Desire Quotes - Page 29

• You must be a poet,
  a lady of evil luck
  desiring to be what you are not,
  longing to be
  what you can only visit.

  Anne Sexton

  Evil, Poetry, Luck

  Anne Sexton (1975). “The Awful Rowing Toward God”, Boston : Houghton Mifflin

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• To die whole,
  riddled with nothing
  but desire for it,
  is like breakfast
  after love.

  Anne Sexton

  Satisfaction, Breakfast, Longing

  Anne Sexton (1978). “Words for Dr. Y.: uncollected poems with three stories”, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (HMH)

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• If fishes were wishes the ocean would be all of our desire.

  Gertrude Stein

  Ocean, Fishing, Wish

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• The protection of a ten-year-old girl from her father's advances is a necessary condition of social order, but the protection of the father from temptation is a necessary condition of his continued social adjustment. The protections that are built up in the child against desire for the parent become the essential counterpart to the attitudes in the parent that protect the child.

  Margaret Mead

  Girl, Children, Attitude

  Margaret Mead (1975). “Male and female: a study of the sexes in a changing world”, William Morrow & Co

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• My first reading of Tolstoy affected me as a revelation from heaven, as the trumpet of the judgment. What he made me feel was notthe desire to imitate, but the conviction that imitation was futile.

  Ellen Glasgow

  Reading, Heaven, Firsts

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• Our dependence outweighs our independence, for we are independent only in our desire, while we are dependent on our health, on nature, on society, on everything in us and outside us.

  Henri Frederic Amiel

  Independent, Independence, Dependent

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• I desire no other epitaph - no hurry about it, I may say - than the statement that I taught medical students in the wards, as I regard this as by far the most useful and important work I have been called upon to do.

  William Osler

  Education, Important, May

  William Osler (1927). “Aequanimitas”, p.221, Ravenio Books

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• Ye whose clay-cold heads and luke-warm hearts can argue down or mask your passions--tell me, what trespass is it that man should have them?... If nature has so wove her web of kindness, that some threads of love and desire are entangled with the piece--must the whole web be rent in drawing them out?

  Laurence Sterne

  Kindness, Passion, Heart

  Laurence Sterne (1849). “The Works of Laurence Sterne: Containing The Life and Opinions of Tristan Shandy ... [etc.] ; with a Life of the Author Written by Himself”, p.339

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• I learned a lot of different things from different schools. MIT is a very good place…. It has developed for itself a spirit, so that every member of the whole place thinks that it’s the most wonderful place in the world—it’s the center, somehow, of scientific and technological development in the United States, if not the world … and while you don’t get a good sense of proportion there, you do get an excellent sense of being with it and in it, and having motivation and desire to keep on

  Richard P. Feynman

  Motivation, Learning, School

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• Any refusal to recognize reality, for any reason whatever, has disastrous consequences. There are no evil thoughts except one: the refusal to think. Don't ignore your own desires.... Don't sacrifice them. Examine their cause. There is a limit to how much you should have to bear.

  Ayn Rand

  Sacrifice, Thinking, Reality

  Ayn Rand (2011). “Ayn Rand Novel Collection”, p.1454, Penguin

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• That those tribes [the Sac and Fox Indians] cannot exist surrounded by our settlements and in continual contact with our citizensis certain. They have neither the intelligence, the industry, the moral habits, nor the desire of improvement which are essential to any favorable change in their condition.

  Andrew Jackson

  Native American, Essentials, Foxes

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• His [the President's] earnest desire is, that you may perpetuated and preserved as a nation; and this he believes can only be doneand secured by your consent to remove to a country beyond the Mississippi.... Where you are, it is not possible you can live contented and happy.

  Andrew Jackson

  Country, Believe, President

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• [T]he syndrome known as life is too diffuse to admit of palliation. For every symptom that is eased, another is made worse. The horse leech's daughter is a closed system. Her quantum of wantum cannot vary.

  Samuel Beckett

  Life, Daughter, Horse

  Samuel Beckett (2011). “Murphy”, p.36, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

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• Research is an organized method of trying to find out what you are going to do after you cannot do what you are doing now. It may also be said to be the method of keeping a customer reasonably dissatisfied with what he has. That means constant improvement and change so that the customer will be stimulated to desire the new product enough to buy it to replace the one he has.

  Charles Kettering

  Mean, Trying, Research

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• The uppermost idea with Hellenism is to see things as they really are; the uppermost ideas with Hebraism is conduct and obedience.Nothing can do away with this ineffaceable difference. The Greek quarrel with the body and its desires is, that they hinder right thinking; the Hebrew quarrel with them is, that they hinder right acting.

  Matthew Arnold

  Thinking, Ideas, Differences

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• It is a human circumstance that when we are born we have not yet come into existence. We are lured into our special human existence by a mothering presence that gratifies our innate urges to be suckled, held, rocked, caressed. But that same gratifying presence puts limits on desire and rations satisfaction. In this sense the mother is also the first lawgiver.

  Louise J. Kaplan

  Mother, Special, Limits

  Louise J. Kaplan (1995). “Adolescence: The Farewell to Childhood”, Touchstone Books

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• They who say that women do not desire the right of suffrage, that they prefer masculine domination to self-government, falsify every page of history, every fact in human experience. It has taken the whole power of the civil and canon law to hold woman in the subordinate position which it is said she willingly accepts.

  Elizabeth Cady Stanton

  Taken, Self, Law

  Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan Brownell Anthony, Ida Husted Harper, Matilda Joslyn Gage (1902). “History of Woman Suffrage ...: 1883-1900”

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• I have a lot of energy, a lot of interest, a lot of desire.

  Wendy Whelan

  Energy, Interest

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• The king, just and prudent, wants only those things which he can get.

  Pierre Corneille

  Kings, Power, Prudent

  "Nicomède". Play by Pierre Corneille, act I, scene ii, 1651.

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• Any government that has a sincere desire for reform and progress should understand the benefit of objective and constructive criticism.

  Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa

  Government, Criticism, Progress

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• Our people have proven their desire for continuing with reforms. We complete the march today with those who have an honest patriotic desire for more progress and reform.

  Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa

  Patriotic, People, Progress

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• Eroticism differs from animal sexuality in that human sexuality is limited by taboos and the domain of eroticism is that of the transgression of these taboos. Desire in eroticism is the desire that triumphs over the taboo. It presupposes man in conflict with himself.

  Georges Bataille

  Sex, Animal, Men

  Georges Bataille (1977). “Death and Sensuality: A Study of Eroticism and the Taboo”, Arno Press

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• The living all assemble! What's the cue?--
  Do what the clumsy partner wants to do!

  Theodore Roethke

  Want, Partners, Clumsy

  Theodore Roethke (2011). “The Collected Poems of Theodore Roethke”, p.161, Anchor

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• What is desire?--
  The impulse to make someone else complete?
  That woman would set sodden straw on fire.

  Theodore Roethke

  Fire, Impulse, Straws

  Theodore Roethke (2011). “The Collected Poems of Theodore Roethke”, p.161, Anchor

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• [Great artists] do not copy what they see, but what they desire.

  Theophile Gautier

  Art, Imagination, Copies

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