“Profound desire, true desire is the desire to be close to someone.”

"Will, Freedom”
Elements of Physiology (1875)

Sometimes published as an anonymous saying, this was attributed to Bishop Samuel Wilberforce in Is It Nothing To You? Social Purity, A Grave Moral Question (1884) by Henry Rowley, p. 88; to Samuel Taylor Coleridge in "Would You Be Re-elected", Munsey's Magazine (April 1909), p. 769; and to de Staël in Aspects of Western Civilization : Problems and Sources in History (2003), p. 294
Disputed

Source: The Beauty Myth (1991), Chapter 5 : 'Sex', p. 157
Context: The books and films they see survey from the young boy's point of view his first touch of a girl's thighs, his first glimpse of her breasts. The girls sit listening, absorbing, their familiar breasts estranged as if they were not part of their bodies, their thighs crossed self-consciously, learning how to leave their bodies and watch them from the outside. Since their bodies are seen from the point of view of strangeness and desire, it is no wonder that what should be familiar, felt to be whole, becomes estranged and divided into parts. What little girls learn is not the desire for the other, but the desire to be desired. Girls learn to watch their sex along with the boys; that takes up the space that should be devoted to finding out about what they are wanting, and reading and writing about it, seeking it and getting it.

Original: (it) La notte compongo pensieri e desideri che descrivono attimi di profonda libertà. Attimi infiniti da vivere con te.
Source: prevale.net

Desire, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

23 July 1827
Table Talk (1821–1834)

Variant: One loves ultimately one's desires, not the thing desired.
Source: Beyond Good and Evil

As quoted in a review of A Swinger of Birches (1957) by Sydney Cox in Vermont History, Vol. 25 (1957), p. 355
1950s