c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
I have failed many times, and that's why I am a success.
— Michael Jordan
To make the fastest progress,Be an absolutely cheerfulHero-warriorAnd take both victory and failureAs parallel experience riversLeading to the sea Of progress-delight.
— Sri Chinmoy, The Wings of Joy: Finding Your Path to Inner Peace
In between your failure-treeAnd your triumph-tree,The tree that is growingIs known as your patience-tree.
— Sri Chinmoy, The Wings of Joy: Finding Your Path to Inner Peace
Obscurity is a good thing. You can fail in obscurity. It removes the fear of failure.
— Jason Fried
If something you did causes failure, shouldn't the exact opposite of what you did bring success?
— Jessica Brody
The man who has done his level best…is a success, even though the world write him down a failure.
— B.C. Forbes
Failure is the sourness that makes success All the more sweeter.
— Joshua Wisenbaker
In times of war or peace the US will gladly pay a man to fail should his heart be in it, a small shimmering proof of the American dream.
— Jonathan Culver, Huey Lambert's Walking Nuclear Circus
Deep down, Story Easton knew what would happen if she attempted to off herself—she would fail It was a matter of probability. This was not a new thing, failure. She was, had always been, a failure of fairy-tale proportion. Quitting wasn’t Story’s problem. She had tried, really tried, lots of things during different stages of her life—Girl Scours, the viola, gardening, Tommy Andres from senior year American Lit—but zero cookie sales, four broken strings, two withered azalea bushes, and one uniquely humiliating breakup later, Story still had not tasted success, and with a shriveled-up writing career as her latest disappointment, she realized no magic slippers or fairy dust was going to rescue her from her Anti-Midas Touch. No Happily Ever After was coming.  So she had learned to find a certain comfort in failure. In addition to her own screw-ups, others’ mistakes became cozy blankets to cuddle, and she snuggled up to famous failures like most people embrace triumph.  The Battle of Little Bighorn—a thing of beauty.  The Bay of Pigs—delicious debacle.  The Y2K Bug—gorgeously disappointing fuck-up.  Geraldo’s anti-climactic Al Capone exhumation—oops!  Jaws III—heaven on film.  Tattooed eyeliner—eyelids everywhere, revolting. Really revolting.  Fat-free potato chips—good Lord, makes anyone feel successful.
— Elizabeth Leiknes, The Understory
Our Heavenly Father did not put us on earth to fail but to succeed gloriously.
— Richard G. Scott
A series of failures may culminate in the best possible result.
— Gisela Richter
Bradshaw especially didn't like the use of the word "experiment" in regard to social conditions. Experiments included of necessity, expendable components. Failure was a precursor to success. When the components were human, who had the audacity to use, lose them, toss them away?
— Bernadette Pajer, Fatal Induction: A Professor Bradshaw Mystery
To burn with desire and keep quiet about it is the greatest punishment we can bring on ourselves.
— Federico García Lorca, Blood Wedding and Yerma
Things are sweeter when they're lost. I know--because once I wanted something and got it. It was the only thing I ever wanted badly, Dot, and when I got it it turned to dust in my hand.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned
The world is little, people are little, human life is little. There is only one big thing — desire.
— Willa Cather, The Song of the Lark
Those who restrain desire do so because theirs is weak enough to be restrained.
— William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
I want her to melt into me, like butter on toast. I want to absorb her and walk around for the rest of my days with her encased in my skin.I want.
— Sara Gruen, Water for Elephants
Profound desire, true desire is the desire to be close to someone.
— Paulo Coelho, Eleven Minutes
If I ever go looking for my heart's desire again, I won't look any further than my own back yard. Because if it isn't there, I never really lost it to begin with.
— L. Frank Baum, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
It's always nice being wanted. Even if it's by the wrong person.
— Tabitha Suzuma, Forbidden
You need to know it's your actions that will make you a good person, not desire.
— Matthew Quick, The Silver Linings Playbook
But he did not understand the price. Mortals never do. They only see the prize, their heart's desire, their dream... But the price of getting what you want, is getting what you once wanted.
— Neil Gaiman, Dream Country
If you don't feel strong desires for the manifestation of the glory of God, it is not because you have drunk deeply and are satisfied. It is because you have nibbled so long at the table of the world. Your soul is stuffed with small things, and there is no room for the great.
— John Piper, A Hunger For God
You can't always get what you want, but if you try sometimes, you might find, you get what you need.
