142 Desire Quotes

In a world driven by ambition, passion, and dreams, desire is the potent fuel that propels us forward. Whether it’s the yearning for love, success, or deeper self-understanding, desire shapes our journeys and defines our paths. Join us as we explore a handpicked selection of the top 142 Desire Quotes that capture the essence of longing and aspiration, offering insight and inspiration to ignite the fire within you. Dive into these powerful words and let them stoke the embers of your own desires, motivating you to chase what truly matters.

1. “All men want, not something to do with, but something to do, or rather something to be.” - Henry David Thoreau

2. “It has made me better loving you... it has made me wiser, and easier, and brighter. I used to want a great many things before, and to be angry that I did not have them. Theoretically, I was satisfied. I flattered myself that I had limited my wants. But I was subject to irritation; I used to have morbid sterile hateful fits of hunger, of desire. Now I really am satisfied, because I can’t think of anything better. It’s just as when one has been trying to spell out a book in the twilight, and suddenly the lamp comes in. I had been putting out my eyes over the book of life, and finding nothing to reward me for my pains; but now that I can read it properly I see that it’s a delightful story.” - Henry James

3. “But if you love and must needs have desires, let these be your desires:To melt and be like a running brook that sings its melody to the night.To know the pain of too much tenderness.To be wounded by your own understanding of love;And to bleed willingly and joyfully.To wake at dawn with a winged heart and give thanks for another day of loving;To rest at noon hour and meditate love's ecstasy;To return home at eventide with gratitude;And then to sleep with a prayer for the beloved in your heart and a song of praise on your lips.” - Kahlil Gibran

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. “Oh I believe in loving cats and dogs and children and parents – sometimes – but I don’t believe in romantic love. Of course, there’s the momentary rush of hormones and chemicals that encourages us to mate, but it’s biology – it’s no more inherently mystical than the nicotine in that cigarette you’re smoking” - Amy Jenkins

6. “She knew what it felt like to tremble like that before touching someone -- desire so acute that it became despair.” - Holly Black

7. “He wants the minute and secret reflection between them, the depth of field minimal, their foreignness intimate like two pages of a closed book.” - Michael Ondaatje

8. “Oh to have you with me, to have you here, not to be alone, but to be with you, my beauty, you of all souls! You.” - Anne Rice

9. “Each day death corrodes what we call living, and life ceaselessly swallows our desire for the void.” - Jindrich Styrsky

10. “Desire acts as a honey trap to the unwary male, luring him into unworthy and catastrophic enterprises. The beauty of the Narnian witches isn't ancillary to their evil, but integral to it, one of the weapons in their arsenal. Evil must, after all, appear attractive if it's going to be tempting, and from there it's only a small step further to the conclusion that feminine beauty is inherently wicked.” - Laura Miller

11. “The power of unfulfilled desires is the root of all man's slavery” - Paramahansa Yogananda

12. “Desire grows by what it feeds on.” - L.M. Montgomery

13. “I felt like an animal, and animals don’t know sin, do they?” - Jess C. Scott

14. “The world is always greater than your desires; plenty is never enough.” - Aleksandar Hemon

15. “To others, the universe seems decent because decent people have welded eyes. That is why they fear lewdness. They are never frightened by the crowing of a rooster or when strolling under a starry heaven. In general, people savor the "pleasures of the flesh" only on the condition that they may be insipid.” - Georges Bataille

16. “Desire is suffering. A simple equation, and a nice catchphrase. But flipped around, it is more troubling: suffering is desire.” - Charles Yu

17. “I want to take you until you are boneless. I want to drain you of strength. I want to fill you and take my fill of you. My dear, Ivy, I want to devour you. I want your juices on my toung, flooding my mouth. I want your wetness on my face, your scent covering me. I want your blood in my veins.” - Kathryn Smith

18. “The world yearns. This is its sure gravity: the attraction of bodies. Earth for molten star. Moon for earth. A hand for the orb of a breast. This is its movement too: the motion of desire, of a longing toward.” - Alison MacLeod

19. “Desire is the key to motivation. It is the key to develop a healthy personality and a positive attitude towards oneself and others.” - Dr. Amit Abraham

20. “For love is no part of the dreamworld. Love belongs to Desire, and Desire is always cruel.” - Neil Gaiman

21. “A major challenge we face today, therefore, is to create a desire in people to learn; and to foster and facilitate this desire throughout their lives.” - Bryn Holmes

