
No. 4, What Is It
1790s, Poems from Blake's Notebook (c. 1791-1792), Several Questions Answered
"Ennui" (1830), p. 48
Literary and Historical Miscellanies (1855)
No. 4, What Is It
1790s, Poems from Blake's Notebook (c. 1791-1792), Several Questions Answered
Source: Practical Pictorial Photography, 1898, Methods - The practical application of means to end, p. 27
“In matters of science, curiosity gratified begets not indolence, but new desires.”
Source: Ages in Chaos (2003), Chapter 15, “The world was tired out with geological theories” (p. 153)
“We are more than our base desires, and our lives are not sustained by gratifying them.”
The Divine Commodity: Discovering A Faith Beyond Consumer Christianity (2009, Zondervan)
“All human activity is prompted by desire.”
( wav audio file of Russell's voice http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/russell/desire.wav)
1950s, What Desires Are Politically Important? (1950)
Context: All human activity is prompted by desire. There is a wholly fallacious theory advanced by some earnest moralists to the effect that it is possible to resist desire in the interests of duty and moral principle. I say this is fallacious, not because no man ever acts from a sense of duty, but because duty has no hold on him unless he desires to be dutiful. If you wish to know what men will do, you must know not only, or principally, their material circumstances, but rather the whole system of their desires with their relative strengths.
“Those who are actuated by the desire of fame and glory are amazingly gratified by approbation and praise, even though it comes from their inferiors.”
Omnes enim, qui gloria famaque ducuntur, mirum in modum assensio et laus a minoribus etiam profecta delectat.
Letter 12, 6.
Letters, Book IV
Abstinence Sows Sand
1790s, Poems from Blake's Notebook (c. 1791-1792)
Changing Places ([1975] 1978), ch. 1, p. 27.