Desire Quotes

So long as we do not know definitely what we want, our forces will be scattered, and so long as our forces are scattered, we will accomplish but little, or fail entirely. When we know what we want, however, and proceed to work for it with all the power and ability that is in us, we may rest assured that we will get it. When we direct the power of thinking, the power of will, the power of mental action, the power of desire, the power of ambition, in fact, all the power we possess on the one thing we want, on the one goal we desire to reach, it is not difficult to understand why success in a greater and greater measure must be realized.

~ Christian D. Larson

Keep your standards even when everyone around you is losing theirs.

~ Habeeb Akande

An aspirational diet will have you dreaming of success; but it’s the attachment of expectations and tangible goals that feeds the desire, persistence, and fortitude required to make the win.

~ Lorii Myers

Life seems to be a process of replacing one anxiety with another and substituting one desire for another--which is not to say that we should never strive to overcome any of our anxieties or fulfil any of our desires, but rather to suggest that we should perhaps build into our strivings an awareness of the way our goals promise us a respite and a resolution that they cannot, by definition, deliver.

~ Alain De Botton

Why is erasing desire seen as so important? If the subjugation of the self is the point of the self what's the point in having a self? It's like someone handing you a leaflet which says throw this leaflet away.

~ Tibor Fischer

Currents of desire and excitement that she had not known or thought about for years now flooded in her. She wanted him to bring alive what she had buried, and to demean, destroy, her fabricated self.

~ Sebastian Faulks

For the only slavery is desire, and he who learns to let go, to climb the wind-swept hills of self-becoming, naked of all possessions and desire, will drink the mountain air of freedom, and find the peace that lies not in the satisfaction but in the controlling of desire.

~ Christmas Humphreys

When you submit yourself to God and obey Him, you allow Him to do what He desires in your life. You make it possible for Him to lead you wherever He wants to use you.

~ Jim George

Why talk about what we want? That is childish. Absurd. Of course, you are interested in what you want. You are eternally interested in it. But no one else is. The rest of us are just like you: we are interested in what we want.

~ Dale Carnegie

God can communicate to us through powerful feelings. They have an energy that impels us to action. They grip our mind and will not let us go. What is calling you? What has the voice of God been whispering to you through the desires of your heart? To what are you drawn and constantly compelled to do? It could be that God is opening the eyes of your heart to see something that no one else is seeing, and to do something that others aren’t doing. If that is true, then move forward and let God worry about the how.

~ Tom Payne

It is an exciting adventure, doing what you love.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

Your Heart's Desire is the Voice of God, and that Voice must be obeyed sooner or later.

~ Emmet Fox

A poem can't free us from the struggle for existence, but it can uncover desires and appetites buried under the accumulating emergencies of our lives, the fabricated wants and needs we have had urged on us, have accepted as our own. It's not a philosophical or psychological blueprint; it's an instrument for embodied experience.

~ Adrienne Rich

Translating from #cat is easy - you just ignore everything, then you decide what you want it to have said, thought, or wanted.

~ Will Advise

And our desire to knowEach other and desertEach other for newCenters of meaning so thatThe boundaries may reignAnd in doing so be undone.

~ Rob Schlegel

But so strong is our desire for meaning, an innate desire, that we construct meanings where there are none.

~ David Cronenberg

Man’s desire is to know the mind of God.

~ Jared Brock

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

~ Christine Feehan

I will be all that I am capable of being.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

I believe now that we’re the enemy to the things we really want for our lives. We get really good at telling ourselves ugly lies on repeat every day. You’re unworthy. You’re ugly. You’re inadequate.

~ Hannah Brencher

Each one of us is the architect of his own fate; and he is unfortunate indeed who will try to build himself without the inspiration of God, without realizing that he grows from within, not from without.

~ David O. Mckay

A person experiments in life and reflects upon those events in order to discover how to lead a meaningful life. We conduct a quest searching for the source our essential being. What we seek is inside us waiting for us to discover. Until we realize the vital inner source that provides direction for our life, all our efforts are in vain. The ego with its craving and fearful protection strategies is what prevents us from perceiving the transparency of the world in which we belong. When we cease clinging to the past and no longer daydream of the future and unreservedly accept whatever is occurring while sacrificing ourselves in service of other people our sense of self vanishes and we exist only as conscious and nonjudgmental witnesses of reality.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

If you suffer and make your loved ones suffer, there is nothing that can justify your desire.

