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Desire quotes

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“When there is no desire, all things are at peace.” Lao Tzu, “Tao Te Ching” - 4th century BC

“There are two tragedies in life. One is not to get your heart's desire. The other is to get it.” George Bernard Shaw, “Man and Superman” - 1903

“Can one desire too much of a good thing?” William Shakespeare, “As You Like It” - 1623

“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” - 1952

“I take the only desire one can really permit oneself. Freedom, Alvah, freedom.” Ayn Rand, “The Fountainhead” - 1943

“She found a dark satisfaction in pain—because that pain came from him.” Ayn Rand, “The Fountainhead” - 1943

“Let your evinced desires be for what is good, and the people will be good.” Confucius, “Analects”

“It is a strange desire, to seek power and to lose liberty: or to seek power over others, and to lose power over a man's self.” Francis Bacon, “The Essays of Francis Bacon” - 1597

“I have already enjoyed too much: give me something to desire.” Samuel Johnson, “The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia” - 1759

“There is no desire more natural than that of knowledge.” Michel de Montaigne, “The Essays of Michel de Montaigne” - 1580

“A gentleman is someone who does not what he wants to do but what he should do.” Haruki Murakami, “Norwegian Wood” - 1987

“It is hard to fight against impulsive desire. Whatever it wants it will buy at the cost of the soul.” Heraclitus, “On Nature” - c. 535 – c. 475 BCE

“The desire for imaginary benefits often involves the loss of present blessings.” Aesop, “Aesop's Fables”

“Ambition is the immoderate desire of power.” Baruch Spinoza, “Ethics” - 1677

“In this world there are only two tragedies. One is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it.” Oscar Wilde, “Lady Windermere's Fan” - 1893

“I don’t want whatever I want. Nobody does. Not really. What kind of fun would it be if I just got everything I ever wanted?” Neil Gaiman, “Coraline” - 2002

“Things are sweeter when they're lost.” F. Scott Fitzgerald, “The Beautiful and Damned” - 1922

“If you don't know what you want . . . you end up with a lot you don't.” Chuck Palahniuk, “Fight Club” - 1996

“I'm a slave to my emotions, to my likes, to my hatred of boredom, to most of my desires” F. Scott Fitzgerald, “This Side of Paradise” - 1920

“Seeking what is true is not seeking what is desirable.” Albert Camus, “The Myth of Sisyphus” - 1942

“I am slow-thinking and full of interior rules that act as brakes on my desires” F. Scott Fitzgerald, “The Great Gatsby” - 1925

“A woman should be able to kiss a man beautifully and romantically without any desire to be either his wife or his mistress.” F. Scott Fitzgerald, “The Beautiful and Damned” - 1922

“I wanted the whole world or nothing.” Charles Bukowski, “Post Office” - 1971

“No evil dooms us hopelessly except the evil we love, and desire to continue in, and make no effort to escape from.” George Eliot, “Daniel Deronda” - 1876

“To want and not to have, sent all up her body a hardness, a hollowness, a strain. And then to want and not to have—to want and want—how that wrung the heart, and wrung it again and again!” Virginia Woolf, “To the Lighthouse” - 1927

“not taking what one doesn’t desire is the hardest thing in the world.” Albert Camus, “The Fall” - 1956

“One loves ultimately one's desires, not the thing desired.” Friedrich Nietzsche, “Beyond Good and Evil” - 1886

“it provokes the desire, but it takes away the performance” William Shakespeare, “Macbeth” - 1623

“Hereafter, in a better world than this, I shall desire more love and knowledge of you.” William Shakespeare, “As You Like It” - 1623

“The tempter or the tempted, who sins most?” William Shakespeare, “Measure for Measure” - 1623

“Which of us is happy in this world? Which of us has his desire? or, having it, is satisfied?” William Makepeace Thackeray, “Vanity Fair” - 1847

“Is it not strange that desire should so many years outlive performance?” William Shakespeare, “Henry IV, Part 2” - 1600

“Our flesh shrinks from what it dreads and responds to the stimulus of what it desires by a purely reflex action of the nervous system. Our eyelid closes before we are aware that the fly is about to enter our eye.” James Joyce, “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” - 1916