— Mick Jagger
There is no fulfillment that is not made sweeter for the prolonging of desire
— Jacqueline Carey, Kushiel's Dart
Never, never underestimate the power of desire. If you want to live badly enough, you can live. The great question, at least for me, was: How do I decide I want to live?
— Marya Hornbacher, Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia
I’ve wanted you from the moment we met, and if you think sitting next to me in your bra doesn’t overwhelm me with desire, you’re very wrong. I just don’t force myself where I’m not invited. (Bones)
— Jeaniene Frost, Halfway to the Grave
If I stayed here, something inside me would be lost forever—something I couldn't afford to lose. It was like a vague dream, a burning, unfulfilled desire. The kind of dream people have only when they're seventeen.
— Haruki Murakami, South of the Border, West of the Sun
She knew what it felt like to tremble like that before touching someone -- desire so acute that it became despair.
— Holly Black, Ironside
It was so much easier when I didn't want anything. Not getting what you want can make you cruel.
— David Levithan, Every Day
Her life with others no longer interests him. He wants only her stalking beauty, her theatre of expressions. He wants the minute secret reflection between them, the depth of field minimal, their foreignness intimate like two pages of a closed book.
— Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient
I think our last kiss was meant to be quick and chaste, but after the first touch of his lips fire leaped up and roared through my belly. My fingers yanked him close, digging into his back, and his arms crushed me to him as if wanting to meld us together. I knotted my fingers in his hair and bit down on his bottom lip, making him groan. His lips parted, and my tongue swept in to dance with his. There was nothing sweet or gentle in our last kiss; it was filled with sorrow and desperation, of the bitter knowledge that we could've had something perfect, but it just wasn't meant to be.
— Julie Kagawa, The Iron Daughter
Why is discipline important? Discipline teaches us to operate by principle rather than desire. Saying no to our impulses (even the ones that are not inherently sinful) puts us in control of our appetites rather than vice versa. It deposes our lust and permits truth, virtue, and integrity to rule our minds instead.
— John F. MacArthur Jr.
The Fremen were supreme in that quality the ancients called "spannungsbogen" -- which is the self-imposed delay between desire for a thing and the act of reaching out to grasp that thing.
— Frank Herbert, Dune
One loves ultimately one's desires, not the thing desired.
— Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil
It was beautiful Eric, who desired me, who was hungry for me, in a world that often let me know it could do very well without me.
— Charlaine Harris, Dead to the World
Don't you see what's happened? You wanted to be in love again. To feel that feeling where a man you hardly know gazes into your eyes and seems to be the only human being who ever understood the real you.
— Nancy Horan, Loving Frank
....love and desire enjoy a symbiotic relationship, meaning that one cannot exist without the other. Desire is an enemy to contentment; desire is illness, a feverish brain. Who can be considered healthy who wants? The very word want suggests a lack, an impoverishment, and that is what desire is: an impoverishment of the brain, a flaw, a mistake.
— Lauren Oliver, Delirium
The power of unfulfilled desires is the root of all man's slavery
— Paramahansa Yogananda, Autobiography of a Yogi
Our frustration is greater when we have much and want more than when we have nothing and want some. We are less dissatisfied when we lack many things than when we seem to lack but one thing.
— Eric Hoffer
You can want and want and want, but if he doesn't want you back ... you might as well wish the sky were red.
— Sophie Kinsella, Twenties Girl
He was raw and sharp and rich and throbbing with life. He was sweet blood after a long hunt. How could she have mistaken Aiden's kisses for this? They had been delicious and smooth like the brief comfort of chocolate, but they had never been enough.
— Annette Curtis Klause, Blood and Chocolate
You’d better not be messing with me. I like you, but if you’re feeding me a load of shit just to get some action, I’m going to plug a big silver stake right through your heart.(Cat)
— Jeaniene Frost, Halfway to the Grave
Rushing into action, you fail.Trying to grasp things, you lose them.Forcing a project to completion,you ruin what was almost ripe.Therefore the Master takes actionby letting things take their course.He remains as calm at the end as at the beginning.He has nothing,thus has nothing to lose.What he desires is non-desire;what he learns is to unlearn.He simply reminds peopleof who they have always been.He cares about nothing but the Tao.Thus he can care for all things.
— Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching
Peeta actually is charming and then utterly winning as the boy in love. And there I am, blushing and confused, made beautiful by Cinna’s hands, desirable by Peeta’s confession, tragic by circumstance, and by all accounts, unforgettable.
