punishment we can bring on ourselves.
FEDERICO GARCIA LORCA
Blood Wedding
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
Always there is desire,
only the shape
of what is desired shifts,
each love giving way to another.
JANE HIRSHFIELD
"Lullabye"
If we go down into ourselves we find that we possess exactly what we desire.
SIMONE WEIL
Gravity and Grace
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
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"
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 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
Whenever we confront an unbridled desire we are surely in the presence of a tragedy-in-the-making.
QUENTIN CRISP
Manners from Heaven
When we try to conceal our innermost drives, our entire being screams betrayal.
BRIAN HERBERT & KEVEN J. ANDERSON
Dune: House Corrino
We are ruined, not by what we really want, but by what we think we do.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON
Lacon
Desire is the ingredient that changes the hot water of mediocrity to the steam of outstanding success.
ZIG ZIGLAR
See You at the Top
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"
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
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
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
We are desire. It is the essence of the human soul, the secret of our existence. Absolutely nothing of human greatness is ever accomplished without it. Not a symphony has been written, a mountain climbed, an injustice fought, or a love sustained apart from desire. Desire fuels our search for the life we prize. Our desire, if we will listen to it, will save us from committing soul-suicide, the sacrifice of our hearts on the altar of "getting by." The same old thing is not enough. It never will be.
JOHN ELDREDGE
Desire
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
The busy mint
Of our laborious thoughts is ever going,
And coining new desires; desires not knowing
Where next to pitch; but, like the boundless ocean,
Gain, and gain ground, and grow more strong by motion.
FRANCIS QUARLES
Emblems
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