Quotes About Desire

That by desiring what is perfectly good, even when we don't quite know what it is and cannot do what we would, we are part of the divine power against evil—widening the skirts of light and making the struggle with darkness narrower.

O me, O me, what frugal cheer My love doth feed upon! A touch, a ray, that is not here, A shadow that is gone:

She wished, poor child, to be wise herself.

A dull mind, once arriving at an inference that flatters a desire, is rarely able to retain the impression that the notion from which the inference started was purely problematic.

dull mind, once arriving at an inference that flatters a desire, is rarely able to retain the impression that the notion from which the inference started was purely problematic

He leaped over the years in this way, and, in the haste of strong purpose and strong desire, did not see how they would be made up of slow days, hours, and minutes.

Explain! Tell a man to explain how he dropped into hell! Explain my preference! I never had *preference* for her, any more than I have a preference for breathing. No other woman exists by the side of her. I would rather touch her hand if it were dead, than I would touch any other woman's living.

I never felt that I had enough music, - I wanted more instruments playing together; I wanted voices to be fuller and deeper.

I shall be glad of a cup of coffee as soon as possible.

I would rather touch her hand if it were dead, than I would touch any other woman's living.

I can look forward to no better happiness than that which would be one with yours.

People can easily take the sacred word duty as a name for what they desire any one else to do.

We can never give up longing and wishing while we are throughly alive

That famous ring that pricked its owner when he forgot duty and followed desire - I wonder if it pricked very hard when he set out on the chase, or whether it pricked but lightly then, and only pierced to the quick when the chase had long been ended, and hope, folding her wings, looked backward and became regret?

It seems to me we can never give up longing and wishing while we are thoroughly alive. There are certain things we feel to be beautiful and good, and we must hunger after them

That will help us to understand how the love of accumulating money grows an absorbing passion in men whose imaginations, even in the very beginning of their hoard, showed them no purpose beyond it. Marner wanted the heaps of ten to grow into a square, and then into a larger square; and every added guinea, while it was itself a satisfaction, bred a new desire

I like not only to be loved, but to be told i am loved

Sometimes Maggie thought she could have been contented with absorbing fancies; if she could have had all Scott's novels and all Byron's poems!–then, perhaps, she might have found happiness enough to dull her sensibility to her actual daily life.

Sometimes Maggie thought she could have been contented with absorbing fancies; if she could have had all Scott's novels and all Byron's poems!–then, perhaps, she might have found happiness enough to dull her sensibility to her actual daily life. And yet they were hardly what she wanted. She could make dream-worlds of her own, but no dream-world would satisfy her now.

To them pain and mishap present a far wider range of possibilities than gladness and enjoyment: their imagination is almost barren of the images that feed desire and hope, but is all overgrown by recollections that are a perpetual pasture to fear.

He begins to die, that quits his desires.

Wouldst thou both eat thy cake and have it?

Man is no star, but a quick coal Of mortal fire: Who blows it not, nor doth control A faint desire

Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Julie