Quotes about desire
page 9

“Accept the children the way we accept trees—with gratitude, because they are a blessing—but do not have expectations or desires. You don’t expect trees to change, you love them as they are.”

Isabel Allende (1942) Chilean writer

Love, Children, Way, Tree

“I do not believe that the desires of young boys cause catastrophic events. The actions of humans do.”

Melina Marchetta Finnikin of the Rock

Source: Finnikin of the Rock

Boy

“But when they kissed goodnight in bed, Therese felt their sudden release, that leap of response in both of them, as if their bodies were of some materials which put together inevitably created desire.”

Patricia Highsmith book The Price of Salt

Source: The Price of Salt

Kiss

“Ah, life is a gate, a way, a path to Paradise anyway, why not live for fun and joy and love or some sort of girl by a fireside, why not go to your desire and LAUGH…”

Jack Kerouac book Big Sur

Big Sur (1962)

Love, Life, Way, Girl

“Exotic: meaning you're "desired."
For madness is seductive, sexy. Female madness.
So long as the female is reasonably young and attractive.”

Joyce Carol Oates Blonde

Source: Blonde

Madness

“God never witholds from His child that which His love and wisdom call good. God's refusals are always merciful -- "severe mercies" at times but mercies all the same. God never denies us our hearts desire except to give us something better.”

Elisabeth Elliot (1926–2015) American missionary

Love, Wisdom, God, Time

“You perhaps now know that desire reduces us to pulp.”

Georges Bataille (1897–1962) French intellectual and literary figure

Source: My Mother/Madame Edwarda/The Dead Man

“No, I slept as I always do when I am bored and have not the courage to amuse myself, or when I am hungry and have not the desire to eat.--The Count of Monte Cristo”

Alexandre Dumas (1802–1870) French writer and dramatist, father of the homonym writer and dramatist

Courage

“I wonder what it feels like to have no desires left because you have satisfied them all, smothered them with money even before they are born. Is an existence without desire very desirable? And is the poverty of desire better than rank poverty itself?”

Vikas Swarup book Q & A

Source: Q & A

Money, Feeling

“For my entire life I longed for love. I knew it was not right for me — as a girl and later as a woman — to want or expect it, but I did, and this unjustified desire has been at the root of every problem I have experienced in my life.”

Lisa See book Snow Flower and the Secret Fan

Source: Snow Flower and the Secret Fan

Love, Life, Girl, Problem

“Peeta actually is charming and then utterly winning as the boy in love. And there I am, blushing and confused, made beautiful by Cinna’s hands, desirable by Peeta’s confession, tragic by circumstance, and by all accounts, unforgettable.”

Suzanne Collins The Hunger Games

Source: The Hunger Games

Love, Beauty, Boy

“Ladies in bunches always filled me with vague apprehension and a firm desire to be elsewhere.”

Harper Lee book To Kill a Mockingbird

Source: To Kill a Mockingbird

“To get to a place where you could love anything you chose--not to need permission for desire--well now _that_ was freedom.”

Toni Morrison (1931–2019) American writer

Beloved (1987)

Love, Freedom

“When a person really desires something, all the universe conspires to help that person to realize his dream.”

Paulo Coelho book The Alchemist

Source: The Alchemist

Dreams, Universe, Help, Personality

“I was Amazement--I was Desire--I was Ecstasy and Rapture and the slightest bit of Greed.”

Sharon Shinn (1957) American science fiction writer

Source: Jenna Starborn

“This is perhaps the most noble aim of poetry, to attach ourselves to the world around us, to turn desire into love, to embrace, finally what always evades us, what is beyond, but what is always there – the unspoken, the spirit, the soul.”

Octavio Paz (1914–1998) Mexican writer laureated with the 1990 Nobel Prize for Literature

Source: The Other Voice: Essays on Modern Poetry

Love, World, Soul

“A desire not to butt into other people's business is at least eighty percent of all human 'wisdom'… and the other twenty percent isn't very important.”

Robert A. Heinlein book Stranger in a Strange Land

Source: Stranger in a Strange Land

Wisdom, People, Business

“I comfort myself with the reflection that your wife will possibly be able to curb your desire--I admit, a natural one for the most part--to exterminate your fellows.”

