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Quotes About Desires

Obsessions, of course, can never be shared.
~ Jonathan Coe
A truly Christian love, either to God or men, is a humble broken-hearted love. The desires of the saints, however earnest, are humble desires. Their hope is a humble hope; and their joy, even when it is unspeakable and full of glory, is a humble broken-hearted joy, and leaves the Christian more poor in spirit, and more like a little child, and more disposed to a universal lowliness of behaviour.
~ Jonathan Edwards
Technological capitalism is an infernal machine. It always has its way with us. If it doesn't dismantle the Postal Service from without, it will steal its soul from within. The attachment of Americans to their post office is pure nostalgia. It's the double vision of a people whose hearts don't like what their desires have created.
~ Jonathan Franzen
The desires our little family couldn't afford to indulge had never seemed important, only snobbish and silly and somehow misplaced, like Thurston Howell's priorities on Gilligan's Island. Besides, I'd had as much or more money than most kids I'd known in Brooklyn, if somewhat less than the majority of my Manhattan schoolmates at Stuyvesant, so figured I was somewhere in the middle. Yeah, sure, that was it: I was middle class.
~ Jonathan Lethem
I love sushi, I love fried chicken, I love steak. But there is a limit to my love
~ Jonathan Safran Foer
The stoical scheme of supplying our wants by lopping off our desires, is like cutting off our feet, when we want shoes.
~ Jonathan Swift
when put into the balance with a refusal to gratify their passions.
~ Jonathan Swift
So many things I would have done, but clouds got in my way.
~ Joni Mitchell
De toutes les villes du monde. de toutes les patries intimes qu'un homme cherche à mériter au cours de ses voyages, Genève me semble la plus propice au bonheur.
~ Jorge Luís Borges
As Freud has shown, blunders are not the merest chance. They are the result of suppressed desires and conflicts. They are ripples on the surface of life, produced by unsuspected springs. And these may be very deep - as deep as the soul itself. The blunder may amount to the opening of a destiny.
~ Joseph Campbell
Nirvana is right here, in the midst of the turmoil of life. It is the state you find when you are no longer driven to live by compelling desires, fears, and social commitments, when you have found your center of freedom and can act by choice out of that. Voluntary action out of this center is the action of the bodhisattvas -- joyful participation in the sorrows of the world. You are not grabbed, because you have released yourself from the grabbers of fear, lust, and duties.
~ Joseph Campbell
Mythologies are in fact the public dreams that move and shape societies, and conversely one's own dreams are the little myths of the private gods, antigods, and guardian powers that are moving and shaping oneself: revelations of the actual fears, desires, aims, and values by which one's life is subliminally ordered.
~ Joseph Campbell
And they say: 'None shall enter Paradise unless he be a Jew or a Christian.' Those are their (vain) desires. Say: 'Produce your proof if ye are truthful.
~ Abdullah Yusuf Ali
Do not follow vain desires for verily he who prospers is preserved from lust, greed and anger.
~ Abu Bakr
we keep company with Jesus by making space for him through a spiritual discipline. Our part is to offer ourselves lovingly and obediently to God. God then works within us doing what he alone can do. Our desires don't obligate the holy One. God is free to come to us in spiritual disciplines as he wills, not as we demand. But unless we open ourselves to him through spiritual practices, we will miss his coming altogether.
~ Adele Ahlberg Calhoun
When we are rested, we notice desires as well as lies buried in our souls.
~ Adele Ahlberg Calhoun
A poem can't free us from the struggle for existence, but it can uncover desires and appetites buried under the accumulating emergencies of our lives, the fabricated wants and needs we have had urged on us, have accepted as our own. It's not a philosophical or psychological blueprint; it's an instrument for embodied experience.
~ Adrienne Rich
Countless as the sands of the sea are human passions.
~ Nikolai Gogol
In the human heart new passions are forever being born; the overthrow of one almost always means the rise of another.
~ Francois de La Rochefoucauld
We are minor in everything but our passions.
~ Elizabeth Bowen
L'homme ne poursuit que des chimères. ( Man follows only phantoms .) { His true last words, according to Augustus De Morgan .}
~ Pierre-Simon Laplace
For lack of rules (which the undisciplined sector of the young call freedom) sets masters over one which are more tyrannical than the teachers and trainers familiar from childhood – these masters are the desires, when they have broken out of prison, so to speak.
~ Plutarch
Pile up gold, heap up silver, build covered walks, fill your house with slaves and the town with debtors, unless you lay to rest the passions of the soul, and put a curb on your insatiable desires, and rid yourself of fear and anxiety, you are but pouring out wine for a man in a fever, and giving honey to a man who is bilious, and laying out a sumptuous banquet for people who are suffering from dysentery
~ Plutarch
For lack of rules (which the undisciplined sector of the young call freedom) 3 sets masters over one which are more tyrannical [D] than the teachers and trainers familiar from childhood – these masters are the desires, when they have broken out of prison, so to speak. Just
~ Plutarch