Quotes About Desire

The best of all things is something entirely outside your grasp: not to be born, not to be, to be nothing. But the second best thing for you is to die soon.

Man does not strive for happiness; only the Englishman does that.

Something unappeased, unappeasable, is within me.

Weariness that wants to reach the ultimate with one leap, with one fatal leap, a poor ignorant weariness that does not want to want any more: this created all gods and afterworlds.

What does our great historical hunger signify, our clutching about us of countless cultures, our consuming desire for knowledge, if not the loss of myth, of a mythic home, the mythic womb?

Masks. - There are women who, however you may search them, prove to have no content but are purely masks. The man who associates with such almost spectral, necessarily unsatisfied beings is to be commiserated with, yet it is precisely they who are able to arouse the desire of the man most strongly: he seeks for her soul - and goes on seeking.

Men of profound sadness betray themselves when they are happy: they have a mode of seizing upon happiness as though they would choke and strangle it, out of jealousy--ah, they know only too well that it will flee from them!

The spirit now wills his own will, and he who had been lost to the world now conquers the world.

The craving for equality can express itself either as a desire to pull everyone down to our own level (by belittling them, excluding them, tripping them up) or as a desire to raise ourselves up along with everyone else (by acknowledging them, helping them, and rejoicing in their success).

That is an artist as I love artists, modest in his needs: he really wants only two things, his bread and his art - panem et Circen.

I would prefer to be a satyr rather than a saint.

Brave and creative men never consider pleasure and pain as ultimate values—they are epiphenomena: one must desire both if one is to achieve anything.

We love life, not because we are used to living but because we are used to loving.

You have always wanted to caress every monster.

A little poison now and then: that maketh pleasant dreams. And much poison at last for a pleasant death.

They believe one becomes selfless in love because one desires the advantage of another human being, often against one's own advantage. But in return for that they want to possess the other person.

Here and there on earth there is probably a kind of continuation of love; in which this greedy desire of two people for each other gives way to a new desire and greed, a shared higher thirst for an ideal above them. But who knows such love? who has experienced it? Its true name is friendship

God is a conjecture; but I desire that your conjectures should be limited by what is thinkable. Can you think a god? [...] You should think through your own senses to their consequences.

Not necessity, not desire - no, the love of power is the demon of men.

Die Forderung, geliebt zu werden, ist die größte der Anmaßungen.

One puts to one's lips what drives one faster into the abyss".

The revolution made Napoleon possible: that is its justification. For the sake of a similar prize one would have to desire the anarchical collapse of our entire civilisation.

This is what is hardest: to close the open hand because one loves.

Whatever may be your desire to accomplish great deeds, the deep silence of pregnancy never comes to you! The event of the day sweeps you along like straws before the wind whilst ye lie under the illusion that ye are chasing the event,—poor fellows! If a man wishes to act the hero on the stage he must not think of forming part of the chorus; he should not even know how the chorus is made up.