Ramana Maharshi
Spiritual Teacher
"Happiness is your nature. It is not wrong to desire it. What is wrong is seeking it outside when it is inside."
Desire quotes
Desire
4.5K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
Peter the Great
Tsar
"It is my great desire to reform my subjects, and yet I am ashamed to confess that I am unable to reform myself."
Saint Augustine
Theologian, Philosopher
"If God seems slow in responding, it is because He is preparing a better gift. He will not deny us. God withholds what you are not yet ready for. He wants you to have a lively desire for His greatest gifts. All of which is to say, pray always and do not lose heart."
Joseph Prince
Pastor
"You are destined to reign in life. You are called by the Lord to be a success, to enjoy wealth, to enjoy health, and to enjoy a life of victory. It is not the Lord's desire that you live a life of defeat, poverty, and failure."
Bryan Stevenson
Lawyer, Author
"There is a strength, a power even, in understanding brokenness, because embracing our brokenness creates a need and desire for mercy, and perhaps a corresponding need to show mercy. When you experience mercy, you learn things that are hard to learn otherwise. You see things you can't otherwise see; you hear things you can't otherwise hear. You begin to recognize the humanity that resides in each of us."
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Desire quotes (page 1 of 225)
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"God always forgives when you are totally repentant and you desire to change. He forgives... and He never gets tired of forgiving. Never. You may get tired asking. I hope not. He never, never tires of forgiving. Never."
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"There is a power under your control that is greater than poverty, greater than the lack of education, greater than all your fears and superstitions combined. It is the power to take possession of your own mind and direct it to whatever ends you may desire."
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"I am lucky that whatever fear I have inside me, my desire to win is always stronger."
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"All suffering originates from craving, from attachment, from desire."
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"Every day I discover more and more beautiful things. It’s enough to drive one mad. I have such a desire to do everything, my head is bursting with it."
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"Human behavior flows from three main sources: desire, emotion, and knowledge."
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"The absolute desire of 'having more' encourages the selfishness that destroys communal bonds among the children of God. It does so because the idolatry of riches prevents the majority from sharing the goods that the Creator has made for all, and in the all-possessing minority it produces an exaggerated pleasure in these goods."
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"Destroy my desires, eradicate my ideals, show me something better, and I will follow you."
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"...it's my hypothesis that the individual is not a pre-given entity which is seized on by the exercise of power. The individual, with his identity and characteristics, is the product of a relation of power exercised over bodies, multiplicities, movements, desires, forces."
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"Just as a waterfall grows slower and more lightly suspended as it plunges down, so the great man of action tends to act with greater calmness than his tempestuous desires prior to the deed would lead one to expect."
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"I have a deeply hidden and inarticulate desire for something beyond the daily life."
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"Its not about passion. Passion is something that we tend to overemphasize, that we certainly place too much importance on. Passion ebbs and flows. To me, it's about desire. If you have constant, unwavering desire to be a cook, then u'll be a great cook."
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"If something burns your soul with purpose and desire, it’s your duty to be reduced to ashes by it. Any other form of existence will be yet another dull book in the library of life."
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"Where they love they do not desire and where they desire they do not love."
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"The desire for symmetry, for balance, for rhythm in form as well as in sound, is one of the most inveterate of human instincts."
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"Life is the will to power; our natural desire to dominate and reshape the world to fit our own preferences and assert our personal strength to the fullest degree."
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"...ma gia volgena il mio disio e'l velle si come rota ch'igualmente e mossa, l'amor che move: i sole e l'altre stelle ...as a wheel turns smoothtly, free from jars, my will and my desire were turned by love, The love that moves the sun and the other stars."
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"It is not enough to demand insight and informative images of reality from the theater. Our theater must stimulate a desire for understanding, a delight in changing reality."
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"I desire the things that will destroy me in the end."
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"All true artists, bear within themselves a deeply rooted and often unconscious desire for transformation."
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