— Suzanne Collins, The Hunger Games
But every spiteful word she ever wrote him was effortless love clenched in her fists. Her heart screaming for stability in this fiery game of desire.
— Coco J. Ginger
And in his eyes he had the look of the cat who inspires a desire to caress but loves no one, who never feels he must respond to the impulses he arouses.
— Anaïs Nin, Delta of Venus
How miserably hypocritical, you might say, but no sooner am I offered a chance to flee Hell than I yearn to stay. Few families hold their relations as closely as do prisons. Few marriages sustain the high level of passion that exists between criminals and those who seek to bring them to justice. It’s no wonder the Zodiac Killer flirted so relentlessly with the police. Or that Jack the Ripper courted and baited detectives with his - or her - coy letters. We all wish to be pursued. We all long to be desired.
— Chuck Palahniuk, Damned
One morning, about four o'clock, I was driving my car just about as fast as I could. I thought, 'Why am I out on the highway this time of night?' I was miserable, and it all came to me: 'I'm falling in love with somebody I have no right to fall in love with. I can't fall in love with this man, but it's just like a ring of fire.
— June Carter Cash
The desires of the heart are as crooked as corkscrewsNot to be born is the best for manThe second best is a formal orderThe dance's pattern, dance while you can.Dance, dance, for the figure is easyThe tune is catching and will not stopDance till the stars come down from the raftersDance, dance, dance till you drop.
— W.H. Auden
If I have you for a day, I'll want you for a week. If I have you for a week, I'll want you for another week.
— Michael Stein, In the Age of Love
Then again, you cannot stop the flood of desire as it moves through the world, inappropriate though it may sometimes be. It is the prerogative of all humans to make ludicrous choices, to fall in love with the most unlikely of partners, and to set themselves up for the most predicatable of calamities.
— Elizabeth Gilbert, Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage
Chris: I don't know why it is, but every time I reach out for something I want, I have to pull back because other people will suffer.
— Arthur Miller, All My Sons
This great handsomeness I took into myself later when he desired me, but I took it as one breathes air, or swallows a snowflake, or yields to the sun.
— Anaïs Nin, Henry & June
Stupid kissing. Stupid roaming hands. Stupid boys.
— Jessica Park, Flat-Out Love
Desire is both imitative (we like what others like) and competitive (we want to take away from others what they have). As children, we wanted to monopolize the attention of a parent, to draw it away from other siblings. This sense of rivalry... makes people compete for the attention.
— Robert Greene, The Art of Seduction
I'm sentimental--I know. I'm desperate and silly--I know that too. Oh, help me!
— Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl
Everything you want is just outside your comfort zone.
— Robert Allen, The One Minute Millionaire: The Enlightened Way to Wealth
She was perfect, pure maddening sex, and she knew it, and she played on it, dripped it, and allowed you to suffer for it.
— Charles Bukowski, Factotum
While a common reaction to seeing a thing of beauty is to want to buy it, our real desire may be not so much to own what we find beautiful as to lay permanent claim to the inner qualities it embodies.Owning such an object may help us realise our ambition of absorbing the virtues to which it alludes, but we ought not to presume that those virtues will automatically or effortlessly begin to rub off on us through tenure. Endeavouring to purchase something we think beautiful may in fact be the most unimaginative way of dealing with the longing it excites in us, just as trying to sleep with someone may be the bluntest response to a feeling of love.What we seek, at the deepest level, is inwardly to resemble, rather than physically possess, the objects and places that touch us through their beauty.
— Alain de Botton, The Architecture of Happiness
Now, I'm not going to deny that I was aware of your beauty. But the point is, this has nothing to do with your beauty. As I got to know you, I began to realise that beauty was the least of your qualities. I became fascinated by your goodness. I was drawn in by it. I didn't understand what was happening to me. And it was only when I began to feel actual, physical pain every time you left the room that it finally dawned on me: I was in love, for the first time in my life. I knew it was hopeless, but that didn't matter to me. And it's not that I want to have you. All I want is to deserve you. Tell me what to do. Show me how to behave. I'll do anything you say.
— Pierre-Ambroise Choderlos de Laclos, Les Liaisons dangereuses
Youngsters want to change world. Elders want to enjoy their works.The entrepreneur sells anything needed by both to win their desires.
— Toba Beta, Master of Stupidity
DesireI desire youmore than foodand drinkMy bodymy sensesmy mindhunger for your tasteI can sense your presencein my heartalthough you belongto all the worldI waitwith silent passionfor one gestureone glancefrom you
— Jalaluddin Rumi, The Love Poems of Rumi
You asked about love. I don't know about love, Daphne. I just know I don't want anything but you. I don't want to anywhere but with you.
