In the ever-evolving journey of life, desire serves as a powerful driving force that propels us towards our dreams and ambitions. It ignites our passion, fuels our determination, and inspires us to overcome obstacles. Whether you're seeking motivation to pursue a personal goal, professional achievement, or simply looking for a dose of inspiration, delving into the words of wisdom from great thinkers and leaders can be incredibly uplifting. In this post, we've meticulously curated a collection of 131 inspirational quotes about desire. Each quote offers a unique perspective, encouraging you to embrace your aspirations and pursue them with unwavering enthusiasm. Let these words serve as a beacon of motivation on your path to realizing your deepest desires.
1. “You can't always get what you want, but if you try sometimes, you might find, you get what you need.” - Mick Jagger
2. “There are two tragedies in life. One is to lose your heart's desire. The other is to gain it.” - George Bernard Shaw
3. “You've blotted the rich form of desire from my life and left me only some vaguely eccentric behaviors that have grown up to integrate so much pleasure into the mundane world around me. What text could I write now? It's as though I cannot even remember what I once desired. All I can look for now, when I have the energy, is lost desire itself-- and I look for it by clearly inadequate means. At best such an account as I might write would read like the life of anyone else, with, now and again, a bizarre and interruptive incident, largely mysterious and completely demystified-- at least that's what it has become without the day-to-day, moment-to-moment web of wanting that you have unstrung from about my universe. Without it, all falls apart. In a single gesture you've turned me into the most ordinary of human creatures and at once left me an obsessive, pleasureless eccentric, trapped in a set of habits which no longer have reason because they no longer lead to reward. And if I had enough self-confidence, in the midst of this bland continual chaos into which you've shunted me, for hate, I should hate you. But I don't have it.” - Samuel R. Delany
4. “It sounds like a fairy-tale, but not only that; this story of what man by his science and practical inventions has achieved on this earth, where he first appeared as a weakly member of the animal kingdom, and on which each individual of his species must ever again appear as a helpless infant... is a direct fulfilment of all, or of most, of the dearest wishes in his fairy-tales. All these possessions he has acquired through culture. Long ago he formed an ideal conception of omnipotence and omniscience which he embodied in his gods. Whatever seemed unattainable to his desires - or forbidden to him - he attributed to these gods. One may say, therefore, that these gods were the ideals of his culture. Now he has himself approached very near to realizing this ideal, he has nearly become a god himself. But only, it is true, in the way that ideals are usually realized in the general experience of humanity. Not completely; in some respects not at all, in others only by halves. Man has become a god by means of artificial limbs, so to speak, quite magnificent when equipped with all his accessory organs; but they do not grow on him and they still give him trouble at times... Future ages will produce further great advances in this realm of culture, probably inconceivable now, and will increase man's likeness to a god still more.” - Sigmund Freud
5. “The shape of my life is, of course, determined by many things; my background and childhood, my mind and its education, my conscience and its pressures, my heart and its desires.” - Anne Morrow Lindbergh
6. “It was the only thing I ever really wanted. And that’s the sin that can’t be forgiven--that I hadn’t done what I wanted. It feels so dirty and pointless and monstrous, as one feels about insanity, because there’s no sense to it, no dignity, nothing but pain--and wasted pain...why do they always teach us that it’s easy and evil to do what we want and that we need discipline to restrain ourselves? It’s the hardest thing in the world--to do what we want. And it takes the greatest kind of courage.” - Ayn Rand
7. “Each day death corrodes what we call living, and life ceaselessly swallows our desire for the void.” - Jindrich Styrsky
8. “Oh no. Don't smile. You'll kill me. I stop breathing when you smile.” - Tessa Dare
9. “The truly terrible thing about this life, was not knowing what you want, but only able to recognize what you do not want. You have to spend so much time and energy trying to find it out, time that other people spent in pursuing of their desires.” - Whitney Otto
10. “I felt like an animal, and animals don’t know sin, do they?” - Jess C. Scott
