Quotes About Desire

Basil Hallward is what I think I am: Lord Henry what the world thinks me: Dorian what I would like to be—in other ages, perhaps.

His sudden mad love for Sibyl Vane was a psychological phenomenon of no small interest. There was no doubt that curiosity had much to do with it, curiosity and the desire for new experiences; yet it was not a simple but rather a very complex passion.

Surely Love is a wonderful thing. It is more precious than emeralds, and dearer than fine opals. Pearls and pomegranates cannot buy it, nor is it set forth in the marketplace. It may not be purchased of the merchants, for can it be weighed out in the balance for gold.

Life cheats us with shadows. We ask it for pleasure. It gives it to us with bitterness and disappointment in its train.

My desire to live is as intense as ever, and though my heart is broken, hearts are made to be broken: that is why God sends sorrow into the world.

Men always want to be a woman's first love - women like to be a man's last romance.

You, who know all the secrets of life, tell me how to charm Sibyl Vane to love me! I want to make Romeo jealous, I want the dead lovers of the world to hear our laughter, and grow sad. I want a breath of our passion to stir their dust into consciousness, to wake their ashes into pain. My God, Harry, how I worship her!

How long could you love a woman who didn't love you, Cecil? A woman who didn't love me? Oh, all my life!

I wish you would tell me your secret. To get back my youth I would do anything in the world, except take exercise, get up early, or be respectable.

The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it. Resist it, and your soul grows sick with longing for the things it has forbidden to itself, with desire for what its monstrous laws have made monstrous and unlawful. It has been said that the great events of the world take place in the brain. It is in the brain, and the brain only, that the great sins of the world take place also.

La única manera de librarse de la tentación es ceder ante ella. Si se resiste, el alma enferma, anhelando lo que ella misma se ha prohibido, deseando lo que sus leyes monstruosas han hecho monstruoso e ilegal

I represent to you all the sins you have never had the courage to commit.

Young men want to be faithful, and are not. Old men want to be faithless, and cannot.

Each of us has heaven and hell in him, Basil, cried Dorian with a wild gesture of despair.

The aim of Love is to love: no more, and no less.

The unspeakable in pursuit of the uneatable!

The living always think that gold can make them happy

Sometime you will find, even as I have found, that there is no such thing as romantic experience; there are romantic memories, and there is the desire of romance- that is all. Our most fiery moments of ecstasy are merely shadows of what somewhere else we have felt, or of what we long someday to feel

You have never been poor, and never known what ambition is.

It was you I thought of all the time, I gave to them the love you did not need: lavished on them a love that was not theirs.

Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live. It is asking other people to live as one wishes to live.

Love! What is love? It's nothing. It's just a word. It doesn't exist. Only pleasure is important.

Lord Illingworth told me this morning that there was an orchid there as beautiful as the seven deadly sins.

LADY BRACKNELL Algernon is an extremely, I may almost say an ostentatiously, eligible young man. He has nothing, but he looks everything. What more can one desire?