— Brenna Yovanoff, The Space Between
Nothing makes you feel more naked than someone identifying a desire you never knew you possessed.
— Jeff Zentner, The Serpent King
free from desire, you realize the mysterycaught in the desire, you see only the manifestations.
— Lao Tzu
Now do you understand why I'm interested in you? You're a locked door, sweetheart. You give no one a key and you never answer the door when anyone knocks...Ah, but sometimes, sometimes I get a peek through the keyhole and what I find there...It's like glimpsing you as you're stripping. Underneath all of that darkness is something hungry, something desperate, something, oh, so deliciously vulnerable.
— Tricia Owens, Fearless Leader
We hunger in earnest for that which we cannot consume.
— Nenia Campbell, Black Beast
What I want is to live of that initial and primordial something that was what made some things reach the point of aspiring to be human.
— Clarice Lispector, The Passion According to G.H.
I must keep my head and not give in to desire, for desire is what causes women to drown.
— Alice Hoffman, The Dovekeepers
I, answering in the end, began: 'Alas,how many yearning thoughts, what great desire,have lead them through such sorrow to their fate?
— Dante Alighieri
Angst is not the human condition, it’s the purgatory between what we have and what we want but can’t get.
— Miguel Syjuco, Ilustrado
What we insistently desire, over time, is what we become.
— Neal A. Maxwell
If your desires are not great, a little will seem much to you; for small appetite makes poverty equivalent to wealth.
— Democritus
It had been a whim, and there was nothing Magnus attached more importance to than a whim.
— Cassandra Clare, The Runaway Queen
One thing I've learned about myself is that I can accomplish anything I want to. The caveat is that I have to want to do it. I've never been able to forge desire.
— Crystal Woods, Write like no one is reading 3
I cannot rest, I must draw, however poor the result, and when I have a bad time come over me it is a stronger desire than ever.
— Beatrix Potter
To wish a healthy man to die is the wish from a mind of sickness. To wish an ailing man to die is the wish of the ambitious.
— Roman Payne
Gabriel pulled her over his body to lie on the bed beside him. His kisses pressed her down into the oblivion of the mattress as her hands explored his chest, his shoulders, his face."I want to lay my kill at your feet," he said, more growl than words, and held her tight by her hair as he marked her neck with his teeth.She writhed against him. She wanted to bite him, she wanted to rip the flesh from his back, but most terrible of all, she didn't want him to stop. Her back arched, her body shattered, she howled.
— Annette Curtis Klause, Blood and Chocolate
There's a rule, I think. You get what you want in life, but not your second choice too.
— Alison Lurie
The world is always greater than your desires
—  plenty is never enough.
The truly terrible thing about this life, was not knowing what you want, but only able to recognize what you do not want. You have to spend so much time and energy trying to find it out, time that other people spent in pursuing of their desires.
— Whitney Otto, How to Make an American Quilt
Okay, let’s put it this way. I would like to sleep with you. But it’s alright if I don’t sleep with you. What I’m saying is I’d like to be as fair as possible. I don’t want to force anything on anybody, any more than I’d want anything forced on me. It’s enough that I feel your presence or see your commas swirling around me.
— Haruki Murakami, The Elephant Vanishes
Let me know when you're ready to talk." She stopped and glanced at them both over her shoulder. "Maybe then I'd be ready to discuss your sexual twists and my own little abnormal desires. You never know what we all might learn that we haven't already."With that, she turned and moved back into the house, closing the door behind her and disappearing out of sight. And Cam found his back slammed against the side of Ian's Hummer, his brother in his face.Lust and irritation flared in his brother's eyes. "You better start talking," he grated. "Because you know what she just did?""She just dared us, Cam. And I don't know about you, but the thought of 'abnormal desires' dancing through her mind is going to drive me fucking crazy. Now, fix it.
— Lora Leigh, Wicked Pleasure
Dying for dark - the darker the worse. Strange.
— Samuel Beckett
Thirst is a language even the grass understands.
— Marty Rubin
No permanence is ours; we are a waveThat flows to fit whatever form it finds:Through night or day, cathedral or the caveWe pass forever, craving form that binds.
— Hermann Hesse, The Glass Bead Game
The poor lack much, the greedy everything.