Georgette Heyer book Devil's Cub

Source: Devil's Cub

Nature, Parting

“My desire for knowledge is intermittent; but my desire to bathe my head in atmospheres unknown to my feet is perennial and constant. The highest that we can attain to is not Knowledge, but Sympathy with Intelligence. I do not know that this higher knowledge amounts to anything more definite than a novel and grand surprise on a sudden revelation of the insufficiency of all that we called Knowledge before — a discovery that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in our philosophy.”

Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) 1817-1862 American poet, essayist, naturalist, and abolitionist

Walking (June 1862)
Source: Civil Disobedience and Other Essays

Dreams, Intelligence, Knowledge

“Good sense is the most equitably distributed of all things because no matter how much or little a person has, everyone feels so abundantly provided with good sense that he feels no desire for more than he already possesses.”

René Descartes (1596–1650) French philosopher, mathematician, and scientist

Feeling, Sense, Personality

“For if there is ever a moment when we are most vulnerable, it’s when we’re closest to the idea of the attained desire, and thus farthest from ourselves, which is when we’ll tread through any flame.”

Chang-rae Lee (1965) Novelist

Source: On Such a Full Sea

Idea

“Open yourself to an encounter with heaven, be as a little child. Release your desire to the winds of the universe. Trust your angels to catch your wish and bring it to you in a delightfully surprising way.”

Doreen Virtue (1958) American writer

Angels, Way, Universe

“The most powerful single force in the world today is neither Communism nor Capitalism, neither the H-bomb nor the guided missile -- it is man's eternal desire to be free and independent.”

John F. Kennedy (1917–1963) 35th president of the United States of America

World, Communication

“You must find another reason to work, other than the desire for success or recognition. It must come from another place.”

Elizabeth Gilbert (1969) American writer

Success

“Aren't we living in a world where heedless men only desire decapitated women?”

Milan Kundera (1929–2023) Czech author of Czech and French literature

Source: Life is Elsewhere

Women, Men, World

“To Thetis,
Long overdue, I know, but every often the things we most desire come only after much patience and struggle. That is a human truth, I think. Even Peleus knew that.
-Seth”

Richelle Mead (1976) American writer

Source: Succubus Blues

Truth, Thinking, Patience

“No evil dooms us hopelessly except the evil we love, and desire to continue in, and make no effort to escape from.”

George Eliot book Daniel Deronda

Source: Daniel Deronda

Love, Effort, Evil

“These lights, this brightness, these clusters of human hope, of wild desire—I shall take these lights in my fingers. I shall make them bright, and whether they shine or not, it is in these fingers that they shall succeed or fail.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald book The Love of the Last Tycoon

Source: The Love of the Last Tycoon

Hope, Light

“The more you seek security, the less of it you have. But the more you seek
opportunity, the more likely it is that you will achieve the security that you
desire.”

Brian Tracy (1944) American motivational speaker and writer

“Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.”

Robert Frost Fire and Ice

"Fire and Ice" (1923)
General sources

Hate, World, Thinking

“Sometimes she did not know what she feared, what she desired: whether she feared or desired what had been or what would be, and precisely what she desired, she did not know.”

Leo Tolstoy book Anna Karenina

Source: Anna Karenina

Fear

“They all talked at once, their voices insistent and contradictory and impatient, making of unreality a possibility, then a probability, then an incontrovertible fact, as people will when their desires become words.”

William Faulkner book The Sound and the Fury

Source: The Sound and the Fury

People

“Each night I lie and dream about the one
Who kissed me and awakened my desire
I spent a single hour with him alone
And since that hour, my days are layed with fire.”

L.J. Smith (1965) American author

Source: Secret Circle Booklet

Lie, Dreams, Kiss, Night

“And I have no desire to get ugly,
But I cannot help mentioning that the door of a bigoted mind opens outwards so that the only result of the pressure of facts upon it is to close it more snugly.”

