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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"My great and exceeding joy over these stupendous achievements, especially over the abolition of slavery (which had been the deepest desire and the great labor of my life), was slightly tinged with a feeling of sadness."
"Most humans know their own "reason" only in the sense that Hume defined it, as "a slave to the passions"-and by "passions" he meant not moral passions or the passions of transcendent genius, but only low appetites or base desires, which society and economy ultimately shape and spur on in us."
"My deepest desire is to create a world where there's room for all of us, where no matter who you are, you get to wake up in the morning and know that you are worthwhile and deserving. If that's the world I want to live in, I have to do the work to make that true for me."
"I wanted to go home and if Hell rose up to stop me, it would make me desire it more."
"I have no desire to write anything for screen. That's a great talent."
"The outcomes are in incredible need more prominent desire."
"Desire is happiness: satisfaction as happiness is merely the ultimate moment of desire. To be wish and wish alone is happiness, and a new wish over and over again."
"Science rushes headlong, without selectivity, without "taste," at whatever is knowable, in the blind desire to know all at any cost."
"Then is what you see through this window onto the world so lovely that you have no desire whatsoever to look out through any other window, and that you even make an attempt to prevent others from doing so?"
"Our vanity desires that what we do best should be considered what is hardest for us."
"To demand of strength that it should not express itself as strength, that it should not be a desire to overcome, a desire to throw down, a desire to become master, a thirst for enemies and resistances and triumphs, is just as absurd as to demand of weakness that it should express itself as strength."
"In the end we love our desire and not what it is that we desire."
"He who desires to see the living God face-to-face should not seek him in the empty, firmament of his mind, but in human love."
"When you were a wandering desire in the mist, I too was there, a wandering desire. Then we sought one another, and out of our eagerness dreams were born. And dreams were time limitless, and dreams were space without measure."
"Life is not only merriment,It is desire and determination."
"Love possesses not nor would it be possessed; For love is sufficient unto love. And think not you can direct the course of love, if it finds you worthy, directs your course. Love has no other desire but to fulfill itself."
"Master, Master Poet, Master of our silent desires, The heart of the world quivers with the throbbing of your heart, But it burns not with your song."
"My characters shall have, after a little trouble, all that they desire."
"Upon the whole, therefore, she found what had been sometimes found before, that an event to which she had looked forward with impatient desire, did not, in taking place, bring all the satisfaction she had promised herself."
"She was without any power, because she was without any desire of command over herself."