— Publilius Syrus
I understand it was Derian who spoiled everything. He purposefully tainted your view of me and forced you to go along with him. I know none of what happened was your idea or your desire, Eena.”She didn’t get up, but spoke from her curled position. Her voice was weak, still heavy with despair. “Derian didn’t force me to do anything.”“But if he hadn’t influenced you, we would be enjoying a pleasant dinner again, telling stories and laughing. I’m sure that would be the case. You would be happy……and so would I.”Eena chuckled without amusement.“You have to admit we shared some very enjoyable evenings, didn’t we? There’s really no reason we can’t put this whole mess behind us and start from where we left off.” He sounded genuinely serious.“You forget,” she reminded him, “I heard your conversation with the Ghengats. This isn’t about Derian, it’s about you.”“Alright,” he admitted with an acquiescent sigh, “so I’m not everything you’d hoped for. But really, what man can ever live up to any woman’s terribly high expectations?”This got her attention. She almost stood up to face him, but decided it wasn’t worth the effort. Leaning forward, she retorted, “Expecting a man to respect you, to be honest with you, and, oh yes, to not be a shameless murderer—I don’t think those are overly high expectations!”He shrugged, casually excusing his faults. “Nobody’s perfect.”“What do you want?” she finally asked, exasperated.He squatted to her level and stated his desire. “I want you.”Eena thought the expression on his face—the look in his weary blue eyes—appeared strangely sincere. But there was one thing she had learned from all this: never trust a master of deceit.
— Richelle E. Goodrich, Eena, The Dawn and Rescue
The problem for us is not are our desires satisfied or not. The problem is how do we know what we desire.
— Slavoj Žižek
Sometimes you don't even know what you want until you find out you can't have it.
— Meghan O'Rourke, The Long Goodbye
To be desired is perhaps the closest anybody in this life can reach to feeling immortal.
— John Berger
It is of the nature of desire not to be satisfied, and most men live only for the gratification of it.
— Aristotle, Politics
Desire grows by what it feeds on.
— L.M. Montgomery, Chronicles of Avonlea
People often miss things that don't exist--miss things that were but are not anymore.
— Sarah McCoy, The Baker's Daughter
Whatever you eye falls on - for it will fall on what you love - will lead you to the questions of your life, the questions that are incumbent upon you to answer, because that is how the mind works in concert with the eye. The things of this world draw us where we need to go.
— Mary Rose O'Reilley, The Barn at the End of the World: The Apprenticeship of a Quaker, Buddhist Shepherd
I looked, and had an acute pleasure in looking,--a precious yet poignant pleasure; pure gold, with a steely point of agony: a pleasure like what the thirst-perishing man might feel who knows the well to which he has crept is poisoned, yet stoops and drinks divine draughts nevertheless.
— Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre
There are few things we should keenly desire if we really knew what we wanted.
— François de La Rochefoucauld
The exotic and the erotic ideals go hand in hand, and this fact also contributes another proof of a more or less obvious truth - that is, that a love of the exotic is usually an imaginative projection of a sexual desire.
— Mario Praz, The Romantic Agony
Just wish it. But remember, it will only work if it's what you most desire. Do it now. We're running out of time." WHAT I MOST DESIRE. WHAT I MOST DESIRE. I looked into his electric eyes and made my wish. Then I popped the bean into my mouth and swallowed it whole. For a moment, the world stood still. We sat in a silent bubble, just us two, insulated from the snow and the wind. His eyes widened. "But, Katrina, that wish was supposed to be for you." "It's what I most desire." And it was.
— Suzanne Selfors, Coffeehouse Angel
Her cheeks were flushed. She caught hold of the Savage's arm and pressed it, limp, against her side. He looked down at her for a moment, pale, pained, desiring, and ashamed of his desire. He was not worthy, not... Their eyes for a moment met. What treasures hers promised! A queen's ransom of temperament. Hastily he looked away, disengaged his imprisoned arm. He was obscurely terrified lest she should cease to be something he could feel himself unworthy of.
— Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
But sex as a physical act is merely athletics, a momentary relief. What it needs to be powerful is desire, and the strongest element of desire is longing. It's in the work. Desider-, sidus: from the stars. The longing that reaches beyond space and time.
— Rosemary Sullivan, Labyrinth of Desire: Women, Passion, and Romantic Obsession
Why doesn't hatred kill desire? I would have given anything to sleep. I would have behaved like a schoolboy if I had believed in the possibility of a substitute. But there was a time when I had tried to find a substitute, and it hadn't worked.