22. “We all have to lead our own life, and we only have the one life, and the only people who can live life not according to their own desires are those who have no desires--which is the majority, actually. People can say what they like, they can speak of abnegation, sacrifice, generosity, acceptance, and resignation, but it's all false. The norm is for people to think that they desire whatever comes to them, whatever they achieve along the way or whatever is given to them--they have no preconceived desires.” - Javier Marías

23. “Olympia thinks often about desire - desire that stops the breath, that causes a preoccupied pause in the midst of uttering a sentence - and how it may upend a life and threaten to dissolve the soul.” - Anita Shreve

24. “And still the brain continues to yearn, continues to burn, foolishly, with desire. My old man's brain is mocked by a body that still longs to stretch in the sun and form a beautiful shape in someone else's gaze, to lie under a blue sky and dream of helpless, selfless love, to behold itself, illuminated, in the golden light of another's eyes.” - Meg Rosoff

25. “All day and all night my desire for you unwinds like a poisonous snake.” - Samar Sen

26. “Ultimately, it is the desire, not the desired, that we love.” - Friedrich Nietzsche

27. “Okay, let’s put it this way. I would like to sleep with you. But it’s alright if I don’t sleep with you. What I’m saying is I’d like to be as fair as possible. I don’t want to force anything on anybody, any more than I’d want anything forced on me. It’s enough that I feel your presence or see your commas swirling around me.” - Haruki Murakami

28. “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

29. “Like trying to keep a fatman out of the refrigerator. 'Lila” - Robert M. Pirsig

30. “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

31. “If you were offered the chance to live your own life again, would you seize the opportunity? The only real philosophical answer is automatically self-contradictory: 'Only if I did not know that I was doing so.' To go through the entire experience once more would be banal and Sisyphean—even if it did build muscle—whereas to wish to be young again and to have the benefit of one's learned and acquired existence is not at all to wish for a repeat performance, or a Groundhog Day. And the mind ought to, but cannot, set some limits to wish-thinking. All right, same me but with more money, an even sturdier penis, slightly different parents, a briefer latency period… the thing is absurd. I seriously would like to know what it was to be a woman, but like blind Tiresias would also want the option of re-metamorphosing if I wished. How terrible it is that we have so many more desires than opportunities.” - Christopher Hitchens

32. “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

33. “I cannot rest, I must draw, however poor the result, and when I have a bad time come over me it is a stronger desire than ever.” - Beatrix Potter

34. “We are all created by desire and we all die because of desire.” - Santosh Kalwar

35. “You can want and want and want, but if he doesn't want you back ... you might as well wish the sky were red.” - Sophie Kinsella

36. “Sometimes I think the difference between what we want and what we're afraid of is about the width of an eyelash.” - Jay Mcinerney

37. “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

38. “I desire to be with you. I miss you. I feel lonely when I can't see you. I am obsessed with you, fascinated by you, infatuated with you. I hunger for your taste, your smell, the feel of your soul touching mine.” - Jack Llawayllynn

39. “A mental disease has swept the planet: banalization. Everyone is hypnotized by production and comfort -- sewage system, elevator, bathroom, washing machine. This state of affairs, which arose out of a struggle against poverty, overshoots its ultimate goal -- the liberation of humanity from material cares -- and becomes an obsessive image hanging over the present. Between love and a garbage disposal, young people of all countries have made their choice and prefer the garbage disposal. A complete and sudden change of spirit has become essential, by bringing to light forgotten desires and creating entirely new ones. And by an intensive propaganda in favor of these desires.Gilles Ivain (aka Ivan Chtcheglov)” - Tom McDonough

40. “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

41. “Any man could, if he were so inclined, be the sculptor of his own brain.” - Santiago Ramón y Cajal

42. “If your desires are not great, a little will seem much to you; for small appetite makes poverty equivalent to wealth.” - Democritus

43. “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

44. “In the endeavor to establish a difficult habit, for example, mere wishing will never carry it to a successful conclusion; our wishing must rise to the level of WANTING if this goal is to be achieved.” - Ralph Alfred Habas

45. “He that has satisfied his thirst turns his back on the well.” - Baltasar Gracian

46. “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

47. “Those sweet lips. My, oh my, I could kiss those lips all night long.Good things come to those who wait.” - Jess C. Scott

48. “I envy people that know love. That have someone who takes them as they are.” - Jess C. Scott

49. “When someone loves you, the way they talk about you is different. You feel safe and comfortable.” - Jess C. Scott