~ Thich Nhat Hanh

We who are like senseless children shrink from suffering, but love its causes. We hurt ourselves; our pain is self-inflicted! Why should others be the object of our anger?

~ Śāntideva

The will has no overall purpose, aims at no highest good, and can never be satisfied. Although it is our essence, it strikes us as an alien agency within, striving for life and procreation blindly, mediated only secondarily by consciousness. Instinctive sexuality is at our core, interfering constantly with the life of the intellect. To be an individual expression of this will is to lead a life of continual desire, deficiency, and suffering. Pleasure or satisfaction exists only relative to a felt lack; it is negative, merely the cessation of an episode of striving or suffering, and has no value of itself. Nothing we can achieve by conscious act of will alters the will to life within us. There is no free will. Human actions, as part of the natural order, are determined [....] As individual parts of the empirical world we are ineluctably pushed through life by a force inside us which is not of our choosing, which gives rise to needs and desires we can never fully satisfy, and is without ultimate purpose. Schopenhauer concludes that it would have been better not to exist—and that the world itself is something whose existence we should deplore rather than celebrate.

~ Christopher Janaway

Desire is suffering. A simple equation, and a nice catchphrase. But flipped around, it is more troubling: suffering is desire.

~ Charles Yu

Fate demands that we continue suffering, until we willingly seek out and discover the sacred path of righteousness. Until we surrender to the sameness of life, we are unable to experience the absolute ground zero of reality. Only by surrendering our desires, by readjusting our consciousness to a state undefined, unbound, and unmotivated by passion and desire, will we experience life transformed.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

There is no shadow without the sun.No suffering without divinity.No fear without love.No despair without desire.No hopelessness without faith.

~ Brownell Landrum

Mankind, in all his lusts, punishes himself. The gods have to do very little.

~ Criss Jami

He has no need for faith who knows the uncreated, who has cut off rebirth, who has destroyed any opportunity for good or evil, and cast away all desire. He is indeed the ultimate man.

~ Gautama Buddha

I saw myself in the mirror, and from my expression I had a shocking intimation of the rift between my body and my soul. Whereas my face was drained by defeat and shock, inside my head was another universe: I now understood as an elemental fact of life that while I was here, inside my body was a soul, a meaning, that all things were made of desire, touch, and love, that what I was suffering was composed of the same elements.

~ Orhan Pamuk

Through the round of many births I roamed without reward, without rest, seeking the house-builder. Painful is birth again & again.House-builder, you're seen!You will not build a house again.All your rafters broken,the ridge pole destroyed,gone to the Unformed, the mind has come to the end of craving.

~ Gautama Buddha

Science itself, no matter whether it is the search for truth or merely the need to gain control over the external world, to alleviate suffering, or to prolong life, is ultimately a matter of feeling, or rather, of desire-the desire to know or the desire to realize.

~ Louis De Broglie

Miracles can only inhabit the reality of our awareness when we surrender our need for the familiar to our desire for the limitless.

~ Eric Micha'el Leventhal

The purpose of suffering is to contain the light of your desire until you see yourself in everything.

~ Eric Micha'el Leventhal

Resistance is the subtlest form of attachment.

~ Eric Micha'el Leventhal

Do you see what this pure feeling ‘love’ can do to people? Just now, I know you wanted to take my head off. But if love is so pure, why do so many die in the name of love? It’s a poison. It enters your body and slowly makes you do impulsive things you wouldn’t normally do. People kill themselves because they want to be with their love. People kill others because they want to be with their love. And people kill their love because they want to be with their love. All in the name of love, but in the end, someone dies.

~ Charles Lee

But Demeseus, I have only begun. Do you see what this pure feeling ‘love’ can do to people? Just now, I know you wanted to take my head off. But if love is so pure, why do so many die in the name of love? It’s a poison. It enters your body and slowly makes you do impulsive things you wouldn’t normally do. People kill themselves because they want to be with their love. People kill others because they want to be with their love. And people kill their love because they want to be with their love. All in the name of love, but in the end, someone dies.

~ Charles Lee

No marketplace, free or otherwise, is good when it fails to consider the basic human state of needs at every stage of life.

~ Bryant Mcgill

To burn with desire and keep quiet about it is the greatest punishment we can bring on ourselves.

~ Federico García Lorca