Desire Quotes

The truth is that the fever of desire in youth is fleeting disease that intimacy promptly cure.

~ Frank Harris

And silence. She liked the silence most of all. The silence in which the body, senses, the instincts, are more alert, more powerful, more sensitized, live a more richly perfumed and intoxication life, instead of transmuting into thoughts, words, into exquisite abstractions, mathematics of emotion in place of violent impact, the volcanic eruptions of fever, lust and delight.

~ Anaïs Nin

You ask me why I don’t love you, but surely you must believe I am very fond of you and if to desire to possess a person wholly, to admire and honour that person deeply, and to seek to secure that person’s happiness in every way is to “love” then perhaps my affection for you is a kind of love. I will tell you this that your soul seems to me to be the most beautiful and simple soul in the world and it may be because I am so conscious of this when I look at you that my love or affection for you loses much of its violence.

~ James Joyce

In my experience, desire is desire, love is love. I have never fallen in love for a gender. I have fallen for individuals. I know this is hard for people to do, but I don’t understand why it’s so hard, when it’s so obvious.

~ David Levithan

...Desire, a function central to all human experience, is the desire for nothing nameable. And at the same time this desire lies at the origin of every variety of animation. If being were only what it is, there wouldn’t even be room to talk about it. Being comes into existence as an exact function of this lack.

~ Jacques Lacan

I'm sure you've heard people talk about their Heart's Desire—well that's a load of rot. Hearts are idiots. They're big and squishy and full of daft dreams. They flounce off to write poetry and moon at folk who aren't worth the mooning. Bones are the ones that have to make the journey, fight the monster, kneel before whomever is big on kneeling these days. Bones do the work for the heart's grand plans. Bones know what you need. Hearts only know want.

~ Catherynne M. Valente

Everyone lusts. Everyone Fantasizes. When your lover respects you, you should feel free to explore your desires. No matter how extreme.

~ Jayne Rylon

Like, in general I think people have very complicated reasons for wanting things, and we often have no idea whether we’re actually motivated by altruism or a desire to hook up or a search for answers or what. I always get annoyed when in books or movies characters want clear things for clear reasons, because my experience of humanness is that I always want messy things for messy reasons.

~ John Green

Stephan was secretive and a liar, but he was a very gentle and expert lover. She was the petted, cherished child, the desired mistress, the worshipped, perfumed goddess. She was all these things to Stephan - or so he made her believe.

~ Jean Rhys

That single thought is enough. The impulse increases to a wish, the wish to a desire, the desire to an uncontrollable longing, and the longing (to the deep regret and mortification of the speaker, and in defiance of all consequences,) is indulged.

~ Edgar Allan Poe

So there the two of us were. Frozen in time, living in the moment, focused only on our immediate desires. Which of course included sex. Lots and lots of it.

~ Emily Giffin

You shouldn't blame others for the conditions you endure, we each have the freedom to follow which path we desire in life.

~ Steven Redhead

She stayed beside me until I slept, waveringly, brilliantly, hooded in diaphanous scarlet, and occasionally she left an imperative written in lipstick on my dusty windowpane. BE AMOROUS! she exhorted one night and, another night, BE MYSTERIOUS! Some nights later, she scribbled: WHEN YOU BEGIN TO THINK, YOU LOSE THE POINT.

~ Angela Carter

What is allowed us is disagreeable, what is denied us causes intense desire.

~ Jeff Wheeler

Humans do not simply, innocently, and honestly disagree with each other about the good, the just, the right, the principles and applications of moral distinction and valuation, for they are already caught, like it or not, in a complex dynamic of each other’s desires, recognition, power, and comparisons which not only relativizes moral distinctions and valuations, but makes them a constant and dangerous source of discord.

~ Gregory B. Sadler

When the human being says:'It is not true...'He may mean:'I don't know about it, so I think it is untrue.'Or:'I don't like it.

~ Idries Shah

Thou art a votary to fond desire

~ William Shakespeare

Five seconds, and my body's humming. I go half-man, half-machine, and my thoughts go straight to touching her more, to how far I want to go, how far she might want to go, and damn, I start to hurt. No amount of music or hard work will fix this. My body's a beast. A beast that's been held back too long.

