Quotes

Quotes about Desire


Now with my friend I desire not to share or participate, but to engross his sorrows, that, by making them mine own, I may more easily discuss them; for in mine own reason, and within myself, I can command that which I cannot entreat without myself, and within the circle of another.

Sir Thomas Browne

Friendship is held to be the severest test of character. It is easy, we think, to be loyal to a family and clan, whose blood is in your own veins. Love between a man and a woman is founded on the mating instinct and is not free from desire and self-seeking. But to have a friend and to be true under any and all trials is the mark of a man!

Charles Alexander Eastman

The best advisers, helpers and friends, always are not those who tell us how to act in special cases, but who give us, out of themselves, the ardent spirit and desire to act right, and leave us then, even through many blunders, to find out what our ow.

Phillips Brooks

Frigidity is desire imagined by a woman who doesn't desire the man offering himself to her. It's the desire of a woman for a man who hasn't yet come to her, whom she doesn't yet know. She's faithful to this stranger even before she belongs to him. Frigidity is the non-desire for whatever is not him.

Marguerite Duras

It is the awareness of unfulfilled desires which gives a nation the feeling that it has a mission and a destiny.

Eric Hoffer

The true way to gain much, is never to desire to gain too much.

Francis Beaumont

If you're bored with life— you don't get up every morning with a burning desire to do things—you don't have enough goals.

Lou Holtz

Can one desire too much of a good thing?

Cervantes (Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra)

The gratitude of most men is but a secret desire of receiving greater benefits.

Francois Duc de la Rochefoucauld

Because gratification of a desire leads to the temporary stilling of the mind and the experience of the peaceful, joyful Self it's no wonder that we get hooked on thinking that happiness comes from the satisfaction of desires. This is the meaning of the old adage, "Joy is not in things, it is in us.".

Joan Borysenko

This war has been motivated by pride or arrogance, by a desire to control oil wealth, by a desire to implant our programs. on the Diane Rehm Show.

Jimmy Carter

"Oh! what a vile and abject thing is man unless he can erect himself above humanity." Here is a bon mot and a useful desire, but equally absurd. For to make the handful bigger than the hand, the armful bigger then the arm, and to hope to stride further than the stretch of our legs, is impossible and monstrous. . . . He may lift himself if God lend him His hand of special grace; he may lift himself . . . by means wholly celestial. It is for our Christian religion, and not for his Stoic virtue, to pretend to this divine and miraculous metamorphosis.

Michael Eyquen de Montaigne

From the deepest desires often come the deadliest hate.

George Bernard Socrates

There are two tragedies in life. One is to lose your heart's desire. The other is to gain it. -George Bernard Shaw.

George Bernard Shaw

Hell is full of good wishes or desires. [Fr., L'enfer est plein de bonnes volontes ou desirs.]

Saint Bernard of Clairvaux

The holiest of all holidays are those Kept by ourselves in silence and apart; The secret anniversaries of the heart, When the full river of feeling overflows;-- The happy days unclouded to their close; The sudden joys that our of darkness start As flames from ashes; swift desires that dart Like swallows singing down each wind that blows!

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Hope deferred maketh the heart sick: but when the desire cometh, it is a tree of life.

Saint Basil (Bishop of Caesarea) ("The Bible

Hope! thou nurse of young desire.

Isaac Bickerstaff

Whoever, in middle age, attempts to realize the wishes and hopes of his early youth, invariably deceives himself. Each ten years of a man's life has its own fortunes, its own hopes, its own desires.

Thomas Goethe

Limited in his nature, infinite in his desires. Man is a fallen god who remembers heaven.

Alphonse De Lamartine

With this there grows In my most ill-compos'd affection such A stanchless avarice that, were I King, I should cut off the nobles for their lands, Desire his jewels, and this other's house, And my more-having would be as a sauce To make me hunger more, that I should forge Quarrels unjust against the good and loyal, Destroying them for wealth.

William Shakespeare

It must be so--Plato, thou reasonest well!-- Else whence this pleasing hope, this fond desire, This longing after immortality? Or whence this secret dread, and inward horror, O falling into nought? Why shrinks the soul Back on herself, and startles at destruction? 'Tis the divinity that stirs within us; 'Tis heaven itself, that points out an hereafter, And intimates eternity to man.

Joseph Addison

I understand by this passion the union of desire, friendship, and tenderness, which is inflamed by a single female, which prefers her to the rest of her sex, and which seeks her possession as the supreme or the sole happiness of our being.

Edward Gibbon

Consciously or unconsciously, every one of us does render some service or other. If we cultivate the habit of doing this service deliberately, our desire for service will steadily grow stronger and we will make not only our own happiness, but that of the world at large.

Mahatma Gandhi

Let us train our minds to desire what the situation demands.

Anthony Seneca

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