“to promise not to do a thing is the surest way in the world to make a body want to go and do that very thing.” Mark Twain, “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer” - 1876

“It is not for its own sake that men desire money, but for the sake of what they can purchase with it.” Adam Smith, “The Wealth of Nations” - 1776

“If you start out by promising what you don't even have yet, you'll lose your desire to work toward getting it.” Paulo Coelho, “The Alchemist” - 1988

“Well, I am happy, and I won't fret, but it does seem as if the more one gets the more one wants, doesn't it?” Louisa May Alcott, “Little Women” - 1868

“For such defects, and not for other guilt, Lost are we and are only so far punished, That without hope we live on in desire.” Dante Alighieri, “Divine Comedy” - 1320

“It is, that human beings are no longer born to their place in life, and chained down by an inexorable bond to the place they are born to, but are free to employ their faculties, and such favourable chances as offer, to achieve the lot which may...” John Stuart Mill, “The Subjection of Women” - 1869

“My third maxim was to endeavor always to conquer myself rather than fortune, and change my desires rather than the order of the world, and in general, accustom myself to the persuasion that, except our own thoughts, there is nothing absolutely in...” René Descartes, “Discourse on the Method” - 1637

“What a weary time those years were—to have the desire and the need to live but not the ability.” Charles Bukowski, “Ham on Rye” - 1982

“If I understand this correctly Christ taught here the alarming doctrine that the desire for honor among men made belief impossible.” A. W. Tozer, “The Pursuit of God” - 1948

“Man surely has some latent sense for which this place affords no gratification; or he has some desire distinct from sense, which must be satisfied before he can be happy.” Samuel Johnson, “The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia” - 1759

“However, some desire is necessary to keep life in motion; and he whose real wants are supplied must admit those of fancy.” Samuel Johnson, “The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia” - 1759

“Perfection of moral virtue does not wholly take away the passions, but regulates them; for the temperate man desires as he ought to desire, and what he ought to desire, as stated in Ethic.” Thomas Aquinas, “Summa Theologica” - 1274

“I had desired it with an ardour that far exceeded moderation; but now that I had finished, the beauty of the dream vanished, and breathless horror and disgust filled my heart.” Mary Shelley, “Frankenstein” - 1818

“She wanted to get some personal profit out of things, and she rejected as useless all that did not contribute to the immediate desires of her heart, being of a temperament more sentimental than artistic, looking for emotions, not landscapes.” Gustave Flaubert, “Madame Bovary” - 1856

“But that happiness, no doubt, was a lie invented for the despair of all desire.” Gustave Flaubert, “Madame Bovary” - 1856

“To see a thing uncolored by one's own personal preferences and desires is to see it in its own pristine simplicity.” Bruce Lee, “Tao of Jeet Kune Do” - 1975

“To make oneself object, to make oneself passive, is very different from being a passive object: a woman in love is neither asleep nor a corpse; there is a surge in her that ceaselessly falls and rises: it is this surge that creates the spell that...” Simone de Beauvoir, “The Second Sex” - 1949

Related topics

love happiness satisfaction reality freedom power want life youth self-knowledge romance ambition world frustration restraint promise motion independence sweetness courage

Related authors

F. Scott Fitzgerald (6)
William Shakespeare (5)
Paulo Coelho (4)
Ayn Rand (3)
Samuel Johnson (3)
Haruki Murakami (3)
George Eliot (2)
Charles Bukowski (2)
Albert Camus (2)
J. R. R. Tolkien (2)
Gustave Flaubert (2)
Oscar Wilde (1)
William Makepeace Thackeray (1)
George Bernard Shaw (1)
James Joyce (1)
Mark Twain (1)
Charlotte Brontë (1)
George Orwell (1)
John Green (1)
Heraclitus (1)

Related sources

The Beautiful and Damned (4)
The Fountainhead (3)
The Alchemist (3)
The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia (3)
As You Like It (2)
Madame Bovary (2)
Macbeth (1)
Lady Windermere's Fan (1)
Vanity Fair (1)
Man and Superman (1)
This Side of Paradise (1)
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1)
Measure for Measure (1)
Henry IV, Part 2 (1)
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1)
Jane Eyre (1)
1984 (1)
On Nature (1)
Mere Christianity (1)
The Wealth of Nations (1)