Given a desire for s, the fact that x-ing would increase the likelihood of s constitutes a reason for x-ing.

The very urge to get rid of desire is still desire, is it not?

People who constantly find new disguises for their desires can easily lie to themselves.

After desire has conceived, it gives birth to sin; and sin, when it is full-grown, gives birth to death.

You are currently experiencing desire; otherwise, you wouldn't be reading these words. Even if you are reading them at the behest of someone else, you are motivated by your desire to please that person. And if you stop reading, you will not do so because you have stopped desiring but because your desires have changed.

There is a strange feeling of longing that I have always had, always a desire to be someplace better than where I am. But the world I want to enter is always disappearing before I get there.

Each person discovers a field of allurements, the totality of which bears the unique stamp of that person's personality. Destiny unfolds in the pursuit of individual fascinations and interests ... By pursuing your allurements, you help bind the universe together. The unity of the world rests on the pursuit of passion.

Whenever we confront an unbridled desire we are surely in the presence of a tragedy-in-the-making.

Desire, both the whispers and the shouts, is the map we have been given to find the only life worth living.

Long only for what you have.

From the unknown, profound desires enter in upon us, and ... the fulfilling of those desires is the fulfilling of creation.

Man's many desires are like the small metal coins he carries about in his pocket. The more he has the more they weight him down.

We abandon the most important journey of our lives when we abandon desire. We leave our hearts by the side of the road and head off in the direction of fitting in, getting by, being productive, what have you. Whatever we might gain--money, position, the approval of others, or just absence of the discontent itself--it's not worth it.

Some desire is necessary to keep life in motion, and he whose real wants are supplied must admit those of fancy.

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.

It is easy for desire to be caught like a bird in a net, its wings fouled and twisted, no longer free to cross back and forth between silence and word. Desire may also find itself so amputated by tradition and community that it wanders in a void with nothing to orient it, to shape or discipline it. Desire must find ways to navigate its bitter and sweet paradox: it moves toward but also always through and beyond every object.

Desire is the creator; desire is the destroyer.

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