Quotes About Desire

Life is short, so fall in love.

Live the life you want.

What makes a scientist a "Mad Scientist"? A lack of desire to publish, mainly.

Desire persuades us that if only we have a pleasant breath or if only we have that spacious feeling we had earlier, then we would be happy. But desire is insatiable. As soon as we get the object or experience we have been longing for, we move on to another desire, because the more we pursue desire, the more desire we experience.

We can also see how desire sees just the attractive qualities of the breath we imagine we want, divorced from the reality of our breathing - which is sometimes tight and sometimes smooth, and always is changing. This examination can give us exceptional insight as to how desire operates in our lives - how it adheres to its object, how it makes its object more attractive than it really is and makes us blind to unattractive aspects. We can examine how insatiable it is.

Hunger knows no friend but its feeder.

The love of wine is a good man's failing.

These impossible women! How they do get around us!The poet was right: can't live with them, or without them!

It is the nature of desire not to be satisfied, and most men live only for the gratification of it.

I count him braver who overcomes his desires than him who overcomes his enemies.

Again, men in general desire the good, and not merely what their fathers had.

To enjoy the things we ought, and to hate the things we ought, has the greatest bearing on excellence of character.

The greatest crimes are caused by surfeit, not by want.

All men by nature desire knowledge...

Purpose is a desire for something in our own power, coupled with an investigation into its means.

Where perception is, there also are pain and pleasure, and where these are, there, of necessity, is desire.

If there is some end of the things we do, which we desire for its own sake, clearly this must be the good. Will not knowledge of it, then, have a great influence on life? Shall we not, like archers who have a mark to aim at, be more likely to hit upon what we should? If so, we must try, in outline at least, to determine what it is.

For pleasure is a state of soul, and to each man that which he is said to be a lover of is pleasant.

Wickedness is nourished by lust.

It is the nature of desire not to be satisfied, and most men live only for the gratification of it. The beginning of reform is not so much to equalize property as to train the noble sort of natures not to desire more, and to prevent the lower from getting more.

Hope is a waking dream.

Oil's been pretty darned good to us," she said. "I don't want a smaller house. I don't want to drive a smaller car.

I keep brooding on whether I shall reach the age of my father and brother, or even that of my mother, tortured as I am by the conflict between the desire for rest, the dread of renewed suffering (which a prolonged life would mean) and by the anticipation of sorrow at being separated from everything to which I am still attached.

He concludes that one can do only three things about death: "To desire it, to fear it, or to ignore it. The third alternative, which is the one the modern world calls 'healthy,' is surely the most uneasy and precarious of all.