Quotes About Desire

Nothing is worthwhile, my distant love, except knowing how sweet it is to know that nothing is worthwhile

Amar es fastidioso, pero tal vez sea preferible a no amar.

Love, glory, and wealth are prisons.

The essence of what I desire is simply this: to sleep away life. I love life too much to want it to be over; I love not living too much to have an active craving for life.

And then I feel an overwhelming, absurd desire for a kind of Satanism before Satan, a desire that one day – a day without time or substance – an escape leading outside of God will be discovered, and our deepest selves will somehow cease participating in being and non-being.

I want you only for my dreams,' they tell the beloved woman in verses they never send – they who dare not tell her anything. This 'I want you only for my dreams' is a verse from an old poem of mine. I record the memory with a smile, and don't even comment on the smile.

I have in me like a haze Which holds and which is nothing A nostalgia for nothing at all, The desire for something vague. — Fernando Pessoa, opening lines to "[I have in me like a haze]," trans. Richard Zenith, Fernando Pessoa and Co.: Selected Poems (Grove Press, 1998)

Without illusions, we live by dreaming, which is the illusion of those who can't have illusions.

Though naturally ambitious, he savored the pleasure of having no ambitions at all.

Everything I sought in life I abandoned for the sake of the search.

I limited and focused my desires to hone and refine them. To reach the infinite – and I believe it can be reached – we need to have a sure port, just one, from which to set out for the Indefinite. Today I'm an ascetic in my religion of myself. A cup of coffee, a cigarette and my dreams can substitute quite well for the universe and its stars, for work, love, and even beauty and glory. I need virtually no stimulants. I have opium enough in my soul.

We never love anyone. What we love is the idea we have of someone. It's our own concept – our own selves – that we love. This is true in the whole gamut of love. In sexual love we seek our own pleasure via another body. In non-sexual love, we seek our own pleasure via our own idea. The masturbator may be abject, but in point of fact he's the perfect logical expression of the lover. He's the only one who doesn't feign and doesn't fool himself.

Wanting to go and die in Peking and not being able to is something that weighs on me like the idea of some imminent cataclysm.

Every pleasure is a vice, because to seek pleasure is what everyone does in life, and the only black vice is to do what everyone else does.

El sueño es la peor de las cocaínas, por ser la más natural de todas.

Amar é maçador, mas é talvez preferível a não amar.

The feelings that hurt most, the emotions that sting most, are those that are absurd: the longing for impossible things, precisely because they are impossible; nostalgia for what never was; the desire for what could have been; regret over not being someone else; dissatisfaction with the world's existence.

Since I cannot live without affection, why was that affection taken from me?

The most contemptible thing about dreams is that everyone has them.

Ah! Querem uma luz melhor que a do Sol! Querem prados mais verdes do que estes! Querem flores mais belas do que estas que vejo! A mim este Sol, estes prados, estas flores, contentam-me. Mas, se acaso me descontentam, O que quero é um sol mais sol que o Sol, O que quero é prados mais prados que estes prados, O que quero é flores mais estas flores que estas flores — Tudo mais ideal do que é do mesmo modo e da mesma maneira!

Want little: you'll have everything. Want nothing: you'll be free.

Tedium … To suffer without suffering, to want without desire, to think without reason … It's like being possessed by a negative demon

Ah, how I'd love to fall right from here Through a trapdoor—clack!—to my grave! Life tastes to me like mild tobacco. All I ever did was smoke life away. What I really want is faith and peace And to get these sensations under control. Put an end to this, God! Open the floodgates! Enough of this comedy in my soul!

Every married couple in the world is a mismatch because each person harbors, in the secret part of the soul that belongs to the Devil, the subtle image of the man they desire but who is not their husband, the nubile figure of the sublime woman their wife never was.