50. “Let me know when you're ready to talk." She stopped and glanced at them both over her shoulder. "Maybe then I'd be ready to discuss your sexual twists and my own little abnormal desires. You never know what we all might learn that we haven't already."With that, she turned and moved back into the house, closing the door behind her and disappearing out of sight. And Cam found his back slammed against the side of Ian's Hummer, his brother in his face.Lust and irritation flared in his brother's eyes. "You better start talking," he grated. "Because you know what she just did?""She just dared us, Cam. And I don't know about you, but the thought of 'abnormal desires' dancing through her mind is going to drive me fucking crazy. Now, fix it.” - Lora Leigh

51. “Habit is the intersection of knowledge (what to do), skill (how to do), and desire (want to do).” - Stephen R. Covey

52. “Peter Wessel and Peter Van Daan have grown into one Peter, who is beloved and good, and for whom I long desperately.” - Anne Frank

53. “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

54. “Dying for dark - the darker the worse. Strange.” - Samuel Beckett

55. “While a common reaction to seeing a thing of beauty is to want to buy it, our real desire may be not so much to own what we find beautiful as to lay permanent claim to the inner qualities it embodies.Owning such an object may help us realise our ambition of absorbing the virtues to which it alludes, but we ought not to presume that those virtues will automatically or effortlessly begin to rub off on us through tenure. Endeavouring to purchase something we think beautiful may in fact be the most unimaginative way of dealing with the longing it excites in us, just as trying to sleep with someone may be the bluntest response to a feeling of love.What we seek, at the deepest level, is inwardly to resemble, rather than physically possess, the objects and places that touch us through their beauty.” - Alain De Botton

56. “Your hand can seize today, but not tomorrow; and thoughts of your tomorrow are nothing but desire. Don’t waste this breath, if your heart isn’t crazy, since "the rest of your life" won’t last forever.” - Omar Khayyám

57. “Anxiety and desire are two, often conflicting, orientations to the unknown. Both are tilted toward the future. Desire implies a willingness, or a need, to engage this unknown, while anxiety suggests a fear of it. Desire takes one out of oneself, into the possibility or relationship, but it also takes one deeper into oneself. Anxiety turns one back on oneself, but only onto the self that is already known.” - Mark Epstein

58. “Wish' is the most powerful thing in the world. Higher than God.” - G.I. Gurdjieff

59. “It's precisely in despair that you find the most intense pleasure, especially if you are already powerfully conscious of the hopelessness of your predicament.” - Fyodor Dostoyevsky

60. “Love lasts a long time but burning desire lasts two to three weeks.” - Carla Bruni

61. “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

62. “You can have anything you want if you want it badly enough. You can be anything you want to be, do anything you set out to accomplish if you hold to that desire with singleness of purpose.” - Abraham Lincoln

63. “When you are secure in yourself, know what turns you on, and enjoy watching your partner watch you experience sexual pleasure, you have a highly novel relationship grounded in love. The experience of seeing and being seen fuels lust and desire. This is exactly the way you integrate healthy lust and love into your sex life. It’s relational sex, not the old pornographic sex of past addictions.” - Alexandra Katehakis

64. “He made me feel unhinged . . . like he could take me apart and put me back together again and again.” - Chelsie Shakespeare

65. “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

66. “Have you ever thought, thought your heart would break? Wished you could cut open your chest tear it out to stop the pain? Why don´t you riot like everyone else. I don't care, life's too long. You can have any man you want. I want him...except him. Always suspected the world didn't smell of fresh paint and flowers. Smells of piss and human sweat If there could have been more moments like this.” - Sarah Kane

67. “Why so scrawny, cat?Starving for fat fish or mice...Or backyard love?” - Basho

68. “...if desire is predominant it can deform love between man and woman and rob them both of it.” - Pope John Paul II

69. “She had rarely been near Henry since then, and the sight of him now was like a concentrated dose.” - Anna Godbersen

70. “The exotic and the erotic ideals go hand in hand, and this fact also contributes another proof of a more or less obvious truth - that is, that a love of the exotic is usually an imaginative projection of a sexual desire.” - Mario Praz

71. “But never had he felt more enthralled than he was right now, sitting beside Evie on a weathered old dock, with a blazing afternoon sun, almost brutal in its clarity, bathing everything in pure light. Sweat trickled down his back and chest from the steamy heat, and his entire body pulsed with life. Even his fingertips throbbed. It took all of his formidable self-control to prevent himself from pushing her down on the dock and spreading her legs for his entry.” - Linda Howard

