Quotes About Desire

The fight for joy is the fight to see and believe Christ as more to be desired than the promises of sin.

We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.5

it would be a great mistake to think that the awakening of desire for the Bridegroom would produce a wave of monastic withdrawal into the fasting and prayer of passive waiting. That is not what the awakening of desire for Christ would produce. It would produce a radical, new commitment to complete the task of world evangelization, no matter what the cost. And fasting would not become a pacifistic discipline for private hopes, but a fearsome missionary weapon in the fight of faith.

It is not a bad thing to desire our own good. In fact, the great problem of human beings is that they are far too easily pleased. They don't seek pleasure with nearly the resolve and passion that they should. And so they settle for mud pies of appetite instead of infinite delight.

Our mistake lies not in the intensity of our desire for happiness, but in the weakness of it.

And the essence of sin is preferring anything more than God. That is the root we must sever (daily!)—desiring anything more than God.

Most of our life is a gorging of one artificially inflamed appetite after another.

God is our supreme pleasure. We prefer above all else to know him and see him and be with him and be like him.

If we are attracted by the desirability of something God promises, and hope to enjoy it without enjoying God in it and by it, then we are turning God's promise into a summons to idolatry.

Every man, whatsoever his condition, desires to be happy. There is no man who does not desire this, and each one desires it with such earnestness that he prefers it to all other things; whoever, in fact, desires other things, desires them for this end alone.

God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in Him

The greatest enemy of hunger for God is not poison but apple pie. It is not the banquet of the wicked that dulls our appetite for heaven, but endless nibbling at the table of the world. It is not the X-rated video, but the prime-time dribble of triviality we drink in every night.

The desire to become a journalist came really because I very much like living abroad, and like to travel, and wanted to be paid for it.

The way to get better pornography is to give pornographers better sex.

Jihadists are thoroughly committed, with a burning desire, to make Allah the god and Sharia Law the law, of every nation on the globe.

My wants are many, and, if told, would muster many a score; and were each wish a mint of gold, I still would want for more.

The imagination of a eunuch dwells more and longer upon the material of love than that of man or woman ... supplying, so far as he can, by speculation, the place of pleasures he can no longer enjoy.

A desire to be observed, considered, esteemed, praised, beloved, and admired by his fellows is one of the earliest as well as the keenest dispositions discovered in the heart of man.

Cats are greedy, whereas I merely want all the scraps.

Whoever believes, fears. Whoever fears is humble. Whoever is humble becomes gentle. Whoever is gentle pacifies the unruly forces of desire and aggression and begins to keep the commandments. Whoever keeps the commandments is purified. Whoever is purified is illuminated. Whoever is illuminated is made a spouse of the divine Logos-Bridegroom and shares with him the bridal chamber of mysteries. —Maximos the Confessor

As Julian of Norwich put it, "And thus I saw God, and sought God. I had God, and at the same time I wanted God. And this is, and should be, what we are all working towards."1

And now, it seems, they are all here: the handsome masculine ones desired alike by men and women; the gushing swishes, hands aflutter like wings; the few stray women secure among the men who will idolize them but not love them; and as in any group of homosexuals and those lured for whatever reason to them, there is here a mood of superficial good humor, of euphoria bordering on hysteria. So

It was never about the money; at times no money was involved, just sex." "Then what?" "It was always about—" I had never asked that question of myself. "It was always about—" No word came, no answer. "Power.

But do you know, baby, that I have never been Really Married? I mean in White, coming down a Winding Staircase. . . . And I will! I will fall in love again soon—I can feel it—and when I do, I will have my Fabulous Wedding, in a pearlwhite gown