Ogden Nash (1902–1971) American poet

Good Intentions (1942), Seeing Eye to Eye is Believing

Help

“I had a desire to see something besides my own shores, if only to be content to return to them someday. If I wish to live in my native land and love her, it should not be out of ignorance.”

Margaret George (1943) American writer

Source: Mary Queen of Scotland and The Isles

Love

“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)

“If you start by promising what you don't even have yet, you'll lose your desire to work towards getting it.”

Paulo Coelho book The Alchemist

Source: The Alchemist

“It is not desire.
Instead it is something deeper. I don't want to be with him
constantly and forever. I want to be with him for the moment,
and I want the moments to go on forever.”

David Levithan The Realm of Possibility

Source: The Realm of Possibility

“What we insistently desire, over time, is what we become.”

Neal A. Maxwell (1926–2004) Mormon leader

Time

“Whoever you are, or whatever it is that you do, when you really want something, it's because that desire originated in the soul of the universe. It's your mission on earth.”

Paulo Coelho book The Alchemist

Source: The Alchemist

Soul, Universe

“There is no greater indication of youth, perhaps, than the desire for everything to be as it should.”

Brandon Sanderson book The Way of Kings

Source: The Way of Kings

Youth

“It’s hard to feel desire when you don’t feel desirable”

Christine Feehan American writer

Source: Safe Harbor

Feeling

“All progress is based upon a universal innate desire on the part of every organism to live beyond its income.”

Samuel Butler book The Way of All Flesh

Life, xvi
The Note-Books of Samuel Butler (1912), Part I - Lord, What is Man?
Source: The Way of All Flesh

Universe, Parting

“If I ever go looking for my heart's desire again, I won't look any further than my own back yard. Because if it isn't there, I never really lost it to begin with.”

L. Frank Baum book The Wonderful Wizard of Oz

Source: The Wonderful Wizard of Oz

Heart

“At the root of all misery is unfulfilled desire.”

Scott Hahn (1957) American theologian

Source: Hope for Hard Times

“This is a difference between us: you desire what other people have, while I desire the things I used to have, or think I might have one day.”

David Levithan The Lover's Dictionary

Source: The Lover's Dictionary

People, Thinking

“My prize, my pleasure and pain, my endless desire. I've never know anyone like you.”

Lisa Kleypas (1964) American writer

Source: Devil in Winter

Pain, Pleasure

“Intensity is the desire to receive. Open yourself to light and you will become light.”

Jeanette Winterson (1959) English writer

Light

“Memory chooses to preserve what desire cannot hope to sustain.”

Rabih Alameddine book An Unnecessary Woman

Source: An Unnecessary Woman

Hope, Memory

“I can't sleep, I can't eat, I can't do anything but think about him. At night I dream of him, all day I wait to see him, and when I do see him my heart turns over and I think I will faint with desire.”

Philippa Gregory book The Other Boleyn Girl

Source: The Other Boleyn Girl

Dreams, Thinking, Sleep, Waiting

“Don’t we forgive everything of a lover? We forgive selfishness, desire, guile. As long as we are the motive for it.”

Michael Ondaatje book The English Patient

Source: The English Patient

Lovers, Motivation, Forgiveness, Selfishness

“Disgust with injustice may sharpen the desire for justice. Readers who don’t see this connection merely wish to be entertained, and I have neither skill nor desire to turn the agony of a people into entertainment.”

Ayi Kwei Armah book The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born

Source: The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born

People, Justice

“Sorry," [Hamlet] said, rubbing his temples. "I don't know what came over me. All of a sudden I had this overwhelming desire to talk for a very long time without actually doing anything.”

Jasper Fforde book Something Rotten

Source: Something Rotten

Time

“Our waking life's desire to shape the world to our convenience invites all manner of paradox and difficulty.”

Cormac McCarthy book Cities of the Plain

Source: Cities of the Plain (1998)

Life, World

“She was without any power, because she was without any desire of command over herself.”

Jane Austen book Sense and Sensibility

Source: Sense and Sensibility

“If she did experience sex--or something close to it--in high school, I'm sure it would have been less out of sexual desire or love than literary curiosity.”