72. “Nothing makes a person desire improvement like failure” - Chris Stocking

73. “he was conscious of the disastrous fact that love and desire must be expressed in the same way...” - Albert Camus

74. “Our duty is to be useful, not according to our desires but according to our powers.” - Henri Frédéric Amiel

75. “To be desired is perhaps the closest anybody in this life can reach to feeling immortal.” - John Berger

76. “Your desire is your prayer. Picture the fulfillment of your desire now and feel its reality and you will experience the joy of the answered.Dr. Joseph Murphy” - Joseph Murphy

77. “There is no Christianity unless first there is repentance. And it is not just, “Well, I am guilty.” It is not just a conviction. It is a conviction plus a desire to turn away from those things.” - Brian Richardson

78. “Would that thy love, beloved, had less trust in me, that it might be more anxious!” - Héloïse

79. “It's wonderful to feel desired. There's a sense of power in it, really.” - Nancy Horan

80. “Sometimes you don't even know what you want until you find out you can't have it.” - Meghan O'Rourke

81. “You see, gentlemen, reason is an excellent thing, there's no disputing that, but reason is nothing but reason and satisfies only the rational side of man's nature, while will is a manifestation of the whole life, that is, of the whole human life including reason and all the impulses. And although our life, in this manifestation of it, is often worthless, yet it is life and not simply extracting square roots. Here I, for instance, quite naturally want to live, in order to satisfy all my capacities for life, and not simply my capacity for reasoning, that is, not simply one twentieth of my capacity for life. What does reason know? Reason only knows what it has succeeded in learning (some things, perhaps, it will never learn; this is a poor comfort, but why not say so frankly?) and human nature acts as a whole, with everything that is in it, consciously or unconsciously, and, even if it goes wrong, it lives.” - Fyodor Dostoyevsky

82. “Gabriel pulled her over his body to lie on the bed beside him. His kisses pressed her down into the oblivion of the mattress as her hands explored his chest, his shoulders, his face."I want to lay my kill at your feet," he said, more growl than words, and held her tight by her hair as he marked her neck with his teeth.She writhed against him. She wanted to bite him, she wanted to rip the flesh from his back, but most terrible of all, she didn't want him to stop. Her back arched, her body shattered, she howled.” - Annette Curtis Klause

83. “The green-eyed angel came in less than a half hour and fell docile as a lamb into my arms. We kissed and caressed, I met no resistance when I unlaced the strings to free her dress and fill myself in the moist and hot bed nature made between her thighs. We made love outdoors—without a roof, I like most, without stove, my favorite place, assuming the weather be fair and balmy, and the earth beneath be clean. Our souls intertwined and dripping with dew, and our love for each other was seen. Our love for the world was new.” - Roman Payne

84. “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

85. “People often miss things that don't exist--miss things that were but are not anymore.” - Sarah McCoy

86. “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

87. “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

88. “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

89. “On Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell in His Girl Friday:"These two simply appreciate one another more than either of them appreciates anyone else, and they would rather be appreciated by one another more than by anyone else. They just are at home with one another, whether or not they can ever live together under the same roof -- that is, ever find a roof they can live together under.” - Stanley Cavell

90. “How we need that security. How we need another soul to cling to, another body to keep us warm. To rest and trust; to give your soul in confidence: I need this, I need someone to pour myself into.” - Sylvia Plath

91. “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

92. “I am the woman at the water’s edge,offering you oranges for the peeling,knife glistening in the sun.This is the scent and tasteof my skin: citon and sweet.Touch me and your life will unfoldbefore you, easily as this skirtbillows then sinks,lapping against my legs, my toesfiltering through the rivers silt.Following the current out to sea,I am the kind of womanwho will come back to hauntyour dreams, move through yourhumid nights the way honeyswirls through a cup of hot tea” - Shara McCallum

93. “Love is the castle, doubt is the moat, desire is the paddle and hope is the boat.” - Kellie Elmore