~ Susan Vaught

Open your mind to the infinite possibilities that exist for you, then create within your reality the things that you desire.

~ Steven Redhead

MINISTER: All he has done is to find some means of bewitching the intelligence. He has only induced a radical suspension of disbelief. As in the early days of the cinema, all the citizens are jumping through the screen to lay their hands on the naked lady in the bathtub!AMBASSADOR: And yet, in fact, their fingers touch flesh.MINISTER: They believe they do. Yet all they touch is substantial shadow.AMBASSADOR: And what a beautiful definition of flesh! You know I am only substantial shadow, Minister, but if you cut me, I bleed. Touch me, I palpitate!

~ Angela Carter

You can keep going on much less attention than you crave.

~ Idries Shah

Each of us has immense potential to achieve what we desire, unless we enliven and enlighten our life with inspiration, bring our dreams or desires into reality we will never shine as bright as our potential.

~ Steven Redhead

Each of us has immense potential to achieve what we desire, unless you enliven and enlighten your life with inspiration, bring your dreams into reality through the power of desire you will never shine as bright as your potential.

~ Steven Redhead

mysterious money had stood to him as the symbol of earthly good, and the immediate object of toil. He had seemed to love it little in the years when every penny had its purpose for him; for he loved the purpose then. But now, when all purpose was gone, that habit of looking towards the money and grasping it with a sense of fulfilled effort made a loam that was deep enough for the seeds of desire.

~ George Eliot

Though it doesn’t feel like it, crisis places us front and center of desire, which is the force of power.

~ S. Kelley Harrell

We need to make our own miracles, it is a wasted exercise to just wait for miracles to happen; they need a spark of energy and desire to make them come true.

~ Steven Redhead

to read is to surrender oneself to an endless displacement of curiosity and desire from one sentence to another, from one action to another, from one level of a text to another. The text unveils itself before us, but never allows itself to be possessed; and instead of trying to possess it we should take pleasure in its teasing

~ David Lodge

The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it. Resist it, and your soul grows sick with longing for the things it has forbidden to itself, with desire for what its monstrous laws have made monstrous and unlawful. It has been said that the great events of the world take place in the brain. It is in the brain, and the brain only, that the great sins of the world take place also.

~ Oscar Wilde

I thought about how stupid it is, that all of us are born destined to desire somebody else, though desire brings with it such disappointment and pain. Humankind's history must be scored bloody with heartbreak. This hankering for affection is a blight upon us.

~ Sonya Hartnett

Patience can be bitter but her fruit is always sweet.

~ Habeeb Akande

Every man becomes the image of the God he adores.He whose worship is directed to a dead thing becomes dead.He who loves corruption rots.He who loves a shadow becomes, himself, a shadow. He who loves things that must perish lives in dread of their perishing.

~ Thomas Merton

Desires are but pain and torment, and enjoyment is sweet because it delivers us from them.

~ Giacomo Casanova

Essential to life, is desiring the things that you need, than needing the things you desire.

~ Anthony Liccione

As a general rule, desire is always marketable: we don’t do anything but sell, buy, exchange desires. . . . And I think of Bloy’s words: “there is nothing perfectly beautiful except what is invisible and above all unbuyable.

~ Roland Barthes

It may seem strange that one with whom I had held so little communion should have so engrossed my thoughts, but benefits conferred awaken love in some minds, as surely as benefits received in others.

~ George Macdonald

Adrian's tone suggested that the desire for something was all it took. They all live with endless possibilities, leave their homes for the sake of something new. But the dream is woven from the fabric of freedom. For desire to exist it requires the element of possibility, and that for Kai has never existed, until now...

~ Aminatta Forna

This was what the poets couldn't put in their poetry, she thought dumbly, the rush of desire so fierce and pure it made one shake, all on the force of a word.

~ Lauren Willig

Love me, desire me and pray for me.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

One excuse, could destroy a multitude of chances.

~ Anthony Liccione

Desire is the starting point of all achievement, not a hope, not a wish, but a keen pulsating desire which transcends everything.

~ Napoleon Hill