— Graham Greene, The End of the Affair
However much you possess there's someone else who has more, and you'll be fancying yourself to be short of things you need to exact extent to which you lag behind him.
— Seneca, Letters from a Stoic
Listen. Look. Desire is a house. Desire needs closed space. Desire runs out of doors or windows, or slats or pinpricks, it can’t fit under the sky, too large. Close the doors. Close the windows. As soon as you laugh from nerves or make a joke or say something just to say something or get all involved with the bushes, then you blow open a window in your house of desire and it can’t heat up as well. Cold draft comes in.
— Aimee Bender, Willful Creatures
Because life is short. I feel we’re made of a hunger, a desire for life – if that can be described as a material. As I get older, I’m trying to open that channel more. If you don’t, if you close off desire and get complacent, life loses its freshness and sweetness, and that’s what I crave. That’s my bliss.
— Sarah Slean
Olympia thinks often about desire - desire that stops the breath, that causes a preoccupied pause in the midst of uttering a sentence - and how it may upend a life and threaten to dissolve the soul.
— Anita Shreve, Fortune's Rocks
And Desire smiles, and forgets, for Desire is a creature of the moment.
— Neil Gaiman, The Doll's House
He that has satisfied his thirst turns his back on the well.
— Baltasar Gracián
Why... is human desire so unsatisfying?
— Ai Yazawa, NANA: The Complete Series
Her lips found his and a stab of exquisite desire shot through him. This is what he's been waiting for all this time. Not a stolen embrace. A gift, freely given. One that he would keep forever in some small part of his soul.
— Courtney Milan, Unveiled
Desire is like fog on a bathroom mirror -- its presence incites you to wipe the mirror, and see yourself clearly again.
— Vera Nazarian, The Perpetual Calendar of Inspiration
She couldn't turn away from the eyes that held her. Eyes as deep, as Dark as the night, yet there was something that sparked with warmth, that kept those eyes from being cold.
— Lora Leigh, Maverick
Boredom is the inner conflict we suffer when we lose desire, when we lack a lacking.
— Robert McKee, Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting
I am Desire, am I not? That is what I am; that is what I do. I make things want things. Where I touch, things want and need and love - drawn to their objects of desire like butterflies to a candle-flame.
— Neil Gaiman, Season of Mists
You've blotted the rich form of desire from my life and left me only some vaguely eccentric behaviors that have grown up to integrate so much pleasure into the mundane world around me. What text could I write now? It's as though I cannot even remember what I once desired. All I can look for now, when I have the energy, is lost desire itself-- and I look for it by clearly inadequate means. At best such an account as I might write would read like the life of anyone else, with, now and again, a bizarre and interruptive incident, largely mysterious and completely demystified-- at least that's what it has become without the day-to-day, moment-to-moment web of wanting that you have unstrung from about my universe. Without it, all falls apart. In a single gesture you've turned me into the most ordinary of human creatures and at once left me an obsessive, pleasureless eccentric, trapped in a set of habits which no longer have reason because they no longer lead to reward. And if I had enough self-confidence, in the midst of this bland continual chaos into which you've shunted me, for hate, I should hate you. But I don't have it.
— Samuel R. Delany, Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand
I don't want whatever I want. Nobody does. What kind of fun would it be if I just got everything I ever wanted?
— Neil Gaiman, Coraline
Had a couple of drinks by myself. It was a mistake. Have I got to give up drinking, too? If I eliminate everything, how will I exist? I was somebody who loved Maurice and went with men and enjoyed my drinks. What happens if you drop all the things that make you I?
— Graham Greene, The End of the Affair
Our restlessness in this world seems to indicate that we are intended for a better. We have all of us a longing after happiness
—  and surely the Creator will gratify all the natural desires he has implanted in us.
But that was all bravado. Already - how had it come about so quickly - desire had begotten need. A few whispered words (perhaps he didn't mean them) and I was ready to follow. It was worse to think of staying behind, to grind one day upon another. Nothing to hold me here. None to regret my leaving, save Az.
— Sarah Micklem, Firethorn
A man’s desire is for the woman, but the woman’s desire is rarely other than for the desire of the man.
— Samuel Taylor Coleridge
We all have to lead our own life, and we only have the one life, and the only people who can live life not according to their own desires are those who have no desires--which is the majority, actually. People can say what they like, they can speak of abnegation, sacrifice, generosity, acceptance, and resignation, but it's all false. The norm is for people to think that they desire whatever comes to them, whatever they achieve along the way or whatever is given to them--they have no preconceived desires.
