Quotes About Desire

World was in the face of the beloved--, but suddenly it poured out and was gone: world is outside, world can not be grasped. Why didn't I, from the full, beloved face as I raised it to my lips, why didn't I drink world, so near that I couldn't almost taste it? Ah, I drank. Insatiably I drank. But I was filled up also, with too much world, and, drinking, I myself ran over.

Das ist die Sehnsucht: wohnen im Gewoge und keine Heimat haben in der Zeit. Und das sind Wünsche: leise Dialoge täglicher Stunden mit der Ewigkeit.

To Lou: I want to see the world through you; for then I shall not be seeing the world but only you, you you! I have never seen you without thinking that I should like to pray to you. I have never heard you without thinking that I should like to believe in you. I have never longed for you without thinking that I should like to suffer for you. I have never desired you without thinking that I should be allowed to kneel before you.

Riding, riding, riding, through the dag, through the night, through the day. And the heart has become so tired, and the longing so vast.

Let me put aside every desire, so that my heart grows used to its farthest spaces. Better that it live fully aware, in the terror of its stars, than as if protected, soothed by what is near.

And the heart has become so tired, and the longing so vast.

How he loved and yet wished to leave you: always both, at once.

O stars, Isn't it from you that the lover's desire for the face Of his beloved arises? Doesn't his secret insight Into her pure features come from the pure constellations?

De ton rêve trop plein, fleur en dedans nombreuse, mouillée comme une pleureuse, tu te penches sur le matin. Tes douces forces qui dorment, dans un désir incertain, développent ces tendres formes entre joues et seins.

I don't invent you at sadly cooled-off places from which you've gone away; even your not being there is warm with you and more real and more than a privation. Longing leads out too often into vagueness. Why should I cast myself, when, for all I know, your influence falls on me, gently, like moonlight on a window seat.

Never forget to make a wish, Malte. You should never give up wishing. I believe there is no such thing as fulfillment, but there are wishes, and they go on lasting, your whole lifetime, so that you couldn't wait long enough for them to be fulfilled even if you wanted to.

Eating, too, has been turned away from its true nature: want on the one hand and superfluity on the other have troubled the clarity of this need, and all the profound, simple necessities in which life renews itself have similarly been obscured.

Cum aÅŸ putea s? mi-l mai Å£in în mine sufletul când mi-l mângâi tu?

The artist's experience lies so unbelievably close to the sexual, to its pain and its pleasure, that the two phenomena are really just different forms of one and the same longing and bliss.

To transcend the ego does not mean, for Rilke, to enter into a spiral of radical self-doubt and philosophical skepticism or to open the floodgates of unconscious desire and irrationality. It means to be swept up by the movement of one's heart (or soul, if you like, or serotonin levels) without ever reaching a state where this movement will lose its purpose and desire by being fulfilled.

You see, I want a lot. Maybe I want it all: the darkness of each endless fall, the shimmering light of each ascent. — Rainer Maria Rilke, from "Du Siehst, ich will viel," Rilke's Book of Hours: Love Poems to God , trans. Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy (Riverhead Books, 1996)

Du entfernst dich von mir, du Stunde. Wunden schlägt mir dein Flügelschlag. Allein: was soll ich mit meinem Munde? mit meiner Nacht? mit meinem Tag? Ich habe keine Geliebte, kein Haus, keine Stelle auf der ich lebe. Alle Dinge, an die ich mich gebe, werden reich und geben mich aus. [Der Dichter]

And you must not let yourself be diverted out of your solitude by the fact that something in you wants to escape from it. Precisely this desire, if you use it calmly and judiciously, as a kind of tool, will help you to extend your solitude over a greater expanse of ground.

love then is what my hands attempt to grasp because I want to say a prayer whose sounds my burning mouth, my lips, cannot bring forth … (Franz Kappus)

Ah, only plunged toward you does my face cease being on display, grows into you and twines on darkly, endlessly, into your sheltered heart…

There is only one way: go into yourself. Seek out the reason that commands you to write; discover if it has stretched out its roots into the deepest part of your heart, admit to yourself whether you would have to die if it were forbidden you to write.

Earth, isn't this what you want: to arise in us invisible?—Isn't your dream one day to be invisible?

love then is what my hands attempt to grasp because I want to say a prayer whose sounds my burning mouth, my lips, cannot bring forth …

Wenn du der Träumer bist, bin ich dein Traum. Doch wenn du wachen willst, bin ich dein Wille