Quotes About Desire

The Shadow. It cannot be grasped. Chase your shadow and it will, flee; turn your back on it and it will follow you. It is also a person's dark side, the thing that makes them mysterious. After they have given us pleasure, the shadow of their withdrawal makes us yearn for their return, much as clouds make us yearn for the sun.

Your greatest power in seduction is your ability to turn away, to make others come after you, delaying their satisfaction.

A man grows bored with a woman, no matter how beautiful; he yearns for different pleasures, and for adventure.

Absence diminishes minor passions and inflames great ones, as the wind douses a candle and fans a fire. La Rochefoucauld, 1613-1680 OBSERVANCE

Selfishness is one of the qualities apt to inspire love. —NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE

Our levels of desire, patience, persistence, and confidence end up playing a much larger role in success than sheer reasoning powers.

Many men are intimidated by beauty and prefer to worship it from afar; others are drawn in, but not for the purpose of conversation. The Beauty suffers from isolation.

Our levels of desire, patience, persistence, and confidence end up playing a much larger role in success than sheer reasoning powers. Feeling motivated and energized, we can overcome almost anything. Feeling bored and restless, our minds shut

Seduction is a form of deception, but people want to be led astray, they yearn to be seduced. If they didn't, seducers would not find so many willing victims. Get rid of any moralizing tendencies, adopt the seducer's playful philosophy, and you will find the rest of the process easy and natural.

PSYCHOLOGY OF LOVE, TRANSLATED BY JOAN RIVIÈRE

We have a continual desire to communicate our feelings and yet at the same time the need to conceal them for proper social functioning.

To understand the peculiar power of the Coquette, you must first understand a critical property of love and desire: the more obviously you pursue a person, the more likely you are to chase them away. Too much attention can be interesting for a while, but it soon grows cloying and finally becomes claustrophobic and frightening. It signals weakness and neediness, an unseductive combination.

The fetish is an object that commands an emotional response and that makes us breathe life into it. Because it is an object we can imagine whatever we want to about it.

The perfect victim is the person who stirs you in a way that cannot be explained in words, whose effect on you has nothing to do with superficialities. He or she often has a quality that you yourself lack, and may even secretly envy

To understand the peculiar power of the Coquette, you must first understand a critical property of love and desire: the more obviously you pursue a person, the more likely you are to chase them away.

Men are not gentle, friendly creatures wishing for love, who simply defend themselves if attacked. . . . A powerful desire for aggression has to be reckoned as part of their . . . endowment. —Sigmund Freud

Coquetry depends on developing a pattern to keep the other person off balance. The strategy is extremely effective. Experiencing a pleasure once, we yearn to repeat it; so the Coquette gives us pleasure, then withdraws it.

In fact, the seducer sees the world as his or her bedroom.)

Neither had any desire for talk; the glow and glory of existing on this perfect morning were satisfaction full and sufficient

So beautiful and strange and new! Since it was to end so soon, I almost wish I had never heard it. For it has roused a longing in me that is pain, and nothing seems worth while but just to hear that sound once more and go on listening to it for ever.

There is a passion in you that scares me.

I believe there is something on this earth that you desire more than anything, and it isn't me.

You're like something drawn with the sun's fire, and I can take only little glimpses of you.

I wish it had been my heart.