Quotes on Desire

Christianity was simple: fight your desires in order to please God.

life is long between the desire and the spasm.

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... how many disappointed hopes and unsuccessful plans have I brought back!

And liberty cannot be preserved without a general knowledge among the people who have a right from the frame of their nature to knowledge, as their great Creator who does nothing in vain, has given them understandings and a desire to know. But besides this they have a right, an indisputable, unalienable, indefeasible divine right to the most dreaded and envied kind of knowledge, I mean of the characters and conduct of their rulers.

I have already enjoyed too much; give me something to desire.

I want so to live that I work with my hands and my feeling and my brain. I want a garden, a small house, grass, animals, books, pictures, music. And out of this, the expression of this, I want to be writing (Though I may write about cabmen. That’s no matter.) But warm, eager, living life — to be rooted in life — to learn, to desire, to feel, to think, to act. This is what I want. And nothing less. That is what I must try for.

Being in the mood to write, like being in the mood to make love, is a luxury that isn't necessary in a long-term relationship. Just as the first caress can lead to a change of heart, the first sentence, however tentative and awkward, can lead to a desire to go just a little further.

I spin worlds where we could be together. I dream you. For me, imagination and desire are very close.

Life is not only merriment,It is desire and determination.

What's madness but nobility of soul At odds with circumstance? The day's on fire! I know the purity of pure despair, My shadow pinned against a sweating wall, That place among the rocks--is it a cave, Or winding path? The edge is what I have........ ....... Dark,dark my light, and darker my desire. My soul, like some heat-maddened summer fly, Keeps buzzing at the sill. ~From "The Waking" by Theodore Roethke

Aren't we living in a world where heedless men only desire decapitated women?

It is easy, when you are young, to believe that what you desire is no less than what you deserve, to assume that if you want something badly enough, it is your God-given right to have it.

Your heart's desire is to be told some mystery. The mystery is that there is no mystery.

Discipline is the highest of all virtues. Only so may strength and desire be counterbalanced and the endeavors of man bear fruit.

Some prices are just too high, no matter how much you may want the prize. The one thing you can't trade for your heart's desire is your heart.

And priests in black gowns were walking their rounds and binding with briars my joys and desires. (from 'The Garden of Love')

Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else.

Desire that your life count for something great! Long for your life to have eternal significance. Want this! Don’t coast through life without a passion.

I have never killed anybody, it is true, but it is because I lacked the courage or the time, not because I lacked the desire

All joy... emphasizes our pilgrim status; always reminds, beckons, awakens desire. Our best havings are wantings.

I have no desires, save the desire to express myself in defiance of all the world’s muteness.