11. “One hand was behind his back, and he held it out, presenting a bouquet of white and smoky purple lilies. “They’re straight from the underworld, by the way. They are everlasting. They won’t die.” - Jess C. Scott
12. “He expected pages and pages of bright pictures of pancakes of every variety shown in plain stacks, or built into castles or bridges or igloos, or shaped like airplanes or rowboats or fire engines. And pitchers of syrup to choose from -- partridge berry syrup, thimbleberry syrup, huckleberry syrup, bosenberry syrup, and raspberry syrup. Then there would be cheese plates and cheeses a la carte. Creamy cheeses, crumbly cheeses, and peculiar little cheeses in peculiar little clay pots.” - Michael Hoeye
13. “Ultimately, it is the desire, not the desired, that we love.” - Friedrich Nietzsche
14. “Like magic, she felt him getting nearer, felt it like a pull in the pit of her stomach. It felt like hunger but deeper, heavier. Like the best kind of expectation. Ice cream expectation. Chocolate expectation.” - Sarah Addison Allen
15. “I had a feeling that Pandora's box contained the mysteries of woman's sensuality, so different from a man's and for which man's language was so inadequate. The language of sex had yet to be invented. The language of the senses was yet to be explored.” - Anais Nin
16. “Everyone believes very easily whatever he fears or desires.” - Jean de La Fontaine
17. “A desire presupposes the possibility of action to achieve it; action presupposes a goal that is worth achieving.” - Ayn Rand
18. “By the end of the seventies the feared yet desired black male body had become as objectified as it was during slavery, only a seemingly positive twist had been added to the racist sexist objectification: the black male body had become the site for the personification of everyone’s desire.” - bell hooks
19. “Then again, you cannot stop the flood of desire as it moves through the world, inappropriate though it may sometimes be. It is the prerogative of all humans to make ludicrous choices, to fall in love with the most unlikely of partners, and to set themselves up for the most predicatable of calamities.” - Elizabeth Gilbert
20. “There is no fulfillment that is not made sweeter for the prolonging of desire” - Jacqueline Carey
21. “Angst is not the human condition, it’s the purgatory between what we have and what we want but can’t get.” - Miguel Syjuco
22. “Should the king in exile pretend he is happy there?Should he not seek his own country?His miseries are his ally; they urge him on. Let them grow, if need be. But do not forsake the secret of life; do not despise those kingly desires. We abandon the most important journey of our lives when we abandon desire. We leave our hearts by the side of the road and head off in the direction of fitting in, getting by, being productive, what have you. Whatever we might gain – money, position, the approval of others, or just absence of the discontent self – it’s not worth it.” - John Eldredge
23. “When you were a wandering desire in the mist, I too was there, a wandering desire. Then we sought one another, and out of our eagerness dreams were born. And dreams were time limitless, and dreams were space without measure.” - Kahlil Gibran
24. “She wanted to be the rain, to cover him with moisture, to bring life to his seed.” - Caris Roane
25. “The fiery force is nothing more than the life force as we know it. It is the flame of desire and love, of sex and beauty, of pleasure and joy as we consume and are consumed, as we burn with pleasure and burn out in time.” - Harold Norse
26. “I spin worlds where we could be together. I dream you. For me, imagination and desire are very close.” - Jeanette Winterson
27. “If you don't get everything you want, think of the things you don't get that you don't want.” - Oscar Wilde
28. “Why me?" she asked, holding on to him."Because you cared," he whispered. "You cared so much for your people, it broke your heart to see the pack in ruins. You cared so much for your mother, you risked your life for hers. You cared enough to save someone who wanted you dead. And because you walk like a queen.” - Annette Curtis Klause
29. “There are few things we should keenly desire if we really knew what we wanted.” - Francois de La Rochefoucauld
30. “Wild Nights—Wild Nights!Were I with theeWild Nights should beOur luxury!Futile—the winds—To a heart in port—Done with the compass—Done with the chart!Rowing in Eden—Ah, the sea!Might I but moor— Tonight—In thee!” - Emily Dickinson
31. “I do not mind when you tell me what you want and put that first instead of last.” - John Scalzi
