quotations about desire
You had better return home and make a net, than go down to the river and desire to get the fishes.
CHINESE PROVERB
If wishes were fishes we'd all cast nets.
FRANK HERBERT
Dune
Man is the only animal whose desires increase as they are fed; the only animal that is never satisfied.
HENRY GEORGE
Progress and Poverty
Why can I never set my heart on a possible thing?
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Left Hand of Darkness
It is not poverty which produces sorrow, but desire.
EPICTETUS
Fragments
Nothing is more human than for man to desire naturally things impossible to his nature. It is, indeed, the property of a nature which is not closed up in matter like the nature of physical things, but which is intellectual or infinitized by the spirit. It is the property of a metaphysical nature. Such desires reach for the infinite, because the intellect thirsts for being and being is infinite.
JACQUES MARITAIN
Approaches to God
A single spark of occasion discharges the child of passions into a thousand crackers of desire.
JOHANN CASPAR LAVATER
Aphorisms on Man
Do not desire what you can't acquire.
KEN ALSTAD
Savvy Sayin's
Everything desires not like but unlike: for example, the dry desires the moist, the cold the hot, the bitter the sweet, the sharp the blunt, the void the full, the full the void, and so of all other things; for the opposite is the food of the opposite, whereas like receives like receives nothing from like.
PLATO
Lysis
Is it the gods who set this fire in our hearts, or do we each make our fierce desire into a god?
URSULA K. LE GUIN
Lavinia
There is no natural desire of what is unnatural.
BENJAMIN WHICHCOTE
Moral and Religious Aphorisms
And desire shall fail: because man goeth to his long home, and the mourners go about the streets.
BIBLE
Ecclesiastes 12:5
To bliss unknown by lofty soul aspires,
My lot unequal to my vast desires.
JOHN ARBUTHNOT
"Know Yourself", A Supplement to the Miscellaneous Works of the Late Dr. Arbuthnot
Do not indulge in dreams of having what you have not, but reckon up the chief of the blessings you do possess, and then thankfully remember how you would crave for them if they were not yours.
MARCUS AURELIUS
Meditations
What desire can be contrary to nature, since it was given to man by nature itself?
MICHEL FOUCAULT
Madness & Civilization
Weak desires bring weak results, just as a small amount of fire makes a small amount of heat.
NAPOLEON HILL
Think and Grow Rich
Ignore what a man desires and you ignore the very source of his power.
WALTER LIPPMANN
A Preface to Politics
All cravings are the mind seeking salvation or fulfillment in external things and in the future as a substitute for the joy of Being.
ECKHARD TOLLE
The Power of Now
Disdain to warm thee at lust's smoky fires,
Scorn, scorn to feed on thy old bloat desires:
Come, come, my soul, hoist up thy higher sails,
The wind blows fair; shall we still creep like snails,
That glide their ways with their own native slimes?
FRANCIS QUARLES
Emblems
Through their proper knowledge
Creatures of Discernment forsake that Desire
Through which lustful creatures
Go to misfortune.
GAUTAMA BUDDHA
Iti-Vuttaka