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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"[I]t is rather the case that we desire something because we believe it to be good than that we believe a thing to be good because we desire it. It is the thought that starts things off."
"Man by Nature desires to know."
"The desire not to be anything is the desire not to be."
"A 'whim' is a desire experienced by a person who does not know and does not care to discover its cause."
"Affection is created by habit, community of interests, convenience and the desire of companionship. It is a comfort rather than an exhilaration."
"Abstinence sows sand all over The ruddy limbs and flaming hair, But desire gratified Plants fruits of life and beauty there."
"Events are influenced by our very great desires."
"it provokes the desire, but it takes away the performance"
"My love is as a fever, longing still For that which longer nurseth the disease, Feeding on that which doth preserve the ill, Th' uncertain sickly appetite to please. My reason, the physician to my love, Angry that his prescriptions are not kept, Hath left me, and I desperate now approve Desire is death, which physic did except."
"And keep you in the rear of your affection, Out of the shot and danger of desire, The chariest maid is prodigal enough If she unmasks her beauty to the moon."
"Can it be That modesty may more betray our sense Than woman's lightness? Having waste ground enough, Shall we desire to raze the sanctuary And pitch our evils there?"
"it so often happens that, when men are convinced that they have to die, a desire to bear themselves well and to leave life's stage with dignity conquers all other sensations."
"That is the worst moment, when you feel you have lost / The desires for all that was most desirable, / Before you are contented with what you can desire; / Before you know what is left to be desired; / And you go on wishing that you could desire / What desire has left behind."
"This very moment I may, if I desire, become the friend of God."
"Repulsion is the sentry that guards the gate to all that we most desire."
"He was a worker whose only desire was to penetrate with all his forces into the humble and difficult significance of his tools. Therein lay a certain renunciation of Life, but in just this renunciation lay his triumph, for Life entered into his work."
"You don't have to become a slave in a corporate office or groupie of a celebrity architect, because all you need is a piece of paper, a pencil and the desire to make architecture."
"The obsessive documentation is itself adjacent to hyper-consumption in our society. The desire to just have everything all the time and adjacent to that is - it might be a little hokey but - a certain loss of identity that then only gets sort of found or ascribed to these moments that are documented."
"What we love that we have, but by desire we bereave ourselves of the love."
"We walk alone in the world. Friends, such as we desire, are dreams and fables."
