Desire

“ The sensuous desire is violent but limited; the moral desire is infinite: the craving which soul feels for perfect communion with soul, and the infinite variety with which that desire is maintained, give to love its lustre and its immortality. ”

“ Nay, desire itself is but God—Good—Love, knocking at the door of your consciousness. It is impossible for you to desire anything that is not already your own! It only remains for you to bring the invisible into visibility—to take of the everlasting substance what you will! ”

“ Lift up my mind, which is pressed down by the weight of my sins. Draw up my whole desire to heavenly things; that having tasted the sweetness of supernatural happiness, it may be irksome to me even to think of earthly vanities.
5. Snatch me, and deliver me from all the unlasting comfort of creatures; for no created thing can fully comfort and quiet my desire.
*Join me unto thee with an inseparable band of love; for thou alone dost satisfy him that loveth thee, and without thee all things are frivolous. ”

“ Am I exemplarily pure from all worldly desire? From all vile and vain affections? Is my life one continued labour of love? One tract of praising God and helping man? Do I in every thing see him who is invisible? ”

“ What next I bring shall please thee, be assured, Thy likeness, thy fit help, thy other self, Thy wish exactly to thy heart's desire. ”

“ For my own part, I am glad even to perceive a faint desire, a feeble longing, a degree of uneasiness, or a measure of weariness of sin, or a craving after mercy. Will it not be wise for you, also, to allow things to begin at the beginning, and to be satisfied with their being small at the first? See the blade of desire, and then watch for more. ”

“ Fill your heart with desires after what is worthy of desire; and the greater having entered in, all lesser objects will rank themselves in the right place, and the 'glory that excelleth' will outshine the seducing brightness of the paltry present. Oh! it is want of love, it is want of earnest desire, it is want of firm conviction that God, God only, God by Himself, is enough for me, that makes me careful and troubled. ”

“ For love is the desire of the whole, and the pursuit of the whole is called love. ”

“ If, however, the desire fails to find its immediate fruition, if it is frustrated, consciousness of it may become exceedingly intense. There is the constant thought of the object, a vivid feeling of tension, of a striving to attain the object. Desire may become an obsession, a torment filling the horizon, and the volition in which it finds its fruition stands forth as a marked relief. ”

“ I have but one passion, one want, one all-engrossing desire,—to work upon those around me. The more I act, the happier I seem to be. Is this too delusion? It may be so, but there is truth at the bottom of it. ”

“ We desire unfeignedly that all the thoughts and designs of our minds, all the affections and tempers of our hearts, and all the actions of our life, may be pure, holy, and unreproveable in thy sight.
Search us, O Lord, and prove us; try out our reins and our heart. Look well if there be any way of wickedness in us, and lead us in the way everlasting. Let thy favour be better to us than life itself; that so in all things we may approve our hearts before thee, and feel the sense of thy acceptance of us, giving us a joy which the world cannot give. ”

“ Now you desire nothing else; every other desire is driven out; see that none enter again. 'Keep thyself pure;' let your 'eye' remain 'single, and your whole body shall be full of light.' Admit no desire of pleasing food, or any other pleasure of sense; no desire of pleasing the eye or the imagination, by anything grand, or new, or beautiful; no desire of money, of praise, or esteem; of happiness in any creature. ”

“ Have you not at the bottom of your heart a secret desire? Does the god that I appear to you satisfy fully your need of worship and humiliation? Speak, my friend, I am what you desire that I should be. ”

“ It is now taught, not only that physical passion stands for, or rather is, the Love of which it forms only a part; but that the fire of sudden desire is the only true, or natural, expression of love itself. ”

“ What I speak of is that unceasing, unwearied desire that is with us in joy or sadness, that journeys with us and lives with us, mingling in every action, blending with every thought, and presenting to our minds a constant picture of ourselves under some wished-for aspect different from all we have ever known, where we are surrounded with other impulses and swayed by other passions, and yet still identically ourselves. ”

“ Is it not more probable that, not having come into the world spontaneously, but by the will of Him who sent me, my reason and my desire to love and be loved have been given to guide me in the accomplishment of that will? ”

“ A thousand good wishes, which may all be summed up in one,—health for you and yours, and all those you love; in this wish lies the continuance of your happiness, in this lies your enjoyment of it, in this lies all that is good, all that I can possibly desire for you, and no human being could possibly wish or desire anything better for any man? ”

“ By the vestibule of desire this philosopher means the deferring of satisfaction for any impulse or desire. We love, but we can wait for love's fulfillment; we desire achievement, but we can work and watch the approach of our goal. Something we desire is directly ahead, almost in our reach,— fame, love, riches, vindication, anything you please from the sensuous to the sublime satisfaction ”

“ It was a desire, an echo, a sound; she could drape it in color, see it in form, hear it in music, but not in words; no, never in words. She sighed, teased by desires so incoherent, so incommunicable. ”

“ That desire is so noble and elevated an aspiration, and man feels that desire in the bottom of his soul with so irresistible a force than one may say without any kind of exaggeration, that even unconsciously he is dragged along by it. ”

“ Though his determination is largely based upon feeling, reason has chosen between feelings, between immediate desire to have, and desire to avoid future discomfort. Reason is triumphant over present desire. ”

“ Make us, not fly to dreams, but moderate desire. ”

“ One is, to endeavour more and more to keep the door of your heart closed against desires, for desire is the long beam of the cross, and of anxiety, which will encumber you according to the greatness of the desire. And if the desires be for many things, the more will be the beams, which are prepared for many crosses. ”

“ If we have no affections which rest in what are called their objects, then what is called affection, love, desire, hope in human nature, is only an uneasiness in being at rest—an unquiet disposition to action, progress, pursuit, without end or meaning. ”

“ for, as he contemptuously observes, "those who restrain desire, do so because theirs is weak enough to be restrained," and, as he further explains, in A Vision of the Last Judgment, "Men are admitted into heaven, not because they have curbed and governed their passions, or have no passions, but because they have cultivated their understandings. ”

“ Your presence alone can satisfy my will and desire." The will cannot be satisfied with anything less than the vision of God, and therefore the soul prays that He may be pleased to give Himself to it in truth, in perfect love. ”

“ If, in all those attentions and eagernesses with which we see you occupied, to manage either the interests of your worldly affairs, or the preservation of a vain beauty, there is not either as much forwardness as may amount to the crime of illegal ambition, or complaisance for yourself, and desire of pleasing, as may sully your heart with the guilt of sensuality? ”

“ Desire, the story of the struggle between the divine and mortal forces and the powers of the Sidhe to claim the soul of the young wife and of the triumph of the fairies, by which the girl’s body falls lifeless by the hearth while her spirit speeds away to live forever in the land “where nobody gets old or sorry or poor,” has a poignant pathos, a wild, dreamy beauty that touches the heart. ”

“ To place thy desire altogether in subjection to My good pleasure, and not to be a lover of thyself, but an earnest seeker of My will. Thy desires often excite and urge thee forward; but consider with thyself whether thou art not more moved for thine own objects than for My honour. If it is Myself that thou seekest, thou shalt be well content with whatsoever I shall ordain; but if any pursuit of thine own lieth hidden within thee, behold it is this which hindereth and weigheth thee down. ”

“ High ambitions and most base desires, and women’s laughter and red blood gushing, and all hopes and fears and lusts and terrors together disappear between the millstones and come out transformed into the product that the gods desire. ”

“ And Heyst, the son, read:
Of the stratagems of life the most cruel is the consolation of love—the most subtle, too; for the desire is the bed of dreams. ”

“ The implanting of a desire indicates that the gratification of that desire is in the constitution of the creature that feels it; ”

“ For this special desire becomes the master-motive in the man; and, if strong, establishes a unity in his consciousness, and calls out certain passions, appetites, powers of mind and conscience, heart and soul; and, in a long life, the man creates himself anew in the image of his ideal desire. This desire, good or bad, which sways the man, is writ on his character, and thence copied into the countenance; and lust or love, frivolity or science, interest or principle, mammon or God, is writ on the man. ”

“ I lose my way and I wander, I seek what I cannot get, I get what I do not seek. From my heart comes out and dances the image of my own desire. The gleaming vision flits on. I try to clasp it firmly, it eludes me and leads me astray. ”

“ Where these conditions are fulfilled, desire springs up at once in the mind, a desire proportioned to the degree of that previous enjoyment, and the strength of the affection thereby awakened in our minds for the object of our regard. ”

“ The exaltation of desire, of hope, of self-sacrifice by which love manifests itself and in which it principally consists, could not have any moral merit nor could it become a real incentive to noble actions except on certain conditions. ”

“ So, in that rightful bringing-in of novelty which is the business of the fully living soul, the most powerful agent is love, understood as the controlling factor of behaviour, the sublimation and union of will and desire. ”

“ Have you freed yourself from desire? Don't say `good desires', `bad desires', `spiritual desires' and `material desires'. They are all the same. What you are going to do with the desires is all that you are interested in. ”

“ Then, in happy ignorance, I sighed for a world I did not know, where I hoped to find every pleasure and enjoyment which my heart could desire; and now, on my return from that wide world, O my friend, how many disappointed hopes and unsuccessful plans have I brought back! ”

“ There is not more desire, he had said, in lust than in true love, but in true love desire awakens pity, hope, affection, admiration, and, given appropriate circumstance, every emotion possible to man. ”

“ What the paradox was to me in the sphere of thought, perversity became to me in the sphere of passion. Desire, at the end, was a malady, or a madness, or both. ”

“ “Nothing but ambition, nothing but the desire to get on, that’s all there is in his soul,” she thought; “as for these lofty ideals, love of culture, religion, they are only so many tools for getting on.” ”

“ Thus, we are to use our understanding, our imagination, our memory, wholly to the glory of him that gave them. Thus our will is to be wholly given up to him, and all our affections to be regulated as he directs. We are to love and hate, to rejoice and grieve, to desire and shun, to hope and fear, according to the rule which he prescribes, whose we are, and whom we are to serve in all things. Even our thoughts are not our own in this sense: they are not at our own disposal: but for every deliberate motion of our mind, we are accountable to our great Master. ”

“ We will now consider some of the modes by which the will controls the intellect, desires, and emotions.
We have seen, in previous pages, the influence which desire and emotion exert in making both our perceptions and conceptions more vivid. Whatever purpose or aim in life becomes an object of strong desire, is always distinctly and vividly conceived, while all less interesting objects are more faint and indistinct. ”

“ The will itself is the capacity of being affected by objects with emotion, passion, and desire,—and with that form of passion which we call the sense of the most agreeable or choice, and which is connected with effects or consequents as their stated antecedent. ”

“ Desire is creation, is the magical element in that process. If there were an instrument by which to measure desire, one could foretell achievement. ”