Quotes About Desire

The world tempts us either by attaching us to it in prosperity, or by filling us with fear of adversity. But faith overcomes this in that we believe in a life to come better than this one, and hence we despise the riches of this world and we are not terrified in the face of adversity.

sin embargo, el conocimiento más delgado que se puede obtener de las cosas más altas es más deseable que el conocimiento más cierto obtenido de las cosas menores

Satisfaction = what you have ÷ what you want

I would rather be poor in a cottage full of books than a king without the desire to read.

I like to have a thing suggested rather than told in full. When every detail is given, the mind rests satisfied, and the imagination loses the desire to use its own wings. The partly draped statue has a charm which the nude lacks. Who would have those marble folds slip from the raised knee of the Venus of Melos?

When I behold what pleasure is Pursuit, What life, what glorious eagerness it is, Then mark how full Possession falls from this, How fairer seems the blossom than the fruit

I like to have a thing suggested rather than told in full. When every detail is given, the mind rests satisfied, and the imagination loses the desire to use its own wings.

Whatever condition we are in, we must always do what we want to do, and if we want to go on a journey, then we must do so and not worry about our condition, even if it's the worst possible condition, because, if it is, we're finished anyway, whether we go on the journey or not, and it's better to die having made the journey we're been longing for than to be stifled by our longing.

Women were like rivers, their banks were unreachable, the night often rang with the cries of the drowned.

Many eat that on earth that they digest in hell.

If reason is a rebel unto faith, so is passion unto reason.

These are O Lord the humble desires of my most reasonable ambition and all I dare call happinesse on earth: wherein I set no rule or limit to thy hand or providence. Dispose of me according to the wisdome of thy pleasure. Thy will bee done, though in my owne undoing.

How delicious is the winning of a kiss at love's beginning.

My sweetest Lesbia, let us live and love,And though the sager sort our deeds reprove,Let us not weigh them. Heaven's great lamps do diveInto their west, and straight again revive,But soon as once set is our little light,Then must we sleep one ever-during night.

He that loves a rosy cheek,Or a coral lip admires,Or, from starlike eyes, doth seekFuel to maintain his fires;As old Time makes these decay,So his flames must waste away.

Weak eyes are fondest of glittering objects.

The courage we desire and prize is not the courage to die decently, but to live manfully.

No sooner is your ocean filled, than he grumbles that it might have been of better vintage. Try him with half of a Universe, of an Omnipotence, he sets to quarrelling with the proprietor of the other half, and declares himself the most maltreated of men.—Always there is a black spot in our sunshine: it is even, as I said, the Shadow of Ourselves.

Enjoy things which are pleasant; that is not the evil: it is the reducing of our moral self to slavery by them that is.

Hunger whets everything, especially Suspicion and Indignation.

To men in their sleep there is nothing granted in this world.

We can do without any article of luxury we have never had; but when once obtained, it is not in human natur' to surrender it voluntarily.

Thomas de Quincey

Not the Opium-eater, but the opium, is the true hero of the tale, and the legitimate centre on which the interest revolves.