94. “The room where they were dancing was very dark.... It was queer to be in his arms.... She had known better dancers.... He had looked ill.... Perhaps he was.... Oh, poor Valentine-Elisabeth.... What a funny position!.... The good gramophone played.... Destiny!.... You see, father! ... In his arms! Of course, dancing is not really.... But so near the real thing! So near!... 'Good luck to the special intention!...' She had almost kissed him on the lips ... All but!... Effleurer, the French call it.... But she was not as humble.... He had pressed her tighter.... All these months without.... My lord did me honour.... Good for Malbrouck s'en va-t-en guerre.... He knew she had almost kissed him on the lips.... And that his lips had almost responded.... The civilian, the novelist, had turned out the last light.... Tietjens said, 'Hadn't we better talk?...' She said: 'In my room, then! I'm dog-tired.... I haven't slept for six nights.... In spite of drugs...' He said: 'Yes. Of course! Where else?....” - Ford Madox Ford

95. “Everyone lusts. Everyone Fantasizes. When your lover respects you, you should feel free to explore your desires. No matter how extreme.” - Jayne Rylon

96. “I’m the thing you most desire, you represent the thing I least desire, death. It’s just the opposite of love.” - Ray Bradbury

97. “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

98. “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

99. “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

100. “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

101. “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

102. “Why doesn't hatred kill desire? I would have given anything to sleep. I would have behaved like a schoolboy if I had believed in the possibility of a substitute. But there was a time when I had tried to find a substitute, and it hadn't worked.” - Graham Greene

103. “Had a couple of drinks by myself. It was a mistake. Have I got to give up drinking, too? If I eliminate everything, how will I exist? I was somebody who loved Maurice and went with men and enjoyed my drinks. What happens if you drop all the things that make you I?” - Graham Greene

104. “Now do you understand why I'm interested in you? You're a locked door, sweetheart. You give no one a key and you never answer the door when anyone knocks...Ah, but sometimes, sometimes I get a peek through the keyhole and what I find there...It's like glimpsing you as you're stripping. Underneath all of that darkness is something hungry, something desperate, something, oh, so deliciously vulnerable.” - Tricia Owens

105. “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

106. “Desires to which we cling closely can easily prevent us from being what we ought to be and can be; and on the other hand, desires repeatedly mastered for the sake of present duty make us richer.Lack of desire is poverty.” - Dietrich Bonhoeffer

107. “He was still a mystery to me. And God, did I want to play Nancy Drew.” - Cora Carmack

108. “Desires are but pain and torment, and enjoyment is sweet because it delivers us from them.” - Giacomo Casanova

109. “Desire wills its perpetuation ad infinitum.” - Susan Sontag

110. “I feel alive when you kiss me.” - Missy Lyons

111. “Breath by breath, let go of fear, expectation, anger, regret, cravings, frustration, fatigue. Let go of the need for approval. Let go of old judgments and opinions. Die to all that, and fly free. Soar in the freedom of desirelessness. Let go. Let Be. See through everything and be free, complete, luminous, at home -- at ease.” - Lama Surya Das

112. “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

113. “Total knowledge is annihilation Of the desire to see, to touch, to feel The world sensed only through senses And immune to the knowledge without feeling.” - Dejan Stojanovic

114. “There is only as much space, only as much time, Only as much desire, only as many words, Only as many pages, only as much ink To accept all of us at light-speed Hurrying into the Promised Land Of oblivion that is waiting for us sooner or later.” - Dejan Stojanovic

115. “Having begun to feel, people’s desire to feel grew. They wanted to feel more, feel deeper, despite how it sometimes hurt. People became addicted to feeling. They struggled to uncover new emotions.” - Nicole Krauss

116. “Love is a kind of symptom that arises through the repression of libido.” - Frank Tallis

117. “God loves his creatures, and he loves each one the more, the more it shares his own goodness, which is the first and primary object of his love. Therefore he wants the desires of his rational creatures to be fulfilled because they share most perfectly of all creatures the goodness of god. And his will is an accomplisher of things because he is the cause of things by his will. So it belongs to the divine goodness to fulfill the desires of rational creatures which are put to him in prayer.” - St. Thomas Aquinas

118. “Have you ever considered what Adam and Eve were doing when they got into so much trouble? As I read the story, they were shopping. The forbidden fruit was not scattered throughout the garden, not in many places, not in multiple locations, but one place, one site, one location and one location only. Perhaps they just came upon it, “Oh, look, the forbidden fruit…” or, perhaps, they were looking for something, searching, shopping. Somewhere in their dissatisfaction they thought, “If only we had something more…” - David W. Jones

119. “It's a good sign but rare instance when, in a relationship, you find that the more you learn about the other person, the more you continue to desire them. A sturdy bond delights in that degree of youthful intrigue. Love loves its youth.” - Criss Jami