32. “She felt the cold blast from the sterile air conditioning on her bare arms and thighs, as she ambled down the center of the shopping complex's ground floor.The scene was a swirl of candy bright lights--the Victoria's Secret fuchsia signboard, signboards which lured one to purchase "confidence," or "sexual appeal," or whatever it was that was being advertised--the fluorescent lights in each store, contrasting with the shiny, black-tiled walls and eye-catching speckled marble tiles on the ground.One could lick the floor--the tiles were spotless, clean like the fake air she was breathing in, like the atoms and cells in her that were decaying in stale neglect.” - Jess C. Scott
33. “Tie me up, please..." Chantal said. They looked above at some vines and roots hanging down from the grassy area above the depression in the canal they were standing in. She was in his hands—he had to comply.A little bit of kink was one of the most delicious of erotic pleasures. Catholic school girls were often the horniest—Brett could hardly contain his elation.” - Jess C. Scott
34. “I think our last kiss was meant to be quick and chaste, but after the first touch of his lips fire leaped up and roared through my belly. My fingers yanked him close, digging into his back, and his arms crushed me to him as if wanting to meld us together. I knotted my fingers in his hair and bit down on his bottom lip, making him groan. His lips parted, and my tongue swept in to dance with his. There was nothing sweet or gentle in our last kiss; it was filled with sorrow and desperation, of the bitter knowledge that we could've had something perfect, but it just wasn't meant to be.” - Julie Kagawa
35. “Desiring another person is perhaps the most risky endeavor of all. As soon as you want somebody—really want him—it is as though you have taken a surgical needle and sutured your happiness to the skin of that person, so that any separation will now cause a lacerating injury.” - Elizabeth Gilbert
36. “If your desires are not great, a little will seem much to you; for small appetite makes poverty equivalent to wealth.” - Democritus
37. “I spent an hour looking at pots and carpets in the museums the other day, until the desire to describe them became like the desire for the lusts of the flesh.” - Virginia Woolf
38. “Last night I was seriously considering whether I was a bisexual or not but I don’t think so though I’m not sure if I’d like to be and argh I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that, if you like a person, you like the person, not their genitals.” - Jess C. Scott
39. “Every man has his secret desire, I suppose, and mine is someday to own a farm.” - A. G. Street
40. “To wish a healthy man to die is the wish from a mind of sickness. To wish an ailing man to die is the wish of the ambitious.” - Roman Payne
41. “Those sweet lips. My, oh my, I could kiss those lips all night long.Good things come to those who wait.” - Jess C. Scott
42. “Desire is half of life; indifference is half of death.” - Kahlil Gibran
43. “When your desires are strong enough, you will appear to possess superhuman powers to achieve.” - Napoleon Hill
44. “Human tool-makers always make tools that will help us get what we want, and what we want hasn't changed for thousands of years because as far as we can tell the human template hasn't changed either. We still want the purse that will always be filled with gold, and the Fountain of Youth. We want the table that will cover itself with delicious food whenever we say the word, and that will be cleaned up afterwards by invisible servants. We want the Seven-League Boots so we can travel very quickly, and the Hat of Darkness so we can snoop on other people without being seen. We want the weapon that will never miss, and the castle that will keep us safe. We want excitement and adventure; we want routine and security. We want to have a large number of sexually attractive partners, and we also want those we love to love us in return, and be utterly faithful to us. We want cute, smart children who will treat us with the respect we deserve. We want to be surrounded by music, and by ravishing scents and attractive visual objects. We don't want to be too hot or too cold. We want to dance. We want to speak with the animals. We want to be envied. We want to be immortal. We want to be gods.But in addition, we want wisdom and justice. We want hope. We want to be good.” - Margaret Atwood
45. “The problem for us is not are our desires satisfied or not. The problem is how do we know what we desire.” - Slavoj Žižek
46. “Peter Wessel and Peter Van Daan have grown into one Peter, who is beloved and good, and for whom I long desperately.” - Anne Frank
47. “Dou comigo a pensar se figuras de estilo não serão, afinal, as silhuetas dos corpos humanos que tão ardentemente desejamos ou abominamos.I find myself wondering if figures of speech are not, after all, the silhouettes of human bodies which we so ardently desire or abhor.” - Victor Eustáquio
48. “What we insistently desire, over time, is what we become.” - Neal A. Maxwell
49. “Dying for dark - the darker the worse. Strange.” - Samuel Beckett
