50 Desire Quotes To Inspire

In the journey of life, desire serves as a powerful motivator, propelling us toward our dreams and aspirations. Whether it's the yearning for success, love, personal growth, or adventure, our desires shape our paths and guide our actions. To ignite your inner passion and keep your dreams alive, we've curated a collection of the top 50 desire quotes. These words of wisdom from great thinkers, writers, and leaders are sure to inspire and remind you of the boundless potential that lies within your heart. Dive into this treasure trove of motivational quotes and let them fuel your drive to achieve greatness.

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

2. “Thou hast made us for thyself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it finds its rest in thee.” - Augustine of Hippo

3. “Everything you want is just outside your comfort zone.” - Robert G. Allen

4. “As if one could do what one wanted with one's own body!” - Louis Aragon

5. “Desire is the key to motivation, but it’s determination and commitment to an unrelenting pursuit of your goal - a commitment to excellence - that will enable you to attain the success you seek.” - Mario Andretti

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

7. “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

8. “See how she leans her cheek upon her hand. O, that I were a glove upon that hand That I might touch that cheek!” - William Shakespeare

9. “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

10. “Why... is human desire so unsatisfying?” - Ai Yazawa

11. “À l'aurore, armés d'une ardente patience, nous entrerons aux splendides Villes. (In the dawn, armed with a burning patience, we shall enter the splendid Cities.)” - Arthur Rimbaud

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

13. “Everyone believes very easily whatever he fears or desires.” - Jean de La Fontaine

14. “A desire presupposes the possibility of action to achieve it; action presupposes a goal that is worth achieving.” - Ayn Rand

15. “There are few things we should keenly desire if we really knew what we wanted.” - Francois de La Rochefoucauld

16. “One morning, about four o'clock, I was driving my car just about as fast as I could. I thought, 'Why am I out on the highway this time of night?' I was miserable, and it all came to me: 'I'm falling in love with somebody I have no right to fall in love with. I can't fall in love with this man, but it's just like a ring of fire.” - June Carter Cash

17. “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

18. “I was flipping channels, watching this cheerleading program on MTV. They took a field hockey girl and “transformed” her into a cheerleader by the end of the show. I was just wondering: what if she liked field hockey better?” - Jess C. Scott

19. “The problem for us is not are our desires satisfied or not. The problem is how do we know what we desire.” - Slavoj Žižek

20. “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

21. “Chris: I don't know why it is, but every time I reach out for something I want, I have to pull back because other people will suffer.” - Arthur Miller

22. “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

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

24. “I miss your silent stature, your avoided days of disaster, your present state of distress.I’m cinnamon, cloves and fire, you are the rested cedarwood of desire.” - Jamie Weise

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

26. “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

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

28. “All the beautiful waitresses existed like eternal responsibilities.” - Spalding Gray

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

30. “It was long since I had longed for anything and the effect on me was horrible.” - Samuel Beckett

31. “When I see a word held hostage to manhood I have to rescue it. Sweet trembling word, locked in a tower, tired of your Prince coming and coming.” - Jeanette Winterson

32. “I think I am a rare breed, a homosexual who doesn't like men.” - Michel Tremblay

33. “He was so close to her then that they owned every molecule of air in the tiny room and the air grew heavy with their desire and worked to move them together.” - Ann Patchett

34. “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

35. “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

36. “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

37. “I eyed her like a thirsty traveler in the desert looks at a pail of water.” - Faraaz Kazi

38. “You need to know it's your actions that will make you a good person, not desire.” - Matthew Quick

39. “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

40. “Blake inspires instant, tender Blakelust in everyone he meets. All of his beauties are meant to be touched, and he likes to be touched.” - John Valentine

41. “I have a deeply hidden and inarticulate desire for something beyond the daily life.” - Virginia Woolf

42. “In every living thing there is the desire for love.” - D.H. Lawrence

43. “Wealth is not an absolute. It is relative to desire. Every time we yearn for something we cannot afford, we grow poorer, whatever our resources. And every time we feel satisfied with what we have, we can be counted as rich, however little we may actually possess.” - Alain De Botton

44. “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

45. “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

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

47. “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

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

49. “It was that impossible thing: happiness that does not wilt to reveal the thin shoots of some new desire rising from within it.” - George Saunders

50. “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