120. “deseo, esa «fuerza Misteriosa que hay detrás de cada cosa». ¡Cómo le gustaban esas palabras de Alfred de Musset! El deseo que hace que toda la superficie de la piel se alumbre y desee la superficie de otra piel de la que no se sabe nada. Antes de conocerse ya son íntimos. Ya no se puede vivir sin la mirada del otro, sin su sonrisa, sin su mano, sin sus labios. Se pierde el rumbo. Se vuelve uno loco. Se le seguiría al fin del mundo, mientras la razón dice: Pero ¿qué sabes tú de él? Nada, nada, ayer mismo no sabíamos ni su nombre. ¡Qué hermoso ardid inventado por la biología para el ser humano, que se creía tan fuerte! ¡Qué triunfo el de la piel sobre el cerebro! El deseo se infiltra en las neuronas y las embota. Nos encadenamos, nos privamos de libertad. En la cama, en todo caso…El último eslabón de vida primitiva” - Katherine Pancol

121. “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

122. “It's about people who still are unaware. Therefore they strive to live by all means: love like no one before them loved, believe like no one ever believed, desire like no one else ever desired...” - Marius Ivaškevičius

123. “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

124. “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

125. “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

126. “Sometimes it's a good idea to think about what you want from a situation, and try to get it, rather than just blurt out the first thing that comes into your head.” - E. Lockhart

127. “Desire-Aspire-Perspire-Inspire but, don't Expire!” - Ifeanyi Enoch Onuoha

128. “What is allowed us is disagreeable, what is denied us causes intense desire.” - Jeff Wheeler

129. “But now it was spring again, and spring was almost unbearable for sensitive hearts. It drove creation to its utmost limits, it wafted its spice-laden breath even into the nostrils of the innocent.” - Knut Hamsun

130. “I want to undress you, touch you, kiss you, taste you. And then I want you to taste yourself on my mouth." He kissed her again, hot and strong and long. One hand crept to her clothed breast, kneading it. "I want you hard and hot and deep and fast. And then I want you slow and sweet. I want you to wrap those beautiful long legs around me. I want you under me and on top of me and sitting and standing. I want to see your eyes when pleasure makes you light up. I want to hold you when you come down and try to find your breath. I want everything with you, Ellie. I care about you more than I've cared about a woman in so long. I hardly recognized the feelings. I'm dying for you." (Noah Kincaid)” - Robyn Carr

131. “I want to love every piece of you. I want to be inside you. I want our bodies together, to make the two of us into one. I want it all, and I want it hard, soft, anything that will make you happy. I want to hold you, keep you safe, make you scream... I want to make you gasp and tremble and lose control, like I'm losing control. And tip over the edge. And fall." He kissed her again. "And fall," he whispered against her lips. "I want to make you fall in love with me. The way I'm in love with you." (Noah Kincaid)” - Robyn Carr

132. “Don't canonize me too soon. I'm perfectly capable of fathering a child.” - St. Francis Of Assisi

133. “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

134. “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

135. “NOVIA. ¡Porque yo me fui con el otro, me fui! (Con angustia.) Tú también te hubieras ido. Yo era una mujer quemada, llena de llagas por dentro y por fuera,y tu hijo era un poquito de agua de la que yo esperaba hijos, tierra, salud; pero el otro era un río oscuro, lleno de ramas, que acercaba a mí el rumor de sus juncos y su cantar entre dientes. Y yo corría con tu hijo que era como un niñito de agua, frío, y el otro me mandaba cientos de pájaros que me impedían el andar y que dejaban escarcha sobre mis heridas de pobre mujer marchita, de muchacha acariciada por el fuego. Yo no quería, ¡óyelo bien!, yo no quería. ¡Tu hijo era mi fin y yo no lo he engañado, pero el brazo del otro me arrastró como un golpe de mar, como la cabezada de un mulo, y me hubiera arrastrado siempre, siempre, siempre, aun que hubiera sido vieja y todos los hijos de tu hijo me hubiesen agarrado de los cabellos.” - Federico García-Lorca

136. “Prayer is the soul's sincere desire. Your desire is your prayer. It comes out of your deepest needs and it reveals the things you want in life.” - Joseph Murphy

137. “The greatest forces lie in the region of the uncomprehended.” - George MacDonald

138. “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

139. “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

140. “Let temporal things be in the use, eternal things in the desire.” - Thomas A. Kempis

141. “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

142. “How can you possibly do everything you want to do in life if you start doing a bunch of things twice?” - Lorii Myers