Quotes about Desire

We should not be surprised by marriages between people who would never have been friends: Love…casts itself on people who, apart from sex, would be hateful, contemptible, and even abhorrent to us. But the will of the species is so much more powerful than that of individuals, that lovers overlook everything, misjudge everything, and bind themselves forever to an object of misery.

The greatest intellectual capacities are only found in connection with a vehement and passionate will.

A man may begin by following the craving of desire, until he comes to see how hollow and unreal a thing is life, how deceitful are its pleasures, what horrible aspects it possesses; and this it is that makes people hermits, penitents, Magdalenes.

everyone desires to achieve old age, that is to say a condition in which one can say: Today is bad, and day by day it will get worse - until at last the worst of all arrives.

What keeps all living things busy and in motion is the striving to exist. But when existence is secured, they do not know what to do: that is why the second thing that sets them in motion is a striving to get rid of the burden of existence, not to feel it any longer, 'to kill time', to escape boredom.

Nonetheless, everyone desires to achieve old age, that is to say a condition in which one can say: 'Today it is bad, and day by day it will get worse — until at last the worst of all arrives.

A man can surely do what he wills to do, but he cannot determine what he wills.

For if anything in the world is desirable, so desirable that even the dull and uneducated herd in its more reflective moments would value it more than silver and gold, it is that a ray of light should fall on the obscurity of our existence, and that we should obtain some information about this enigmatical life of ours, in which nothing is clear except its misery and vanity.

We tend to think of the erotic as an easy, tantalizing sexual arousal. I speak of the erotic as the deepest life force, a force which moves us toward living in a fundamental way.

I have always wanted to be both man and woman...to share valleys and mountains upon my body the way the earth does in hills and peaks. I would like to enter a woman the way any man can, and be entered--to leave and to be left--to be hot and hard and soft all at the same time in the cause of our loving.

She taught me that women who want without needing are expensive and sometimes wasteful, but women who need without wanting are dangerous — they suck you in and pretend not to notice.

Once it was easy to know who were my people... I do not believe our wants have made all our lies holy.