Desires Quotes
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When wisdom reaches the acme of perfection, it will suppress the vicious instincts and injurious desires.
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More Desires Quotes
When wisdom reaches the acme of perfection, it will suppress the vicious instincts and injurious desires.
— Majlisi, Bih?rul Anw?r, vol. 78, p. 6
Sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires. 134
william blake— 1790 The Marriage of Heaven and Hell,'Proverbs of Hell'.
The history of society is the history of the inventive labors that man alter man, alter his desires, habits, outlook, relationships both to other men and to physical nature, with which man is in perpetual physical and technological metabolism.
isaiah berlin— Karl Marx (1978)
Allah, the Exalted, gave the angels intellect without desires, He gave the animals desires without intellect, and He gave both to the sons of Adam. So a man whose intellect prevails over his desires is better than the angels, whilst a man whose desire prevails over his intellect is worse than the animals.
ali ibn abi talib— Majlisi, Bih?rul Anw?r, vol. 60, p. 299, no.5
The American conception of advertising is to arouse desires and stimulate wants, to make people dissatisfied with the old and out-of-date and by constant iteration to send them out to work harder to get the latest model—whether that model be an icebox or a rug or a new home.
bruce fairchild barton— As quoted in Fables of Abundance: a cultural history of advertising in America (1994) by Jackson Lears
This world is moving around like a wheel. That indeed is the last birth in which one gets completely rid of all desires.
sarada devi— Swami Tapasyananda, Swami Nikhilananda. Sri Sarada Devi, the Holy Mother; Life and Conversations. p. 297.
who desires all people to be saved and come to full knowledge of the truth.
paul of tarsus— 1 Timothy 2:4 (as quoted in World English Bible)
Real fulfillment, for the man who allows absolutely free rein to his desires, and who much dominate everything, lies in hatred.
Albert Camus— Part 2: Metaphysical Rebellion
It is as his own mind comes into contact with others that truth will begin to acquire value in the child's eyes and will consequently become a moral demand that can be made upon him. As long as the child remains egocentric, truth as such will fail to interest him and he will see no harm in transposing facts in accordance with his desires.
jean piaget— Ch. 2 : Adult Constraint and Moral Realism
Sweet babe, in thy face soft desires I can trace. Secret joys and secret smiles, little pretty infant wiles.
william blake— William Blake, A Cradle Song.
Religion is an illusion and it derives its strength from the fact that it falls in with our instinctual desires.
Sigmund Freud— Sigmund Freud, New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis
Allah, the Exalted, gave the angels intellect without desires, He gave the animals desires without intellect, and He gave both to the sons of Adam. So a man whose intellect prevails over his desires is better than the angels, whilst a man whose desire prevails over his intellect is worse than the animals.
— Majlisi, Bih?rul Anw?r, vol. 60, p. 299, no.5
When he says that in that day all his thoughts perish, or flow away, perhaps under this expression he censures the madness of princes in setting no bounds to their hopes and desires, and scaling the very heavens in their ambition, like the insane Alexander of Macedon, who, upon hearing that there were other worlds, wept that he had not yet conquered one, although soon after the funeral urn sufficed him.
— John Calvin, in his interpretation of Psalm 146 in On The Book Of Psalms (1557) as translated by Rev. James Anderson (1849)
Our whole life can go on in observation of the laws of nature, if we gain dominion over our desires from the beginning and if we do not kill, by various means of a perverse art, the human offspring, born according to the designs of divine providence; for these women who, if order to hide their immorality, use abortive drugs which expel the child completely dead, abort at the same time their own human feelings.
— Clement of Alexandria, Paedagogus 2, circa 210.
In contrast to Breton we believe that behind the false ethical and aesthetic, indeed metaphysical understandings which are out of contact with the vital interest of "man" we find the real, the materialistic ethics and aesthetics. One includes our needs, the other is an expression of our sensual desires. It is exactly in order to liberate the true ethics and the true aesthetics that we make use of "automatism."
— Asger Jorn, in Speech to the Penguins (1949)
As long as the child remains egocentric, truth as such will fail to interest him and he will see no harm in transposing facts in accordance with his desires .