50. “Kiss me. My lips are on fire.You, my friend, are the object of mysecret desire.” - Lisa Canfield
51. “When a man touches a woman's body, he is not just touching her body. It goes MUCH DEEPER than that for a woman. He is touching parts of her soul-parts as diverse as how she feels about being a grandmother some day, to what is her favorite ice cream, to how much she loves her pet, and to her opinion of how the current President is governing. The man wants a sexual encounter and love is far from his mind; she desires permanence, commitment, safety, and security.” - Jim Anderson
52. “Wish' is the most powerful thing in the world. Higher than God.” - G.I. Gurdjieff
53. “She'd been in love with the man, and love is a scary thing. If not reciprocated, it can turn a person into a monster.” - Michele Young-Stone
54. “Sólo con una ardiente paciencia conquistaremos la espléndida ciudad que dará luz, justicia y dignidad a todos los hombres. Así la poesía no habrá cantado en vano.” - Pablo Neruda
55. “A 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
56. “I am dead because I lack desire,I lack desire because I think I possess,I think I possess because I do not try to give,In trying to give, you see that you have nothing,Seeing that you have nothing, you try to give of yourself,Trying to give of yourself, you see that you are nothing,Seeing that you are nothing, you desire to become,In desiring to become, you begin to live.” - Rene Daumal
57. “Needs cause motivation. Deep-rooted desires for esteem, affection, belonging, achievement, self-actualization, power, and control motivate us to push for what we want and need in our lives.” - Lorii Myers
58. “It is of the nature of desire not to be satisfied, and most men live only for the gratification of it.” - Aristotle
59. “Whatever you eye falls on - for it will fall on what you love - will lead you to the questions of your life, the questions that are incumbent upon you to answer, because that is how the mind works in concert with the eye. The things of this world draw us where we need to go.” - Mary Rose O'Reilley
60. “He would reach for me in the middle of the night, nearly every single night, wrapping one of those solid arms around my waist and pulling me in close. So. Close.” - Chelsie Shakespeare
61. “The longer I lived, the longer it would be until I saw him alive again, until I could taste his new lips and run my fingers through his new hair. We could be young and beautiful again . . .” - Chelsie Shakespeare
62. “I don't think that science and the paranormal have to be at war; in fact, it's crucial that they work together. It seems naïve to believe that the world is exactly as it seems.” - Chelsie Shakespeare
63. “He made me feel unhinged . . . like he could take me apart and put me back together again and again.” - Chelsie Shakespeare
64. “Be very careful what you try with that. I’m not as strong as I should be.” His breath was ragged, and irregular. “And you are stronger than you know.” - Tyra Lynn
65. “Joni discovered the best way to put the halter on her horse without being animal resisting and fleeing was to turn her back until he nuzzled up to her. At that point, she could slip the halter on. Just so, she surmises, sometimes God waits for us to turn our backs on what we desire most and to trust Him.” - Joni Eareckson Tada
66. “I would rather a romantic relationship turn into contempt than turn into apathy. The passion in the extremities make it appear as though it once meant something. We grow from hot or cold, but lukewarm is the biggest insult.” - Criss Jami
67. “...if desire is predominant it can deform love between man and woman and rob them both of it.” - Pope John Paul II
68. “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
69. “She had rarely been near Henry since then, and the sight of him now was like a concentrated dose.” - Anna Godbersen
70. “She was like a heroine in a novel that she herself was writing the character kept protesting that she was too strong for love and yet the narrator went on describing her desire.” - Anna Godbersen
71. “All the beautiful waitresses existed like eternal responsibilities.” - Spalding Gray
72. “Our duty is to be useful, not according to our desires but according to our powers.” - Henri Frédéric Amiel
73. “Love is not selective, desire is selective. In love there are no strangers. When the centre of selfishness is no longer, all desires for pleasure and fear of pain cease; one is no longer interested in being happy; beyond happiness there is pure intensity, inexhaustible energy, the ecstasy of giving from a perennial source.” - Nisargadatta Maharaj
74. “Could it be that desire for a good thing has become a bad thing because that desire has become a ruling thing?” - Paul David Tripp
75. “I must keep my head and not give in to desire, for desire is what causes women to drown.” - Alice Hoffman
76. “The thing about the Lexington International Bank ladder was that it was very long, and climbing it was very exhausting, and so Andrew Brown didn't have a lot of time to think about whether he really wanted to get to the top of it—and besides, since so many other people were climbing too, the view from the top must be worth it.So he kept going. He worked hard. He put his heart and mind and soul into it. There was an opening for a position half a rung higher than he already was. With a promotion, he might get two hours a week of a secretary's time. He'd go to more important meetings, with more senior people, and have the opportunity to impress them, and if he did he might be promoted again and then... well, of course eventually he'd be running the whole office. It's important to have a dream: otherwise you might notice where you really are.” - Naomi Alderman
77. “Just wish it. But remember, it will only work if it's what you most desire. Do it now. We're running out of time." WHAT I MOST DESIRE. WHAT I MOST DESIRE. I looked into his electric eyes and made my wish. Then I popped the bean into my mouth and swallowed it whole. For a moment, the world stood still. We sat in a silent bubble, just us two, insulated from the snow and the wind. His eyes widened. "But, Katrina, that wish was supposed to be for you." "It's what I most desire." And it was.” - Suzanne Selfors
78. “When the mouth cries, I want to see God, the heart has reached its finest moment. Once we have sought and seen God, all other things have a way of finding us.” - Gayle D. Erwin
79. “I understand it was Derian who spoiled everything. He purposefully tainted your view of me and forced you to go along with him. I know none of what happened was your idea or your desire, Eena.”She didn’t get up, but spoke from her curled position. Her voice was weak, still heavy with despair. “Derian didn’t force me to do anything.”“But if he hadn’t influenced you, we would be enjoying a pleasant dinner again, telling stories and laughing. I’m sure that would be the case. You would be happy……and so would I.”Eena chuckled without amusement.“You have to admit we shared some very enjoyable evenings, didn’t we? There’s really no reason we can’t put this whole mess behind us and start from where we left off.” He sounded genuinely serious.“You forget,” she reminded him, “I heard your conversation with the Ghengats. This isn’t about Derian, it’s about you.”“Alright,” he admitted with an acquiescent sigh, “so I’m not everything you’d hoped for. But really, what man can ever live up to any woman’s terribly high expectations?”This got her attention. She almost stood up to face him, but decided it wasn’t worth the effort. Leaning forward, she retorted, “Expecting a man to respect you, to be honest with you, and, oh yes, to not be a shameless murderer—I don’t think those are overly high expectations!”He shrugged, casually excusing his faults. “Nobody’s perfect.”“What do you want?” she finally asked, exasperated.He squatted to her level and stated his desire. “I want you.”Eena thought the expression on his face—the look in his weary blue eyes—appeared strangely sincere. But there was one thing she had learned from all this: never trust a master of deceit.” - Richelle E. Goodrich
80. “We mistakenly assume that bodily survival has a higher precedence than ego survival. This is simply not generally true. Ego will happily destroy the body for its own sake. Look at overweight executives headed for heart attacks on the way to getting their pictures in Fortune or anorexic models suffering slow starvation on their way to getting their pictures in Vogue. Protecting ego is the general case.” - Karl Marlantes
81. “He had to feel those lips on him again. Had. To. This wasn’t a mild expression of preference. This was an imperative. His body was insistent. To continue hisexistence on this earth, he now needed the following: food, water, shelter, clothing, and Minerva Highwood’s lips.” - Tessa Dare
82. “Eros, again now, the loosener of limbs troubles me,Bittersweet, sly, uncontrollable creature….” - Sappho
83. “I've wandered through the real world, and written myself through the darkness of the streets inside me. I see people walking through the city and wonder where they've been, and what the moments of their lives have done to them. If they're anything like me, their moments have held them up and shot them down.Sometimes I just survive.But sometimes I stand on the rooftop of my existence, arms stretched out, begging for more.That's when the stories show up in me.They find me all the time.They're made of underdogs and fighters. They're made of hunger and desire and trying to live decent.The only trouble is, I don't know which of those stories comes first.Maybe they all just merge into one.We'll see, I guess.I'll let you know when I decide.” - Markus Zusak
84. “Because life is short. I feel we’re made of a hunger, a desire for life – if that can be described as a material. As I get older, I’m trying to open that channel more. If you don’t, if you close off desire and get complacent, life loses its freshness and sweetness, and that’s what I crave. That’s my bliss.” - Sarah Slean
85. “Give me the strongest cheese, the one that stinks best;and I want the good wine, the swirl in crystalsurrendering the bruised scent of blackberries,or cherries, the rich spurt in the backof the throat, the holding it there before swallowing.Give me the lover who yanks open the doorof his house and presses me to the wallin the dim hallway, and keeps me there until I’m drenchedand shaking, whose kisses arrive by the boatloadand begin their delicious diasporathrough the cities and small towns of my body.To hell with the saints, with martyrsof my childhood meant to instruct mein the power of endurance and faith,to hell with the next world and its pallid angelsswooning and sighing like Victorian girls.I want this world. I want to walk intothe ocean and feel it trying to drag me alonglike I’m nothing but a broken bit of scratched glass,and I want to resist it. I want to gostaggering and flailing my waythrough the bars and back rooms,through the gleaming hotels and weedylots of abandoned sunflowers and the parkswhere dogs are let off their leashesin spite of the signs, where they sniff eachother and roll together in the grass, I want tolie down somewhere and suffer for love untilit nearly kills me, and then I want to get up againand put on that little black dress and waitfor you, yes you, to come over hereand get down on your knees and tell mejust how fucking good I look.- “For Desire” - Kim Addonizio
86. “INTENT reveals desire; ACTION reveals commitment.” - Steve Maraboli
87. “My heart does not desire what my eyes does not admire.” - Habeeb Akande
88. “Love is the castle, doubt is the moat, desire is the paddle and hope is the boat.” - Kellie Elmore
89. “We don't just want what we want because we want it; we want what we want because that's what we've learned to want.” - Hanne Blank
90. “There's mainstream pornography--soft-core airbrushed fluff such as Penthouse and Playboy. The folks makin' this stuff do men and their range of desires a disservice; their implication is that anything outside the "big hair, fake tits, tiny waste, no pores, limited body hair" aesthetic is deviant, weird, not normal--and not something that a red-blooded American man would be interested in. The common boys-will-be-boys explanation for porn--that men get turned on visually (in contrast to "feminine" mode of arousal, which is mental and emotional)--is nothing more than an insult, making men out to be Pavlovian dogs who salivate uncontrollably and strain at their trousers upon contact with nudie pictures.Antiporn arguments, however well-meaning, are no better. Folks like Catherine MacKinnon also believe that men are inherently drawn to porn. And to them, porn is by definition violent, suggesting that it's somehow in men's nature to be aroused by hurting others. Furthermore, antipornography activists think that porn leads men to commit violence--as if men have no self-control or capacity to separate fantasy from reality, as if an erection is a driving force that can't be stopped once it's started... The only difference is one of perspective: Antiporn folk believe that male sexuality is always threatening, while men's-magazine editors think it's always fabulous.” - Lisa Jervis
91. “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
92. “True prayer is only another name for the love of God. Its excellence does not consist in the multitude of our words; for our Father knoweth what things we have need of before we ask Him. The true prayer is that of the heart, and the heart prays only for what it desires. To pray, then is to desire -- but to desire what God would have us desire. He who asks what he does not from the bottom of his heart desire, is mistaken in thinking that he prays.” - Francois Fenelon
93. “Desire is an appetite, quickly sated. Longing is a wound, an opening in the heart or the spirit. Whatever the cause, whatever the duration, it almost always leaves a scar.” - Philip Sington
94. “I eyed her like a thirsty traveler in the desert looks at a pail of water.” - Faraaz Kazi
95. “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
96. “She didn't want soft and gentle. She needed his rough possession, claiming her, branding her, taking her in a firestorm of heat and flame that would end the world around them, leaving them nothing but ashes, clean and fierce and forever welded together.” - Christine Feehan
97. “Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art--Not in lone splendour hung aloft the nightAnd watching, with eternal lids apart,Like nature's patient, sleepless Eremite,The moving waters at their priestlike taskOf pure ablution round earth's human shores,Or gazing on the new soft-fallen maskOf snow upon the mountains and the moors--No--yet still stedfast, still unchangeable,Pillow'd upon my fair love's ripening breast,To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,And so live ever--or else swoon to death. Glanzvoller Stern! wär ich so stet wie du,Nicht hing ich nachts in einsam stolzer Pracht!SchautŽ nicht mit ewigem Blick beiseite zu,Einsiedler der Natur, auf hoher WachtBeim Priesterwerk der Reinigung, das die See,Die wogende, vollbringt am Meeresstrand;Noch starrt ich auf die Maske, die der SchneeSanft fallend frisch um Berg und Moore band.Nein, doch unwandelbar und unentwegtMöchtŽ ruhn ich an der Liebsten weicher Brust,Zu fühlen, wie es wogend dort sich regt,Zu wachen ewig in unruhiger Lust,Zu lauschen auf des Atems sanftes Wehen -So ewig leben - sonst im Tod vergehen!” - John Keats
98. “Being wealthy isn't just a question of having lots of money. It's a question of what we want. Wealth isn't an absolute, it's relative to desire. Every time we seek something that we can't afford, we can be counted as poor, how much money we may actually have.” - Jean Jacques Rousseau
99. “But that was all bravado. Already - how had it come about so quickly - desire had begotten need. A few whispered words (perhaps he didn't mean them) and I was ready to follow. It was worse to think of staying behind, to grind one day upon another. Nothing to hold me here. None to regret my leaving, save Az.” - Sarah Micklem
100. “There's a chasm between envy and desire. Envy is like wanting something that's not yours. But desire is different. Desire comes out of wanting what is yours, and still wanting it even if it's not yet there, but it's not envy.” - Michka Assayas
101. “The timbre of his voice went into that low register that made my insides curl in on themselves--it was like my uterus was tapping out a happy dance on the rest of my organs.” - Cora Carmack
102. “He was still a mystery to me. And God, did I want to play Nancy Drew.” - Cora Carmack
103. “I have a deeply hidden and inarticulate desire for something beyond the daily life.” - Virginia Woolf
104. “Desires are but pain and torment, and enjoyment is sweet because it delivers us from them.” - Giacomo Casanova
105. “I feel alive when you kiss me.” - Missy Lyons
106. “And do I still have that look?" he asked."Yes just there," she kissed his eye. "The desire to love me is still there. If you look closely you can see mine for you, my tears never washed it away.” - Racquel McDonnell
107. “Sex, once a law as undisputed as gravity, has been disproved. The equation is erased, the blackboard broken” - Isaac Marion
108. “The moral, I suppose, would be that the first requirements for a heroic career are the knightly virtues of loyalty, temperance, and courage. The loyalty in this case is of two degrees or commitments: first, to the chosen adventure, but then, also, to the ideals of the order of knighthood. Now, this second commitment seems to put Gawain's way in opposition to the way of the Buddha, who when ordered by the Lord of Duty to perform the social duties proper to his caste, simply ignored the command, and that night achieved illumination as well as release from rebirth. Gawain is a European and, like Odysseus, who remained true to the earth and returned from the Island of the Sun to his marriage with Penelope, he has accepted, as the commitment of his life, not release from but loyalty to the values of life in this world. And yet, as we have just seen, whether following the middle way of the Buddha or the middle way of Gawain, the passage to fulfillment lies between the perils of desire and fear.” - Joseph Campbell
109. “Christianity set itself the goal of fulfilling man’s unattainable desires, but for that very reason ignored his attainable desires. By promising man eternal life, it deprived him of temporal life, by teaching him to trust in God’s help it took away his trust in his own powers; by giving him faith in a better life in heaven, it destroyed his faith in a better life on earth and his striving to attain such a life. Christianity gave man what his imagination desires, but for that very reason failed to give him what he really and truly desires.” - Ludwig Feuerbach
110. “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
111. “You have no concept of fairness, apart from your desire to have your own way. I suggest you put that notion from your head, because despite what you believe, the realms will not cater to your whims, and neither will I.” - Dawn Jayne
112. “I barely brushed towards her cheek as I moved towards her mouth, her nails tickled my chest, driving me insane. Kissing her became my single reason for breathing.” - Katie McGarry
