quotations about desire
All my life, my heart has sought a thing I cannot name.
HUNTER S. THOMPSON
Hell's Angels
Where perception is, there also are pain and pleasure, and where these are, there, of necessity, is desire.
ARISTOTLE
Physica
You taught me the ways of desire, now it's takin' its toll
You're the right kind of sinner, to release my inner fantasy
PAT BENATAR
"Heartbreaker"
Sometimes it's like someone took a knife baby, edgy and dull
And cut a six-inch valley through the middle of my soul.
At night I wake up with the sheets soaking wet
And a freight train running through the middle of my head.
Only you can cool my desire.
I'm on fire.
BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN
"I'm on Fire", Born in the U.S.A.
Given a desire for s, the fact that x-ing would increase the likelihood of s constitutes a reason for x-ing.
ROBERT M. GORDON
"The Circle of Desire"
The more you want, the more you stand to lose.
AESOP
Fables
Desires satisfied are but as seeds sown a second time.
EDWARD COUNSEL
Maxims
All movement, of every creature, comes from the desire after something better.
CHARLES BUXTON
Notes of Thought
I can tell you at any rate how to get what you want. You've just got to keep a thing in view and go for it and never let your eye wander to right or left or up or down. And looking back is fatal--the truest thing in Scripture is about Lot's wife.
WILLIAM JOHN LOCKE
Septimus
'Tis easier to suppress the first Desire, than to satisfy all that follow it.
BENJAMIN FRANKLIN
Poor Richard's Almanack, 1751
In the end there is no desire so deep as the simple desire for companionship.
GRAHAM GREENE
"May We Borrow Your Husband?"
By the destruction of his Cravings,
This monk hath extinguished Hunger, and hath attained Nirvana.
GAUTAMA BUDDHA
Iti-Vuttaka
The dead are happy, having no desire.
I rise and fall, and rise and fall again,
Something is in me, famishing for bread,
Baffled and unappeasable as fire.
ARTHUR SYMONS
"Soror Tua"
When it comes to desiring, we are all experts. If there were an Olympics of desiring, we would all make the team.
WILLIAM BRAXTON IRVINE
On Desire
Long only for what you have.
ANDRÉ GIDE
The Fruits of the Earth
We grow like flowers, and bear desire, The odor of the human flowers.
RICHARD HENRY STODDARD
The Squire of Low Degree--The Princess Answers
Desire animates the world. It is present in the baby crying for milk, the girl struggling to solve a math problem, the woman running to meet her lover and later deciding to have children, and the old woman, hunched over her walker, moving down the hall of the nursing home at a glacial pace to pick up her mail. Banish desire from the world, and you get a world of frozen beings who have no reason to live and no reason to die.
WILLIAM BRAXTON IRVINE
On Desire
Perhaps when we find ourselves wanting everything, it is because we are dangerously near to wanting nothing.
SYLVIA PLATH
The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
Things desired are oftentimes of less value than our present possessions.
EDWARD COUNSEL
Maxims
Those who restrain desire do so because theirs is weak enough to be restrained.
WILLIAM BLAKE
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell