Quotes about Desire

One who asks the law to rule, therefore, is held to be asking god and intellect alone to rule, while one who asks man adds the beast. Desire is a thing of this sort; and spiritedness perverts rulers and the best men. Hence law is intellect without appetite.

The self-indulgent man, then, craves for all pleasant things or those that are most pleasant . . . Hence he is pained both when he fails to get them and when he is craving for them, for appetite involves pain.

The law is reason unaffected by desire.

The avarice of mankind is insatiable.

It belongs to the imperfection of everything human that man can only attain his desire by passing through its opposite.

What distinguishes all love from lust is the fact that it bears an impress of eternity.

Ulysses was not comely, but he was eloquent, Yet he fired two goddesses of the sea with love

When a person has found something which he prefers to life itself, he for the first time has begun to live.

Being alive is having what I want, that is my joy, my happiness.

Her virtue and the conscience of her worth, that would be woo'd, and not unsought be won.

Thus the Lord, by pain, sickness, and disappointments, by breaking our cisterns and withering our gourds—weakens our attachment to this world, and makes the thought of leaving it, more easy and more desirable.

Satan transforms himself into an angel of light. He sometimes offers to teach us humility; but though I wish to be humble, I desire not to learn in this school. His premises perhaps are true, that we are vile, wretched creatures—but he then draws abominable conclusions from them; and would teach us, that, therefore, we ought to question either the power, or the willingness, or the faithfulness of Christ.