“The monastic man is an artist.The philosopher
Appoints man’s place in music, say, today.
But the priest desires. The philosopher desires.

And not to have is the beginning of desire.
To have what is not is its ancient cycle.”

—  Wallace Stevens

Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942), It Must Be Abstract

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update Nov. 10, 2022. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "The monastic man is an artist.The philosopher Appoints man’s place in music, say, today. But the priest desires. The …" by Wallace Stevens?
Wallace Stevens photo
Wallace Stevens 278
American poet 1879–1955

Related quotes

Michel Foucault photo

“There is hardly a philosophy which has not invoked something like the will or desire to know, the love of truth, etcetera. But, in truth, very few philosophers—apart, perhaps, from Spinoza and Schopenhauer—have accorded it more than a marginal status; as if there was no need for philosophy to say first of all what the name that it bears actually refers to. As if placing at the head of its discourse the desire to know, which it repeats in its name, was enough to justify its own existence and show—at a stroke—that it is necessary and natural: All men desire to know. Who, then, is not a philosopher, and how could philosophy not be the most necessary thing in the world?”

Michel Foucault (1926–1984) French philosopher

Source: Lectures on the Will to Know (1970), pp. 4-5

Anne Louise Germaine de Staël photo

“The desire of the man is for the woman, but the desire of the woman is for the desire of the man.”

Anne Louise Germaine de Staël (1766–1817) Swiss author

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

Samuel Taylor Coleridge photo

“The man's desire is for the woman; but the woman's desire is rarely other than for the desire of the man.”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) English poet, literary critic and philosopher

23 July 1827
Table Talk (1821–1834)

Françoise Sagan photo

“Desire, even the basest, kind, required the notion of futurity if it was ever to come off. A man without a future, a dying man, was no longer desirable. And however stupid such a reaction might have seemed, Paul knew that if the situation was ever reversed, he would feel the same way about the woman. Desire would have turned into compassion. Which is tantamount to saying that desire would vanish into thin air.”

Françoise Sagan (1935–2004) French writer

Un chagrin de passage (1994, A Fleeting Sorrow, translated 1995)

Sathya Sai Baba photo

“LIFE + DESIRE = MAN; LIFE – DESIRE = GOD.”

Sathya Sai Baba (1926–2011) Indian guru

Interview with R.K. Karanjia for Blitz magazine (1976)

Ayn Rand photo

“Competition is a by-product of productive work, not its goal. A creative man is motivated by the desire to achieve, not by the desire to beat others.”

Ayn Rand (1905–1982) Russian-American novelist and philosopher

The Ayn Rand Letter (1971–1976)

William Saroyan photo

“If I have any desire at all, it is to show the brotherhood of man.”

William Saroyan (1908–1981) American writer

Seventy Thousand Assyrians (1934)

Ludwig Feuerbach photo

“Man has many wishes that he does not really wish to fulfil, and it would be a misunderstanding to suppose the contrary. He wants them to remain wishes, they have value only in his imagination; their fulfilment would be a bitter disappointment to him. Such a desire is the desire for eternal life. If it were fulfilled, man would become thoroughly sick of living eternally, and yearn for death. In reality man wishes merely to avoid a premature, violent or gruesome death. Everything has its measure, says a pagan philosopher; in the end we weary of everything, even of life; a time comes when man desires death. Consequently there is nothing frightening about a normal, natural death, the death of a man who has fulfilled himself and lived out his life.”

Ludwig Feuerbach (1804–1872) German philosopher and anthropologist

Lecture XXX, Atheism alone a Positive View
Lectures on the Essence of Religion http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/feuerbach/works/lectures/index.htm (1851)

Martin Heidegger photo

“The desire to philosophize from the standpoint of standpointlessness, as a purportedly genuine and superior objectivity, is either childish, or, as is usually the case, disingenuous.”

Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) German philosopher

The Essence of Truth, 1931-32

Related topics