Desire Quotes - Page 34

• You need not be proud of me.... I'm only being active till you can be again--it isn't such a great desire on my part to serve theworld and I'll fall back into habits of sloth quite easily!

  Eleanor Roosevelt

  Marriage, Fall, Sloth

  Joseph P. Lash, Eleanor Roosevelt (1982). “Love, Eleanor: Eleanor Roosevelt and Her Friends”, Doubleday Books

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• Benevolent desires, after passing a certain point, can not undertake their own fulfillment without incurring the risk of evils beyond those sought to be remedied.

  Herman Melville

  Evil, Risk, Politics

  Herman Melville (2015). “Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War: Works of Melville”, p.201, 谷月社

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• The greatest poverty is not to live
  In a physical world, to feel that one's desire
  Is too difficult to tell from despair.

  Wallace Stevens

  Despair, World, Poverty

  Wallace Stevens (1959). “Poems”

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• Make the expectations lively enough, and action will follow.

  Mason Cooley

  Expectations, Action, Enough

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• Nihilism is not only despair and negation, but above all the desire to despair and to negate.

  Albert Camus

  Despair, Nihilism, Negation

  Albert Camus (2012). “The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt”, p.57, Vintage

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• To many men much-wandering hope comes as a boon, but to many others it is the deception of vain desires.

  Sophocles

  Hope, Men, Deception

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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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