Quotes about Desires

We live in a society whose whole policy is to excite every nerve in the human body and keep it at the highest pitch of artificial tension, to strain every human desire to the limit and to create as many new desires and synthetic passions as possible, in order to cater to them with the products of our factories and printing presses and movie studios and all the rest.

The things that we love tell us what we are.

If the impulse to worship God and to adore Him in truth by the goodness and order of our own lives is nothing more than a transitory and emotional thing, that is our own fault. It is so only because we make it so, and because we take what is substantially a deep and powerful and lasting moral impetus, supernatural in its origin and in its direction, and reduce it to the level of our own weak and unstable and futile fancies and desires.

To eat in a monastery refectory is an exercise in humility; daily, one is reminded to put communal necessity before individual preference. While consumer culture speaks only to preferences, treating even whims as needs to be granted (and the sooner the better), monastics sense that this pandering to delusions of self-importance weakens the true self, and diminishes our ability to distinguish desires from needs. It's a price they're not willing to pay.

It would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.

This is what women want: to be safe, to be valued, to live in peace, to have their own resources, to be connected, to have control over their bodies and lives, and above all, to be loved.

God's goal is not to get what you want; it is to get you what you need.

Little hearts, little souls give little lusts big power. Big hearts give little lusts little power.

Riches do not respond to wishes. They respond only to definite plans, backed by definite desires, through constant persistence.

All men have become what they are, because of their dominating thoughts and desires.

Riches do not respond to wishes. They respond only to definite plans, backed by definite desires, through constant persistence. HOW

As long as we hold onto our own desires and remain fixated on having our way, we will be unable to see God, even if He were to stand right before our eyes. God, in His patient, sometimes painful mercy, allows us to hold our desires as tightly as we wish until we tire of the pain and loosen our grip. Meanwhile, He holds before us a divine alternative, one that offers great abundance in exchange for the trinkets we clutch with desperate resolve.