Desire quotes
4.5K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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Browse quotes that often appear alongside desire — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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"What do you fear, lady?" [Aragorn] asked. "A cage," [Éowyn] said. "To stay behind bars, until use and old age accept them, and all chance of doing great deeds is gone beyond recall or desire."
"Desire makes everything blossom; possession makes everything wither and fade."
"I wish I knew where I was going. Doomed to be carried of the spirit into the wilderness, I suppose. I wish I could be more moderate in my desires, but I cannot, and so there is no rest."
"Freedom is secured not by the fulfillment of one's desires, but by the removal of desire."
"This is the copywriters task: not to create mass desire — but to channel and direct it."
"Oh foolish desires of mortals! How weak are the reasons that lead us to not take off our flight from the ground."
"It is essential to happiness that our way of living should spring from our own deep impulses and not from the accidental tastes and desires of those who happen to be our neighbors, or even our relations."
"life is long between the desire and the spasm."
"For what are we looking for if not to please? I do not know if the desire to attract others comes from a superabundance of vitality, possessiveness, or the hidden, unspoken need to be reassured."
"The world is nothing but a great desire to live and a great dissatisfaction with living."
"Slaves lose everything in their chains, even the desire of escaping from them."
"Even avatars have to desire to be in God in every moment. And when avatars die, they desire with all their being to be united with God. ….. Look at Ramakrishna. How much he wept and prayed for the Divine Mother."
"According to its doctors, my one intransigent desire is to have been a Confederate general, and because I could not or would not become anything else, I set up for poet and beg an to invent fictions about the personal ambitions that my society has no use for."
"You don’t need a reason to be happy...your desire to be so is sufficient."
"Temperance is a disposition that restrains our desires for things which it is base to desire."
"LOVE and LOVER live in Eternity. Other desires are substitutes for that way of being."
"i'm a slave to my emotions, to my likes, to my hatred of boredom, to most of my desires"
"Whatever you ardently and passionately desire, that you obtain."
"The thirst for equality can express itself either as a desire to draw everyone down to one's level, or to raise oneself and everyone else up."
"All roads are long which lead to one's heart's desire."