113. “All I ever wanted from you was to know that I was wanted by you. That would have changed everything.” - Richelle E. Goodrich
114. “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
115. “We are tempted to believe that certain achievements and possessions will give us enduring satisfaction. We are invited to imagine ourselves scaling the steep cliff face of happiness in order to reach a wide, high plateau on which we will live out the rest of our lives; we are not reminded that soon after gaining the summit, we will be called down again into fresh lowlands of anxiety and desire.” - Alain De Botton
116. “If she could find a man who could feel and laugh as well as desire, she might even think about thinking about marriage.” - Melanie Rawn
117. “If you have the woman you love, what more do you need? Well, besides an alibi for the time of her husband’s murder. ” - Dark Jar Tin Zoo
118. “It's not that I feel alone because I have no friends because I have lots of friends. I know that I have people who can hold me and reassure me and talk to ne and care for me and think of me but they can't be inside my head with me all the time - for all time.” - Rob Ryan
119. “The human erotic imagination is a vast wilderness of sexual possibilities. We are each capable of enjoying a pleasurable, satisfying and potentially ecstatic sex life. Yet our culture encourages us to keep the window of possibility very narrow, limiting our erotic expression to a short list of approved activities and energies. To truly experience sexual freedom, you must reclaim your erotic imagination and allow yourself to make your sex life a work of art, your very own creation designed to fulfill your unique needs and desires.” - Chris Maxwell Rose
120. “The Warrior looks at the column of Fear, where he reads: “you are about to enter an unknown and dangerous world where all that you have learned up to now will be of no use whatsoever.”The Warrior of Light looks at the column of Desire, where he reads: “you are about to leave a known world where all the things you always wanted and all that you have fought so hard for are kept.”The Warrior smiles, because nothing can frighten him and nothing can hold him. With the confidence of those who know what they want, he opens the door.” - Paulo Coelho
121. “Or she would look at him with a sullen expression, once again he would see before him a face worthy of figuring in Botticelli's Life of Moses, he would place her in it, he would give her neck the necessary inclination; and when he had well and truly painted her in distemper, in the fifteenth century, on the wall of the Sistine Chapel, the idea that she had nevertheless remained here, by the piano, in the present moment, ready to be kissed and possessed, the idea of her materiality and her life would intoxicate him with such force that, his eyes distracted, his jaw tensed as though to devour her, he would swoop down upon that Botticelli virgin and begin pinching her cheeks.” - Marcel Proust
122. “Who people think they are and what people think they want is not really who they are or what they want.” - Laurie Frankel
123. “Love, is sometimes a simpler form of slowly dying, it's like a bullet that ricochets off time's walls of desire, waiting to hit that picture perfect heart of regrets.” - Anthony Liccione
124. “The greatest forces lie in the region of the uncomprehended.” - George MacDonald
125. “Half naked, he drank her in with his eyes, imprinting this moment into his mind. This, he would take to his death – the woman that stirred him to life.” - Dianna Hardy
126. “He could have watched her all night. He could watch her for an eternity and still never be able to capture the essence of what it is that makes ‘love’.” - Dianna Hardy
127. “She waited for him with shallow breaths, head thrown back, eyes half closed, completely exposed in her trust of him, and it unravelled the last thread holding him together.” - Dianna Hardy
128. “Amuse yourself, torment your desires. Drink when you're thirsty -- that would be very much too simple! If you didn't harbour a temptation eternally in your soul, you'd run the risk of forgetting yourself.” - Jean-Paul Sartre
129. “I looked down, unable to meet the intensity in Nat’s eyes. Tonight, my crush for Nat had moved beyond a crush. The chemistry between us was undeniable, and the more we clashed, the more we wanted each other." - Summer, Perfect Summer” - Kailin Gow
130. “Jelly had no brain per se but was in essence all brain, a shared consciousness programmed for desire. He had an appetite for everything, voraciously absorbing the culture that surrounded him and becoming it, only louder. In other words, he was extremely teenaged.” - Larry Doyle
131. “Lust for possession and greed has ravaged the soul of humanity like a great cancer, metastasizing throughout society in the form of a nouveau post-human, consumer hedonism.” - Bryant McGill
