quotations about desire
Wants, like birds, flutter till they have found a place of rest.
EDWARD COUNSEL
Maxims
A state of constant fruition would be, according to our present notions, a state truly lamentable, since it would preclude, in a great degree, the pleasing emotions that spring from hope and expectation, and thus extinguish the lights that principally serve to cheer our path through life. Were all our desires satiated at their birth, or were we always satisfied with our present condition, in either case, as there would be nothing to draw forth our active energies, life would stagnate.
WILLIAM MATHEWS
Hints on Success in Life
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
Yeah
Lover I'm off the streets
Gonna go where the bright lights
And the big city meet
With a red guitar, on fire
Desire
U2
"Desire", Rattle and Hum
Large natures have usually large desires, and only the small are satisfied with the small.
CHRISTIAN NESTELL BOVEE
Intuitions and Summaries of Thought
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
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
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
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"
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
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
Desire, both the whispers and the shouts, is the map we have been given to find the only life worth living.
JOHN ELDREDGE
Desire
Not wingless is Desire, as feigned by some:
For, though he mostly pace this nether earth
Seasons there are when he can lift to heaven.
RICHARD GARNETT
De Flagello Myrtes
We trifle when we assign limits to our desires, since nature has set none.
CHRISTIAN NESTELL BOVEE
Intuitions and Summaries of Thought
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
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
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"
Venus, queen of soft desire,
Leading Hymen's happy choir.
ANACREON
"Ode XVIII", Odes
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