Quotes on Desirable

For some small number of people, a parental loss appears to be, ultimately, a desirable difficulty - again, not a large number.

Human beings are no longer born to their place in life...but are free to employ their faculties and such favorable chances as offer, to achieve the lot which may appear to them as desirable.

When a man sees something desirable, he must reflect on the fact that with time it could come to involve what is detestable. When he sees something that is beneficial, he should reflect that sooner or later it, too, could come to involve harm.

All wealth consists of desirable things; that is, things which satisfy human wants directly or indirectly: but not all desirable things are reckoned as wealth.

Don't say 'wife.' I'm your mistress. Wife's such an ugly word. Your 'permanent mistress' is so much more tangible and desirable… .

Seeking what is true is not seeking what is desirable.

I am interested in madness. I believe it is the biggest thing in the human race, and the most constant. How do you take away from a man his madness without also taking away his identity? Are we sure it is desirable for a man's spirit not to be at war with itself, or that it is better to be serene and ready to go to dinner than to be excited and unwilling to stop for a cup of coffee, even?

In beautiful things St. Francis saw Beauty itself, and through His vestiges imprinted on creation he followed his Beloved everywhere, making from all things a ladder by which he could climb up and embrace Him who is utterly desirable.

To be gentle and kind, modest and truthful, to be full of faith and integrity, doing no wrong is of God; goodness sheds a halo of loveliness around every person who possesses it, making their countenances beam with light, and their society desirable because of its excellency. They are loved of God, of holy angels, and of all the good earth, while they are hated, envied, admired, and feared by the wicked.

In most mills, only the best portions of the best trees are used, while the ruins are left on the ground to feed great fires which kill much of what is left of the less desirable timber, together with the seedlings on which the permanence of the forest depends.

The individual's desire to dominate his environment is not a desirable trait in a society which every day grows more and more confining.

Nationalism has two fatal charms for its devotees: It presupposes local self-sufficiency, which is a pleasant and desirable condition, and it suggests, very subtly, a certain personal superiority by reason of one's belonging to a place which is definable and familiar, as against a place that is strange, remote.

Manhattanism is the one urbanistic ideology that has fed, from its conception, on the splendors and miseries of the metropolitan condition—hyper-density—without once losing faith in it as the basis for a desirable modern culture. Manhattan's architecture is a paradigm for the exploitation of congestion.

It's a pity that if someone who has a really profoundly potent art to share chooses not to or doesn't fit into this very thin slice of what's desirable and marketable, chances are the public will never get a chance to hear what they're doing.

It isn't that secrets are never needed in security. It's that they are never desirable.

Philosophers have long conceded, however, that every man has two educators: 'that which is given to him, and the other that which he gives himself. Of the two kinds the latter is by far the more desirable. Indeed all that is most worthy in man he must work out and conquer for himself. It is that which constitutes our real and best nourishment. What we are merely taught seldom nourishes the mind like that which we teach ourselves.

There's something desirable about anything you're used to as opposed to something you're not.

Regard it as just as desirable to build a chicken house as to build a cathedral.

From 1970 onwards, our culture told both sexes that individual expression was paramount. And for women, that was defined as the right to choose an interesting a career, a high-status mate, the desirable handbag or vacation, the perfect family size, and a definitionally fruitless quest for 'perfection.'

There never was and is not likely soon to be a nation of philosophers, nor am I certain it is desirable that there should be.

No doubt another may also think for me; but it is not therefore desirable that he should do so to the exclusion of my thinking for myself.