— Javier Marías
Life is complex in its expression, involving more than percipience, namely desire, emotion, will, and feeling.
— Alfred North Whitehead
It is much easier to extinguish a first desire than to satisfy all of those that follow it.
— François de La Rochefoucauld
She had rarely been near Henry since then, and the sight of him now was like a concentrated dose.
— Anna Godbersen, Rumors
You are moving on the chariot of your desire whatever you are thinking is always right.
— Santosh Kalwar
This is desire, daughter, the endless piercing that informs the universe throughout eternity,
— John Speed, The Temple Dancer
It had ever, as I told the reader, been one of the singular blessings of my life, to be almost every hour of it miserably in love with some one....
— Laurence Sterne, A Sentimental Journey
I miss your silent stature, your avoided days of disaster, your present state of distress.I’m cinnamon, cloves and fire, you are the rested cedarwood of desire.
— Coco J. Ginger
Love is not selective, desire is selective. In love there are no strangers. When the centre of selfishness is no longer, all desires for pleasure and fear of pain cease; one is no longer interested in being happy; beyond happiness there is pure intensity, inexhaustible energy, the ecstasy of giving from a perennial source.
— Nisargadatta Maharaj, I Am That: Talks with Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj
I've wandered through the real world, and written myself through the darkness of the streets inside me. I see people walking through the city and wonder where they've been, and what the moments of their lives have done to them. If they're anything like me, their moments have held them up and shot them down.Sometimes I just survive.But sometimes I stand on the rooftop of my existence, arms stretched out, begging for more.That's when the stories show up in me.They find me all the time.They're made of underdogs and fighters. They're made of hunger and desire and trying to live decent.The only trouble is, I don't know which of those stories comes first.Maybe they all just merge into one.We'll see, I guess.I'll let you know when I decide.
— Markus Zusak, Getting the Girl
It has become necessary for me to have this woman, so as to save myself from the ridicule of being in love with her: for to what lengths will a man not be driven by thwarted desire?
— Pierre-Ambroise Choderlos de Laclos, Les Liaisons dangereuses
Kiss me. My lips are on fire.You, my friend, are the object of mysecret desire.
— Lisa Canfield
She was trying to sound tough and impatient, but she knew that vulnerable desire to be wooed was still brimming in her tone.
— Anna Godbersen, Envy
The swallow that hibernates underwater is a creature called yearning.
— David Quammen, Wild Thoughts from Wild Places
But never had he felt more enthralled than he was right now, sitting beside Evie on a weathered old dock, with a blazing afternoon sun, almost brutal in its clarity, bathing everything in pure light. Sweat trickled down his back and chest from the steamy heat, and his entire body pulsed with life. Even his fingertips throbbed. It took all of his formidable self-control to prevent himself from pushing her down on the dock and spreading her legs for his entry.
— Linda Howard, Loving Evangeline
The world yearns. This is its sure gravity: the attraction of bodies. Earth for molten star. Moon for earth. A hand for the orb of a breast. This is its movement too: the motion of desire, of a longing toward.
— Alison MacLeod, Wave Theory of Angels
One could never know anything except through desire, real desire, which was not the same thing as greed or lust; a pure, painful and primitive desire, a longing for everything that was not in oneself, a torment of the flesh, that carried one beyond the limits of one's mind to other times and other places, and even, if one was lucky, to a place where there was no border between oneself and one's image in the mirror.
— Amitav Ghosh, The Shadow Lines
Like trying to keep a fatman out of the refrigerator. 'Lila
— Robert M. Pirsig
I salute my desires with a bow.were it not for them to come and playmind would be empty just like me.
— Suman Pokhrel, Jeevanko Chheubaata
How we need that security. How we need another soul to cling to, another body to keep us warm. To rest and trust; to give your soul in confidence: I need this. I need someone to pour myself into.
— Sylvia Plath
Why so scrawny, cat?Starving for fat fish or mice...Or backyard love?
— Bashō Matsuo, Japanese Haiku
...he was conscious of the disastrous fact that love and desire must be expressed in the same way...
— Albert Camus, A Happy Death
She wanted to be the rain, to cover him with moisture, to bring life to his seed.
— Caris Roane, Ascension
Lust is a tool, desire a trap. Wield the first, and you can take someone’s soul. Fall into the second, and they can take yours. ~ Isadora Conti to Grayson van Court
— Riley Shane, Blood Rose
Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words. My language trembles with desire
— Roland Barthes
What was he? A mere human, stuck between the rungs of blended adolescence and nascent adulthood. What power did he command over the mysterious forces of love? Which sword could shatter the impenetrable armour of desire?
