Desire Quotes - Page 30

• Avarice, or the desire of gain, is a universal passion which operates at all times, at all places, and upon all persons.

  David Hume

  Passion, Greed, Gains

  David Hume (1998). “Selected Essays”, p.58, Oxford Paperbacks

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• Reason, in a strict sense, as meaning the judgment of truth and falsehood, can never, of itself, be any motive to the will, and can have no influence but so far as it touches some passion or affection. Abstract relations of ideas are the object of curiosity, not of volition. And matters of fact, where they are neither good nor evil, where they neither excite desire nor aversion, are totally indifferent, and whether known or unknown, whether mistaken or rightly apprehended, cannot be regarded as any motive to action.

  David Hume

  Truth, Passion, Ideas

  David Hume, Tom L. Beauchamp (2007). “A Dissertation on the Passions: The Natural History of Religion : a Critical Edition”, p.24, Oxford University Press

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• To invent without scruple a new principle to every new phenomenon, instead of adapting it to the old; to overload our hypothesis with a variety of this kind, are certain proofs that none of these principles is the just one, and that we only desire, by a number of falsehoods, to cover our ignorance of the truth.

  David Hume

  Truth, Ignorance, Numbers

  David Hume (2003). “A Treatise of Human Nature”, p.201, Courier Corporation

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• You know, I often thought that the gangster and the artist are the same in the eyes of the masses. They're admired and hero-worshipped but there is always present underlying desire to see them destroyed at the peak of their glory.

  Stanley Kubrick

  Art, Hero, Eye

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• Ruthless and arrogant though power can appear, it is only ever held by mere mammals who excrete and yearn, and who suffer from insomnia and insecurity. These mammals are also necessarily vain in the ­extreme, and often wish to be liked almost as much as they desire to be feared.

  Christopher Hitchens

  Power, Insomnia, Insecurity

  Christopher Hitchens (2001). “Letters to a Young Contrarian”, Basic Books (AZ)

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• The dramatic art would appear to be rather a feminine art; it contains in itself all the artifices which belong to the province ofwoman: the desire to please, facility to express emotions and hide defects, and the faculty of assimilation which is the real essence of woman.

  Sarah Bernhardt

  Art, Real, Essence

  Sarah Bernhardt (1924). “The Art of the Theatre”

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• The fetish of the great university, of expensive colleges for young women, is too often simply a fetish. It is not based on a genuine desire for learning. Education today need not be sought at any great distance. It is largely compounded of two things, of a certain snobbishness on the part of parents, and of escape from home on the part of youth. And to those who must earn quickly it is often sheer waste of time. Very few colleges prepare their students for any special work.

  Mary Roberts Rinehart

  Distance, Home, College

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• Our country was born out of a desire to be free. And every day since, it's been protected by our men and women in uniform - people who believed so deeply in America, they were willing to give their lives for it.

  Barack Obama

  Leadership, Country, Father

  FaceBook post by Barack Obama from May 24, 2014

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• Desires going before conversion are not such as can calm a storming conscience.

  Samuel Rutherford

  Calm, Conversion, Conscience

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• In adversity assume the countenance of prosperity, and in prosperity moderate the temper and desires.

  Livy

  Adversity, Assuming, Prosperity

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• Till now, society has protected the adult and blamed the victim. It has been abetted in its blindness by theories, still in keeping with the pedagogical principles of our great- grandparents, according to which children are viewed as crafty creatures, dominated by wicked drives, who invent stories and attack their innocent parents or desire them sexually. In reality, children tend to blame themselves for their parents' cruelty and to absolve the parents, whom they invariably love, of all responsibility.

  Alice Miller

  Children, Responsibility, Reality

  Alice Miller (2012). “The Untouched Key: Tracing Childhood Trauma in Creativity and Destructiveness”, p.169, Anchor

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• Be always faithful to me, as I always desire to keep you in peace; and if there have been wiser kings, none has ever loved you more than I have.

