
23 July 1827
Table Talk (1821–1834)
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.
23 July 1827
Table Talk (1821–1834)
Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 37.
“A creative man is motivated by the desire to achieve, not by the desire to beat others.”
The Farther Reaches of Human Nature (1971).
1970s and later
“Pain wanders through my bones like a lost fire;
What burns me now? Desire, desire, desire.”
"The Marrow," ll. 11-12
The Far Field (1964)
Source: The Province of Jurisprudence Determined (1832), p. 6
1910s, Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays http://archive.org/stream/mysticism00russuoft/mysticism00russuoft_djvu.txt (1918)
Context: The scientific attitude of mind involves a sweeping away of all other desires in the interests of the desire to know—it involves suppression of hopes and fears, loves and hates, and the whole subjective emotional life, until we become subdued to the material, able to see it frankly, without preconceptions, without bias, without any wish except to see it as it is, and without any belief that what it is must be determined by some relation, positive or negative, to what we should like it to be, or to what we can easily imagine it to be.