“Complexity stimulates desire.”

Source: A Treatise On Political Economy (Fourth Edition) (1832), Book I, On Production, Chapter XV, p. 138

Essays on Woman (1996), Spirituality of the Christian Woman (1932)

Essays on the Art of Theater (1954).
Context: It is not enough to demand insight and informative images of reality from the theater. Our theater must stimulate a desire for understanding, a delight in changing reality. Our audience must experience not only the ways to free Prometheus, but be schooled in the very desire to free him. Theater must teach all the pleasures and joys of discovery, all the feelings of triumph associated with liberation.

Suffering and Greatness of Richard Wagner (1933)

1910s, The Principles of Natural Knowledge (1919)

Source: Political Treatise (1677), Ch. 10, Of Aristocracy, Conclusion

Variant translation : Laws which can be broken without any wrong to one's neighbor are but a laughing-stoke ; and, so far from such laws restraining the appetites and lusts of mankind, they rather heighten them.

Variant: All laws which can be violated without doing any one any injury are laughed at. Nay, so far are they from doing anything to control the desires and passions of men, that, on the contrary, they direct and incite men's thoughts the more toward those very objects, for we always strive toward what is forbidden and desire the things we are not allowed to have. And men of leisure are never deficient in the ingenuity needed to enable them to outwit laws framed to regulate things which cannot be entirely forbidden... He who tries to determine everything by law will foment crime rather than lessen it.

Quote from 'Private Notebooks of Fritz Wotruba'; transl. Peter Foges & Haakon Chevalier – Neuchatel, Editions du Griffion, 1961.

Autobiography of a Yogi (1946)

Sex and Class in Latin America, (1976), p. 9: introduction