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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"It is my desire, by my presence and with my words, to pay tribute to your tireless work in defending and fostering the inviolability of innocent and defenseless human life from the moment of conception until the moment of natural death."
"A man must have limits and cannot give in to the wild desires to be everything and everyone and everything to everyone."
"A human soul devoid of longing was a soul deformed, deprived of its highest good, sick unto death."
". . . I fail to find a trace [in Protestantism] of any desire to set reason free. The most that can be discovered is a proposal to change masters. From being a slave of the papacy, the intellect was to become the serf of the Bible."
"A goal or cause in life, will help you come out of your hunger for insatiable desires."
"[My teacher] basically bribed me back into learning with candy and money and what was really remarkable was before very long I had such a respect for her that it sort of re-ignited my desire to learn."
"The meditative state is the highest state of existence. So long as there is desire, no real happiness can come. It is only the contemplative, witness-like study of objects that brings to us real enjoyment and happiness."
"People who repress desires often turn, suddenly, into hypocrites."
"Many have been led astray by the Qur'an: by clinging to that rope many have fallen into the well. There is no fault in the rope, O perverse man, for it was you who had no desire to reach the top."
"Eroticism is first and foremost a thirst for otherness. And the supernatural is the supreme otherness. This is perhaps the most noble aim of poetry, to attach ourselves to the world around us, to turn desire into love, to embrace, finally what always evades us, what is beyond, but what is always there – the unspoken, the spirit, the soul."
"If you want a thing--truly want it, want it so badly that you need it as you need air to breathe, then unless you die, you will have it. Why not? It has you. There is no escape. What a cruel and terrible thing escape would be if escape were possible"
"Lessen selfishness and restrain desires."
"An anxious unrest, a fierce craving desire for gain has taken possession of the commercial world, and in instances no longer rare the most precious and permanent goods of human life have been madly sacrificed in the interests of momentary enrichment."
"Taking possession of your positive self will put you on the success beam that you may ride triumphantly to whatever heights of achievement you desire."
"Dreams come true when desire transforms into concrete actions."
"Willpower and desire, when properly combined, make an irresistible pair."
"Many desire to kill me, and many wish to spend an hour chatting with me. The law protects me from the former."
"The press, that goiter of the world, swells up with the desire for conquest and bursts with the achievements which every day brings. A week has room for the boldest climax of the human drive for expansion."
"The desire which a man has for a woman is not directed towards her because she is a human being, but because she is a woman ; that she is a human being is of no concern to the man; only her sex is the object of his desires."
"The ultimate end of human acts is eudaimonia, happiness in the sense of living well, which all men desire; all acts are but different means chosen to arrive at it."