Haruki Murakami book Sputnik Sweetheart

Source: Sputnik Sweetheart

Love, School, Sex

“I think in our desire to create a better America, we have to have civilized debate in this country and not just yelling.”

Craig Ferguson (1962) Scottish-born American television host, stand-up comedian, writer, actor, director, author, producer and voice a…

Thinking, Country

“Have regrets. They are fuel. On the page they flare into desire.”

Geoff Dyer (1958) English writer

“Desire is like fog on a bathroom mirror -- its presence incites you to wipe the mirror, and see yourself clearly again.”

Vera Nazarian (1966) American writer

Source: The Perpetual Calendar of Inspiration

“A woman should be able to kiss a man beautifully and romantically without any desire to be either his wife or his mistress.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald book The Beautiful and Damned

Source: The Beautiful and Damned

Kiss

“It is easy, when you are young, to believe that what you desire is no less than what you deserve, to assume that if you want something badly enough, it is your God-given right to have it.”

Jon Krakauer book Into the Wild

Source: Into the Wild

God

“Faith is not Desire. Faith is Will. Desires are things that need to be satisfied, whereas Will is a force. Will changes the space around us,…”

Paulo Coelho (1947) Brazilian lyricist and novelist

Source: The Witch Of Portobello

Faith, Change

“In a nutshell, the Bible from Genesis 3 to Revelation 22 tells the story of a God reckless with desire to get his family back.”

Philip Yancey book The Jesus I Never Knew

Source: The Jesus I Never Knew

God, Family

“He would wake for no reason in the middle of the night, and the memory of the self-absorbed love was revealed to him for what it was: a pitfall of happiness that he despised and desired at the same time, but from which it was impossible to escape.”

Gabriel García Márquez book Love in the Time of Cholera

Source: Love in the Time of Cholera

Love, Happiness, Memory, Time

“If desire did not dim the brain, nobody would ever get married, drunk, or fat.”

Orson Scott Card book Ender in Exile

Source: Ender in Exile

“I did not myself know what I wanted: I feared life, desired to escape from it, yet still hoped something of it.”

Leo Tolstoy book A Confession

Source: A Confession

Life, Fear, Hope

“My magic. That was at the heart of me. It was a manifestation of what I believed, what I lived. It came from my desire to see to it that someone stood between the darkness and the people it would devour.”

Jim Butcher book Fool Moon

Source: Fool Moon

People, Heart

“That is the trick of good government. To make folk desire to live in such a way that there is no need for its intervention.”

Robin Hobb book Assassin's Apprentice

Source: Assassin's Apprentice

Way

“A desire not to butt into other people's business is at least eighty percent of all human wisdom.”

Robert A. Heinlein book Stranger in a Strange Land

Source: Stranger in a Strange Land

Wisdom, People, Business

“Desire that your life count for something great! Long for your life to have eternal significance. Want this! Don’t coast through life without a passion.”

John Piper (1946) American writer

Source: Don't Waste Your Life

Life, Passion

“And in his eyes he had the look of the cat who inspires a desire to caress but loves no one, who never feels he must respond to the impulses he arouses.”

Anaïs Nin book Delta of Venus

Source: Delta of Venus

Love, Feeling, Cats

“Weak desires bring weak results, just as a small amount of fire brings a small amount of heat.”

Napoleon Hill (1883–1970) American author

“If I look upon my whole life, I cannot think of another time when I felt more comfortable: when I had no worries, fears, or desires, when my life seemed as soft and lovely as lying inside a cocoon of rose silk.”

Amy Tan The Joy Luck Club

Source: The Joy Luck Club

Love, Life, Fear, Lying

“It isn't the desire to abide by the law that makes everyone behave as society requires, but the fear of punishment. Each one of us carries a gallows inside us.”

Paulo Coelho book The Devil and Miss Prym

Source: The Devil and Miss Prym

Fear, Law

“The Fremen were supreme in that quality the ancients called "spannungsbogen" -- which is the self-imposed delay between desire for a thing and the act of reaching out to grasp that thing.”