  Elizabeth I

  Loyalty, Peace, Kings

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• As one who knows many things, the humanist loves the world precisely because of its manifold nature and the opposing forces in itdo not frighten him. Nothing is further from him than the desire to resolve such conflictsand this is precisely the mark of the humanist spirit: not to evaluate contrasts as hostility but to seek human unity, that superior unity, for all that appears irreconcilable.

  Stefan Zweig

  Tolerance, Unity, World

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• You can get what you desire and in just the measure of that desire.

  Thomas Dreier

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• I have indeed - praise be to God - attained my desire in this world, which was to travel through the earth, and i have attained in this respect what no other person has attained to my knowledge.

  Ibn Battuta

  World, Earth, Praise

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• The history of work has been, in part, the history of the worker's body. Production depended on what the body could accomplish with strength and skill. Techniques that improve output have been driven by a general desire to decrease the pain of labor as well as by employers' intentions to escape dependency upon that knowledge which only the sentient laboring body could provide.

  Shoshana Zuboff

  Pain, Work, Skills

  Shoshana Zuboff (1988). “In the Age of the Smart Machine: The Future of Work and Power”, New York : Basic Books

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• The body
  
  whips the soul. In its great desire
  it demands the elixir
  
  In the roar of spring,
  transmutations.

  Charles Olson

  Spring, Soul, Body

  Charles Olson (1966). “Selected Writings of Charles Olson”, p.216, New Directions Publishing

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• We all enter the world little plastic beings, with so much natural force, perhaps, but for the rest--blank; and the world tells uswhat we are to be, and shapes us by the ends it sets before us. To you it says--Work; and to us it says--Seem! To you it says--As you approximate to man's highest ideal of God, as your arm is strong and your knowledge great, and the power to labour is with you, so you shall gain all that human heart desires. To us it says--Strength shall not help you, nor knowledge, nor labour. You shall gain what men gain, but by other means. And so the world makes men and women.

  Olive Schreiner

  Strong, Mean, Heart

  Olive Schreiner (1896). “The Story of an African Farm: A Novel”

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• Sexuality is a part of our behavior. It's part of our world freedom. Sexuality is something that we ourselves create. It is our own creation, and much more than the discovery of a secret side of our desire. We have to understand that with our desires go new forms of relationships, new forms of love, new forms of creation. Sex is not a fatality; it's a possibility for creative life. It's not enough to affirm that we are gay but we must also create a gay life.

  Michel Foucault

  Sex, Gay, Our World

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• The parent must not give in to his desire to try to create the child he would like to have, but rather help the child to develop--in his own good time--to the fullest, into what he wishes to be and can be, in line with his natural endowment and as the consequence of his unique life in history.

  Bruno Bettelheim

  Children, Unique, Giving

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• While criticism or fear of punishment may restrain us from doing wrong, it does not make us wish to do right. Disregarding this simple fact is the great error into which parents and educators fall when they rely on these negative means of correction. The only effective discipline is self-discipline, motivated by the inner desire to act meritoriously in order to do well in one's own eyes, according to one's own values, so that one may feel good about oneself may "have a good conscience.

  Bruno Bettelheim

  Fall, Mean, Eye

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• Philip Galanes makes his debut with a novel that is both heartbreaking and deftly comic, the story of a young man struggling with his most primitive desires--wanting and needing. It is a novel about the complex relationships between parents and children, a story of loss and of our unrelenting need for acknowledgment, to be seen as who we are. And in the end it is simply a love story for our time.

  A.M. Homes

  Children, Struggle, Loss

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• It is not a matter of desire, but of coercion and duty.

  Franz Grillparzer

  Coercion, Matter, Duty

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• Shopping malls are liquid TVs for the end of the twentieth century. A whole micro-circuitry of desire, ideology and expenditure for processed bodies drifting through the cyber-space of ultracapitalism.

  Arthur Kroker

  Shopping, Space, Body

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• While extremely sensitive as to the slightest approach to slander, you must also guard against an extreme into which some people fall, who, in their desire to speak evil of no one, actually uphold and speak well of vice.

  Saint Francis de Sales

  Fall, People, Evil

  Saint Francis de Sales, Catholic Way Publishing (2015). “The Saint Francis de Sales Collection [16 Books]”, p.279, Catholic Way Publishing

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