Quotes About Desire

Everything has its place. Let in only those things that are greatly desired, no more and no less. That's how to make sense of the world, and the only real way to achieve happiness.'

You love her without willing it or wanting it, and that is the most exquisite pain of all.'

Chemistry was such a strange thing. I'd be willing to bet even Micah couldn't tell me why hundreds of men could leave me cold, while this one could string me along forever with only a smile.

Sex drives us, love or no love. Power or no power. Money or no money. It's the most powerful drug in the world. Some pay for it. Some die for it.'

Miss me?" he whispered, giving me the once-over, eyes lingering on my chest. My heart skipped a beat. My glyph pulsed painfully. "Like a urinary tract infection," I said, through gritted teeth.

This was not a loss that could be shared. Grief was a place every person had to go alone, a lonely country populated by mistakes and a futile desire to turn back time for an impossible "do-over.

I wasn't heading toward a future I wanted as much as I was running away from one I didn't.

I saw you, looking like Hayworth, making me want to pin you up, pin you down, take you for a different kind of ride altogether

Endless desire is one of the pitfalls of human nature, and one of the first things you need to cure if you want to get ahead more quickly.

We hit a fulfillment ceiling and never recognized that the formula of money = fulfillment not only had stopped working but had started to work against us. No matter how much we bought, the fulfillment curve kept heading down.

Money is not really the thing you're after—after all, would you lock yourself in a dark, silent box forever in exchange for becoming a billionaire?

The Hoover Commission agreed. Leisure was not, in fact, an excuse to relax. It was a hole to fill up with more wants (which, in turn, required more work to pay for them). Somehow the consumer solution satisfied both the industrial hedonists hell-bent on achieving a material paradise and the puritans who feared that unoccupied leisure would lead to sin. In fact, the new consumerism promoted all the deadly sins (lust, covetousness, gluttony, pride, envy) except perhaps anger and sloth.

Having more is an endless horizon, no matter how much you have.

If you live for having it all, what you have is never enough. In an environment of more is better, "enough" is like the horizon—always receding. You lose the ability to identify that point of sufficiency at which you can choose to stop. This is a psychological cul-de-sac, an invisible catch-22 of the consumer myth of more. If more is better, then what I have is not enough.

how much would it take to make you happy," almost everyone, in every income bracket, said: 50 percent more than I have now. When asked to rate their happiness on a scale of 1 to 5, there was no significant difference between the top and bottom earners. You could hear a pin drop as people realized that the person in the row ahead of them probably had the "more" they thought would make them happy—and it made no difference.

If you live for having it all, what you have is never enough.

Did you ever think about that?" Joe would ask. "That you have a relationship with money?" He'd get on his knees, begging money to love him. He'd exhibit mock terror, shrinking from the evil hundred-dollar bill. He'd hold it out like a carrot and run around after it, reaching but never grasping it. "This is what your relationship with money looks like! Think about it. If you were money, would you hang out with you?

Passion, pain, what's at hand—these are doorways to finding a purpose beyond material acquisition.

My only aversion to vice, is the price.

Is that what you want? To stagger around the afterlife blind and eye-fucked?

If you are going out beware of mangoes And all such beautiful sweet things.

To be perfectly happy it does not suffice to possess happiness, it is necessary to have deserved it.

When God desires to destroy a thing, he entrusts its destruction to the thing itself. Every bad institution of this world ends by suicide.

I met in the street a very poor young man who was in love. His hat was old, his coat worn, his cloak was out at the elbows, the water passed through his shoes, - and the stars through his soul.