Frank Herbert book Dune

Source: Dune

“Perhaps all romance is like that; not a contract between equal parties but an explosion of dreams and desires that can find no outlet in everyday life. Only a drama will do and while the fireworks last the sky is a different colour.”

Jeanette Winterson book The Passion

Source: The Passion

Life, Dreams

“Supposedly, dreams reflect our hidden fears and secret desires, all clamoring for attention.”

Rachel Hawthorne (1950) American author

Source: Full Moon

Secret, Fear, Dreams

“Boredom: the desire for desires.”

Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910) Russian writer

“I desired you before, but I never loved you until this life.”

Kresley Cole American writer

Source: Endless Knight

Love, Life

“To put meaning in one's life may end in madness,
But life without meaning is the torture
Of restlessness and vague desire--
It is a boat longing for the sea and yet afraid.”

Edgar Lee Masters book Spoon River Anthology

Source: Spoon River Anthology

Life, Sea, Madness

“As our options expand, so do our desires - and unmet desires in particular.”

Megan McCafferty (1973) American novelist

Fourth Comings

“Pride and hope and desire like crushed herbs in his heart sent up vapours of maddening incense before the eyes of his mind.”

James Joyce book A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Source: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Hope, Heart

“I never desire to converse with a man who has written more than he has read.”

Samuel Johnson (1709–1784) English writer

Quoted in the "Apophthegms, Sentiments, Opinions and Occasional Reflections" of Sir John Hawkins (1787-1789) in Johnsonian Miscellanies (1897), vol. II, p. 6, edited by George Birkbeck Hill
Source: Johnsonian Miscellanies - Vol II

Reading

“My New Year’s Eve Toast: to all the devils, lusts, passions, greeds, envies, loves, hates, strange desires, enemies ghostly and real, the army of memories, with which I do battle — may they never give me peace.”

Patricia Highsmith (1921–1995) American novelist and short story writer

Love, Hate, Peace, Memory

“Which of us is happy in this world? Which of us has his desire? or, having it, is satisfied?”

William Makepeace Thackeray Vanity Fair

Come, children, let us shut up the box and the puppets, for our play is played out. Vol. II, ch. 27.
Source: Vanity Fair (1847–1848)

Happiness, World

“Could it be that to truly love a thing is not to desire it, but to desire happiness for it?”

Richard Paul Evans (1962) American writer

Source: The Letter

Love, Happiness

“I have such a fear of finding another like myself, and such a desire to find one! I am so utterly lonely, but I also have such a fear that my isolation be broken through, and I no longer be the head and ruler of my universe.”

Anaïs Nin book House of Incest

Source: House of Incest

Fear, Universe

“Desire consumes you, it takes you over. You forget yourself completely. All you can think about is the other, the one you desire, your self is just a fire.”

Marilyn French (1929–2009) Novelist, critic

Source: Her Mother's Daughter

Thinking, Forgetting

“Do we have free will, or do the mass media and our culture control us, our desires and actions, from the moment we’re born?”

Chuck Palahniuk book Lullaby

Source: Lullaby

“… If you work hard enough and assert yourself, and use your mind and imagination, you can shape the world to your desires. (151)”

Malcolm Gladwell (1963) journalist and science writer

Source: Outliers: The Story of Success

World, Imagination

“Dancing Is a Perpendicular Expression of a Horizontal Desire.”

George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) Irish playwright

attributed by George Melly in 1962 Source: Quote Investigator - Dancing Is a Perpendicular Expression of a Horizontal Desire http://quoteinvestigator.com/2016/09/11/dancing/

Dance, Funny

“We're all born with selfish desires, so we can all relate to those feelings in others. But kindness is something made individually by each person… so it's easy to misunderstand when others are trying to be kind to you.”

Natsuki Takaya (1973) Manga artist

Source: Fruits Basket Ultimate Edition, Vol. 3

Feeling, Personality, Selfishness

“To be the object of desire is to be defined in the passive case.
To exist in the passive case is to die in the passive case – that is, to be killed.
This is the moral of the fairy tale about the perfect woman.”

Angela Carter (1940–1992) English novelist

Source: The Sadeian Woman: And the Ideology of Pornography

Perfection