quotations about desire
It would be helpful if the universe would give us one big clue, or a giant compass, if you will, pointing to the direction we should be taking. In fact, the compass is there. To find it, you need only look inside yourself to discover your soul's purest desire, its dream for your life.
DEEPAK CHOPRA
The Spontaneous Fulfillment of Desire
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
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
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
It is of the nature of desire not to be satisfied, and most men live only for the gratification of it.
ARISTOTLE
Politics
God has given you these desires ... He gives us carnal love for a purpose, for mutual delight, to produce children, and the sanctification of the soul. Cast yourself headlong on God's love, begging His grace to help you in the perfection of the nature He gave you. To love another so deeply that we seek union with the beloved, by that to bring an immortal soul into this world and care for and shape it ... that is to imitate God Himself in His splendor!
S. M. STIRLING
The Sunrise Lands
When we have the means to pay for what we desire, what we get is not so much what is best, as what is costliest.
CHRISTIAN NESTELL BOVEE
Intuitions and Summaries of Thought
If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.
C. S. LEWIS
Mere Christianity
The best joke of all is to give someone just what they've wanted.
TONY BALLANTYNE
Recursion
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.
LINDSAY AHL
Desire
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.
WENDY FARLEY
The Wounding and Healing of Desire
Natural desires are within bounds; but unnatural lust is infinite.
BENJAMIN WHICHCOTE
Moral and Religious Aphorisms
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
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"
Desires are central to the soul's unfolding and should not be dismissed before giving them careful attention.
THOMAS MOORE
Soul Mates
We cannot be free of nagging desires through suppression. This is like trying to keep a rubber boat beneath the water. But we remove compulsive desires altogether by understanding their nature.
VERNON HOWARD
attributed, Treasury of Spiritual Wisdom
Whenever we confront an unbridled desire we are surely in the presence of a tragedy-in-the-making.
QUENTIN CRISP
Manners from Heaven
Desire, both the whispers and the shouts, is the map we have been given to find the only life worth living.
JOHN ELDREDGE
Desire
When we try to conceal our innermost drives, our entire being screams betrayal.
BRIAN HERBERT & KEVEN J. ANDERSON
Dune: House Corrino
Venus, queen of soft desire,
Leading Hymen's happy choir.
ANACREON
"Ode XVIII", Odes