— Jean Piaget, in The Moral Judgment of the Child (1932), Ch. 2 : Adult Constraint and Moral Realism
The desires of the heart are as crooked as corkscrews, Not to be born is the best for man; The second-best is a formal order, The dance's pattern; dance while you can.
wystan hugh auden— 1937 'Letter to William Coldstream, Esq', in Letter from Iceland (with Louis MacNeice).
Erasmus dramatizes a well-established political position: that of the fool who claims license to criticize all and sundry without reprisal, since his madness defines him as not fully a person and therefore not a political being with political desires and ambitions. The Praise of Folly, therefore sketches the possibility of a position for the critic of the scene of political rivalry, a position not simply impartial between the rivals but also, by self-definition, off the stage of rivalry altogether.
j. m. coetzee— “Erasmus’s Praise of Folly: Rivalry and Madness,” Neophilologus 76 (1992), p. 1
Her majesty, being now in possession of her imperial crown and estate pertaining to it, cannot forsake that faith that the whole world knows her to have followed and practiced since her birth; she desires, rather, by God's grace, to preserve it till her death; and she desires greatly that her subjects may come to embrace the same faith quietly and with charity, whereby she shall receive great happiness.
mary i of england— Proclamation concerning Religion (1553-08-18)
It is a course which perhaps would not have been necessary had it been possible to form a state composed of wise men, but as every multitude is fickle, full of lawless desires, unreasoned passion, and violent anger, the multitude must be held in by invisible terrors and suchlike pageantry. For this reason I think, not that the ancients acted rashly and at haphazard in introducing among the people notions concerning the gods and beliefs in the terrors of hell, but that the moderns are most rash and foolish in banishing such beliefs.
polybius— Histories, VI, 56:10-12
— Often quoted in the version found in The Fine Art of Baloney Detection by Carl Sagan from The Demon-Haunted World:Since the masses of the people are inconstant, full of unruly desires, passionate, and reckless of consequences, they must be filled with fears to keep them in order. The ancients did well, therefore, to invent gods, and the belief in punishment after death.
The priest who has lost the resilience of youth cannot be helped; his polymorphously playful and imaginative energies have been emasculated by a long conditioning to the ways of the old order; he would be liberated into a sea of undifferentiated boredom and anxiety. Only the man whose desires and passions are intact has a future.
john carroll— p. 95 (Break-Out from the Crystal Palace (1974))
O love, whose lordly hand Has bridled my desires, And raised my hunger and my thirst To dignity and pride, Let not the strong in me and the constant Eat the bread or drink the wine That tempt my weaker self. Let me rather starve, And let my heart parch with thirst, And let me die and perish, Ere I stretch my hand To a cup you did not fill, Or a bowl you did not bless.
khalil gibran— "Love" (The Forerunner (1920))
Andrej’s mind, like any sane human’s … was a constantly convulsing dialectical unity of consciousness and subconsciousness, the battening down and channelling of dreams and desires, the recurring re-creation of the subliminal by the contradictory, the rational-capricious ego. And vice versa. The interaction of levels of consciousness into an unstable and permanently self-renewing whole.
china miéville— p. 553 (Perdido Street Station (2000))
He who desires a lifetime of happiness with a beautiful woman desires to enjoy the taste of wine by keeping his mouth always full of it.
George Bernard Shaw— #105. (Maxims for Revolutionists (1903))
A man who does not speak when he ought, shall not be heard when he desires to speak.
— L'Amoureux v. Vischer, 2 Cornstock (New York) R. 281.
Sitting in a solitary place, freeing the mind from desires and controlling the senses, meditate with unswerving attention on the Atman which is One without-a-second.
— Adi Shankara, in Atma-Bodha, as translated by Swami Madhavananda
Moral conduct includes every thing in which men are active and for which they are accountable. They are active in their desires, their affections, their designs, their intentions, and in every thing they say and do of choice; and for all these things they are accountable to God.
— Nathaniel Emmons, reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 1.
A person is said to have achieved yoga, the union with Self, when the perfectly disciplined mind gets freedom from all desires, and becomes absorbed in the Self alone.
Bhagavad Gita— 6.16-18, in “Yoga and You”
Now the New Year reviving old desires, The thoughtful Soul to Solitude retires.
omar khayyám— Omar Khayyam, Rubaiyat, FitzGerald's translation, Stanza 4.
