Quotes About Desire

Our belief that a person takes part in an unknown life which his or her love would allow us to enter is, of all that love demands in order to come into being, what it prizes the most, and what makes it care little for the rest.

Et quand vint l'heure du courrier, je me dis ce soir-la comme tous les autres: Je vais recevoir une lettre de Gilberte, elle va me dire enfin qu'elle n'a jamais cessé de m'aimer, et m'expliquera la raison mysterieuse pour laquelle elle a été forcée de ma le cacher jusqu'ici, de faire semblant de pouvoir être heureuse sans me voir, la raison pour laquelle elle a pris l'apparence de la Gilberte simple camarade.

she had uttered these words simply in order to provoke a reply in certain other words, which she seemed, indeed, to wish to hear spoken, but, from prudence, would let her friend be the first to speak.

Altogether, I had derived little benefit from being in Balbec, for which reason I was all the more determined to come back one day. I felt I had spent too short a time there.

The young woman's smiling lips met his caresses halfway, and her eyes shone in their depths like pools warmed by the sun.

When we are in love, our love is too big a thing for us to be able altogether to contain it within ourselves.

His strength was restored and, with it, all his desires to live; he went out, began living again, and died a second time for himself.

He turned his head to avoid seeing the happy tableau of pleasures that he had passionately loved and that he would never enjoy again.

so beautiful that he could not refrain from moving his lips towards her...

Jean's desires, like those of all men in love, were concentrated on the impossible.

Dire que j'ai gâché des années de ma vie, que j'ai voulu mourir, que j'ai eu mon plus grand amour, pour une femme qui ne me plaisait pas, qui n'était pas mon genre!

Sometimes, too, just as Eve was created from a rib of Adam, so a woman would come into existence while I was sleeping, conceived from some strain in the position of my limbs. Formed by the appetite that I was on the point of gratifying, she it was, I imagined, who offered me that gratification. My body, conscious that its own warmth was permeating hers, would strive to become one with her, and I would awake.

Desiring a will was not enough. I would have needed precisely what I could not have without willpower: a will.

We desire some pleasure, and the material means of obtaining it are lacking. "It is a mistake," Labruyère tells us, "to be in love without an ample fortune." There is nothing for it but to attempt a gradual elimination of our desire for that pleasure.

loopholes opened by disappointment. Dreams are not to be converted into reality, that we know; we would not form any, perhaps, were it not for desire, and it is useful to us to form them in order to see them fail and to be instructed by their failure.

Una certa somiglianza esiste, pur evolvendosi, fra le donne che via via amiamo, e dipende dalla fissità del nostro temperamento il quale, assumendosi l'incarico di sceglierle, elimina tutte quelle che non siano per noi, ad un tempo, opposte e complementari, vale a dire atte a soddisfare i nostri sensi e a far soffrire il nostro cuore.

Because of the infinite quality of love, or its egotism, the intellectual and spiritual physiognomy of the people we love are the least objectively defined for us. We are constantly retouching them to suit our desires and our fears; we do not separate them from us; they are but an immense and vague place where our affections exteriorize themselves.

She wept over the vanity of her desires, which had so ardently flown to the blossoming flesh that now had already withered forever.

Embora Swann nunca se tivesse considerado seriamente ameaçado pela amizade de Odette por esse ou aquele fiel, sentira uma profunda doçura ao ouvi-la admitir assim diante de todos, com aquele tranquilo despudor, seus encontros cotidianos de cada noite, a situação privilegiada que ele ocupava em sua casa e a preferência por ele que ali estava implícita.

Odette seemed a fascinating and desirable woman, the attraction which her body held for him had aroused a painful longing to secure the absolute mastery of even the tiniest particles of her heart.

We dream much of Paradise, or rather of a number of successive Paradises, but each of them is, long before we die, a Paradise lost, in which we should feel ourselves lost also.

I must choose to cease from suffering or to cease from loving.

Attachment to an object always brings death to the possessor.

Ambition is more intoxicating than fame; desire makes all things blossom, possession wilts them; it is better to dream your life than to live it, even if living it means dreaming it, though both less mysteriously and less vividly, in a murky and sluggish dream, like the straggling dream in the feeble awareness of ruminant creatures.