Quotes About Desire

I thought I was someone who did not need to love, or to be loved.

My emotional state then was cramped and confined, like a room with tightly sealed windows and doors: although love's footsteps could be heard outside the room, I felt they were steps heading somewhere else--until one day when the steps came to a halt and the bell rang.

Unequal lives give rise to unequal dreams.

To learn to be without desire you must desire that. Better to do as you please: sing idleness. Floating clouds, and water idly running -- Where's their source? In all the vastness of the sea and sky, you'll never find it.

Mine was the unbearable jealousy a cultured pearl must feel toward a genuine one. Or can there be such a thing in this world as a man who is jealous of the woman who loves him, precisely because of her love?

When a captive lion steps out of his cage, he comes into a wider world than the lion who has known only the wilds. While he was in captivity, there were only two worlds for him - the world of the cage, and the world outside the cage. Now he is free. He roars. He attacks people. He eats them. Yet he is not satisfied, for there is no third world that is neither the world of the cage nor the world outside the cage.

It is a common failing of childhood to think that if one makes a hero out of a demon the demon will be satisfied.

Human life is limited but I would like to live forever.

I've known supreme happiness, and I'm not greedy enough to want what I have to go on forever. Every dream ends. Wouldn't it be foolish, knowing that nothing lasts forever, to insist that one has a right to do something that does? [...]but, if eternity existed, it would be this moment.

There is no virtue in curiosity. In fact, it might even be the most immoral desire a man can possess.

Abruptly he thrust his snow-drenched leather gloves against my cheeks. I dodged. A raw carnal feeling blazed up within me, branding my cheeks. I felt myself staring at him with crystal clear eyes... From that time on I was in love with Omi.

You were so beautiful when you wanted to die. When you wanted to live, you became so ugly.

For me, beauty is always retreating from one's grasp: the only thing I consider important is what existed once, or ought to have existed.

Man always finds the omens he wants.

It seemed that hell could appear day or night, at any time, at any place, simply in response to one's thoughts or wishes. It seemed that we could summon it at our pleasure and that instantly it would appear.

Her desire was close to that of the person who drowns himself; he does not necessarily covet death so much as what comes after the drowning—something different from what he had before, at least a different world.

In the very simplicity of her desire to punish herself appeared egoism in its purest form. Never before had this woman who seemed to think only of herself experienced an egoism so immaculate.

He wanted to talk about the strange passion that catches hold of a man by the scruff of his neck and transports him to a realm beyond the fear of death.

The men who indulged in nocturnal thought, it seemed to me, had without exception dry, lusterless skins and sagging stomachs. They sought to wrap up a whole epoch in a capacious night of ideas, and rejected in all its forms the sun that I had seen. They rejected both life and death as I had seen them, for in both of these the sun had had a hand.

The law is an accumulation of tireless attempts to block a man's desire to change life into an instant of poetry. Certainly it would not be right to let everybody exchange his life for a line of poetry written with a splash of blood. But the mass of men, lacking valor, pass away their lives without ever feeling the least touch of such a desire.

A woman is never so drunk with happiness as when she discovers desire in the eyes of a man

That is because the most subtle and delicate wishes of evil are not for a physical wound but for a spiritual.

I longed for the great sense of relief that death would surely bring if only, like a wrestler, I could wrench the heavy weight of life from my shoulders.

Fin dall'inizio ogni mia fantasia fu tinteggiata di disperazione, stranamente compiuta e somigliante di per se stessa a desiderio struggente