Quotes About Desire

Return enraptur'd Hours, When Delia's heart was mine; When she, with wreaths of flowers, My Temples wou'd entwine. When Jealousy nor care Corroded in my Breast, But Visions, light as Air, Presided o'er my Rest— Now Nightly round my Bed No airy Visions play; No Flowers crown my Head Each Vernal Holyday? For far from those sad Plains My Lovely Delia flies, And rack'd with Jealous Pains, Her wretched Lover dies.34

De liefde tot katten is zo mooi, doordat het eigenlijk een ongelukkige liefde is. Wie durft uit het diepst van zijn gemoed te verklaren dat zijn kat hem bemint? Ik denk dat katten vooral tot liefdesobject worden uitgekozen door hen die een afkeer hebben van allemansvriendinnen.

Hoeveel minder begerenswaardig zou Madelon misschien zijn als ik haar niet aan iemand ontstelen moest!

Spiritual direction, therefore, explicitly acknowledges what is often only implicit in other forms of pastoral care: that the directees' desire for more life, more integration, more union with God is grounded in the indwelling Spirit and that God is an active Other in the relationship. The working alliance is thus grounded in mystery and explicitly acknowledges that the way, too, is mystery.

Your primary desire, says Epictetus, should be your desire not to be frustrated by forming desires you won't be able to fulfill.

the easiest way for us to gain happiness is to learn how to want the things we already have.

Indeed, pursuing pleasure, Seneca warns, is like pursuing a wild beast: On being captured, it can turn on us and tear us to pieces. Or, changing the metaphor a bit, he tells us that intense pleasures, when captured by us, become our captors, meaning that the more pleasures a man captures, "the more masters will he have to serve.

We humans are unhappy in large part because we are insatiable; after working hard to get what we want, we routinely lose interest in the object of our desire. Rather than feeling satisfied, we feel a bit bored, and in response to this boredom, we go on to form new, even grander desires.

Throughout the millennia and across cultures, those who have thought carefully about desire have drawn the conclusion that spending our days working to get whatever it is we find ourselves wanting is unlikely to bring us either happiness or tranquility.

It is, after all, hard to know what to choose when you aren't really sure what you want.

We need, in other words, to learn how to enjoy things without feeling entitled to them and without clinging to them.

one wonderful way to tame our tendency to always want more is to persuade ourselves to want the things we already have.

Most of us are "living the dream" living, that is, the dream we once had for ourselves.

It is impossible that happiness, and yearning for what is not present, should ever be united."3

Around the world and throughout the millennia, those who have thought carefully about the workings of desire have recognized this—that the easiest way for us to gain happiness is to learn how to want the things we already have.

How, after all, can we convince ourselves to want the things we already have? THE STOICS THOUGHT they had an answer to this question.

There was also agreement that one wonderful way to tame our tendency to always want more is to persuade ourselves to want the things we already have.

In my research on desire, I discovered nearly unanimous agreement among thoughtful people that we are unlikely to have a good and meaningful life unless we can overcome our insatiability. There was also agreement that one wonderful way to tame our tendency to always want more is to persuade ourselves to want the things we already have.

People who achieve luxurious lifestyles are rarely satisfied: Experiencing luxury only whets their appetite for even more luxury.

WHAT DO YOU WANT out of life?

Seneca reminds us how small our bodies are and poses this question: "Is it not madness and the wildest lunacy to desire so much when you can hold so little?

Indeed, pursuing pleasure, Seneca warns, is like pursuing a wild beast: On being captured, it can turn on us and tear us to pieces. Or, changing the metaphor a bit, he tells us that intense pleasures, when captured by us, become our captors, meaning that the more pleasures a man captures, "the more masters will he have to serve."5

humans are unhappy in large part because we are insatiable; after working hard to get what we want, we routinely lose interest in the object of our desire. Rather than feeling satisfied, we feel a bit bored, and in response to this boredom, we go on to form new, even grander desires.

For each desire we fulfill in accordance with this strategy, a new desire will pop into our head to take its place. This means that no matter how hard we work to satisfy our desires, we will be no closer to satisfaction than if we had fulfilled none of them. We will, in other words, remain dissatisfied.