Desire Quotes

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From reading of the people I admired - ranging from the soldiers of Valley Forge and Morgan's riflemen to my Southern forefathers and kinfolk - I felt a great admiration for men who were fearless and who could hold their own in the world. And I had a great desire to be like them.

Theodore Roosevelt

Gracefulness cannot subsist without ease; delicacy is not debility; nor must a woman be sick in order to please. Infirmity, and sickness may excite our pity, but desire and pleasure require the bloom and vigor of health.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

To create and to annihilate material substance, cause it to aggregate in forms according to his desire, would be the supreme manifestation of the power of Man's mind, his most complete triumph over the physical world, his crowning achievement, which would place him beside his Creator, make him fulfill his Ultimate Destiny.

Let mental culture go on advancing, let the natural sciences progress in even greater extent and depth, and the human mind widen itself as much as it desires: beyond the elevation and moral culture of Christianity, as it shines forth in the Gospels, it will not go.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

The desire of knowledge is first stimulated in us when remarkable phenomena attract our attention. In order that this attention be continued it is necessary that we should feel some interest in exercising it, and thus by degrees we become better acquainted with the object of our curiosity.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

One interesting thing about greed is that although the underlying motive is to seek satisfaction, the irony is that even after obtaining the object of your desire you are still not satisfied. The true antidote of greed is contentment.

Tenzin Gyatso, 14th Dalai Lama

I desired dragons with a profound desire. Of course, I in my timid body did not wish to have them in the neighborhood, intruding into my relatively safe world, in which it was, for instance, possible to read stories in peace of mind, free from fear. But the world that contained even the imagination of Faihir was richer and more beautiful, at whatever cost of peril.

J. R. R. Tolkien

To be incapable of taking one's enemies, one's accidents, even one's misdeeds seriously for very long—that is the sign of strong, full natures in whom there is an excess of the power to form, to mold, to recuperate and to forget[...] Such a man shakes off with a single shrug many vermin that eat deep into others; here alone genuine 'love of one's enemies' is possible—supposing it to be possible at all on earth. How much reverence has a noble man for his enemies!—and such reverence is a bridge to love.—For he desires his enemy for himself, as his mark of distinction; he can endure no other enemy than one in whom there is nothing to despise and very much to honor!

Friedrich Nietzsche

Chess has this in common with making poetry; that the desire for it comes upon the amateur in gusts.

The desire of glory is the last infirmity cast off even by the wise.

Wherever we turn we find that the real obstacles to peace are human will and feeling, human convictions, prejudices, opinions. If we want to get rid of war we must get rid first of all of its psychological causes. Only when this has been done will the rulers of the nations even desire to get rid of the economic and political causes.

Men have a singular desire to be good without being good for anything, because, perchance, they think vaguely that so it will be good for them in the end.

Henry David Thoreau

Destroy my desires, eradicate my ideals, show me something better, and I will follow you.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

His youth seemed never so vanished as now in the contrast between the utter loneliness of this visit and that riotous, joyful party of four years before. Things that had been the merest commonplaces of his life then, deep sleep, the sense of beauty around him, all desire, had flown away and the gaps they left were filled only with the great listlessness of his disillusion.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

If you would learn to write, it is in the street you must learn it. Both for the vehicle and for the aims of fine arts, you must frequent the public square. The people, and not the college, is the writer's home. A scholar is a candle which the love and desire of all men will light.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

He who thinks to realize when he is older the hopes and desires of youth is always deceiving himself, for every decade of a man's life possesses its own kind of happiness, its own hopes and prospects.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Religion is an illusion and it derives its strength from the fact that it falls in with our instinctual desires.

The sage seeks freedom from desire. He does not collect precious things. He learns not to hold on to ideas. He brings men back to what they have lost.

There is no harder scientific fact in the world than the fact that belief can be produced in practically unlimited quantity and intensity, without observation or reasoning, and even in defiance of both, by the simple desire to believe founded on a strong interest in believing.

George Bernard Shaw

The notion of sitting down and conjuring up, not only words in which to clothe thoughts but thoughts worthy of being clothed—the whole thing was absurdly beyond his desires.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Certainly there are things worth believing. I believe in the brotherhood of man and in personal originality. But if you asked me to prove what I believe, I couldn't. You can spend your whole life trying to prove what you believe; you may hunt for reasons, but it will all be in vain. Yet our beliefs are like our existence; they are facts. If you don't yet know what to believe in, then try to learn what you feel and desire.

Albert Einstein

What? do I love her, that I desire to hear her speak again, and feast upon her eyes

William Shakespeare

O tenderly the haughty day
Fills his blue urn with fire;
One morn is in the mighty heaven,
And one in our desire.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Great ambition, the desire of real superiority, of leading and directing, seems to be altogether peculiar to man, and speech is the great instrument of ambition.

Remember that you ought to behave in life as you would at a banquet. As something is being passed around it comes to you; stretch out your hand, take a portion of it politely. It passes on; do not detain it. Or it has not come to you yet; do not project your desire to meet it, but wait until it comes in front of you. So act toward children, so toward a wife, so toward office, so toward wealth.