— Faraaz Kazi
By the end of the seventies the feared yet desired black male body had become as objectified as it was during slavery, only a seemingly positive twist had been added to the racist sexist objectification: the black male body had become the site for the personification of everyone’s desire.
— bell hooks, We Real Cool: Black Men and Masculinity
Did my moral upbrining somehow turn against itself? If looking at someone with desire was as bad as satisfying the desire, if having an active fantasy was as bad as the act you were fantasizing- then why not the satisfaction and the act itself? As the days went on, I discovered that I couldn't stop thinking sinful thoughts. In which case I also wanted the sin itself.
— Bernhard Schlink
I think I am a rare breed, a homosexual who doesn't like men.
— Michel Tremblay
what was a rose but the living proof of desire, the single best evidence of human longing and earthly devotion. but desire could be twisted,after all, and Jealousy was the name of the rose that did well in arid souls.
— Alice Hoffman, The Probable Future
I don’t want the finer things in life, like preserves of jam and thick soft quilts, until I get what I need: the machinery to make that stuff for me.
— M.C. Humphreys
There's a chasm between envy and desire. Envy is like wanting something that's not yours. But desire is different. Desire comes out of wanting what is yours, and still wanting it even if it's not yet there, but it's not envy.
— Michka Assayas, Bono: In Conversation with Michka Assayas
The desire to be desire-less is but another desire. The thought that, because this desire purports to be spiritual, it is superior to more mundane desires shows how skilled the mind is at justifying any desire it is attached to.
— Joel Kramer, The Passionate Mind Revisited: Expanding Personal and Social Awareness
Every man has his secret desire, I suppose, and mine is someday to own a farm.
— A.G. Street, A.G. Street's Country Calendar
Peter Wessel and Peter Van Daan have grown into one Peter, who is beloved and good, and for whom I long desperately.
— Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl
With every step I took away from her, the movement at my heart and between my legs grew more defined: I felt like a ventriloquist, locking his protesting dolls in to a trunk.
— Sarah Waters, Tipping the Velvet
The object of your desire is not an object.
— Jack Gardner, Words Are Not Things
If nonsatiety were the natural state of human nature then aggressive want-stimulating advertising would not be necessary, nor would the barrage of novelty aimed at promoting dissatisfaction with last year's model. The system attempts to remake people to fit its own presuppositions. If people's wants are not naturally insatiable we must make them so, in order to keep the system going.
— Herman E. Daly, For the Common Good: Redirecting the economy toward community, the environment, and a sustainable future.
Immense wealth, and its lavish expenditure, fill the great house with all that can please the eye, or tempt the taste. Here, appetite, not food, is the great desideratum.
— Frederick Douglass
Lust for possession and greed has ravaged the soul of humanity like a great cancer, metastasizing throughout society in the form of a nouveau post-human, consumer hedonism.
— Bryant McGill, Voice of Reason
What lurking temptations to forbidden tenderness find their finding-places in a woman's dressing-gown, when she is alone in her room at night!
— Wilkie Collins, The Haunted Hotel: A Mystery of Modern Venice
The mystery of desire was way beyond the conceptual abilities of Jules Jacobson. It was like ... robotics. Just another subject that she couldn’t understand at all.
— Meg Wolitzer, The Interestings
He desired her and, so far as her virginal emotions went, she contemplated a surrender with equanimity. Yet she knew she would forget him half an hour after she left him - like an actor kissed in a picture.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender Is the Night
We might like to think of ourselves as autonomous beings who get to decide who we are going to be, but we are likely much more malleable than we think. We are often defined by the structure that keeps us captive. In some ways our desires are so socially constructed that they can't rightfully be called our own.
— Debbie Blue, Consider the Birds: A Provocative Guide to Birds of the Bible
The two great movers of the human mind are the desire of good and the fear of evil.
— Amit Abraham, Personality Development Through Positive Thinking
It's precisely in despair that you find the most intense pleasure, especially if you are already powerfully conscious of the hopelessness of your predicament.
— Fyodor Dostoyevsky
When faced with people who have very limited conversational skills and no apparent desire to cultivate any it's always easier to simply go along.
— Jeff Lindsay, Dearly Devoted Dexter
We want more than there is.
— Jonathan Goldstein
Humans do not possess a single, focused will. In their hearts, they have countless bugs, buzzing in all directions. There are times when all these bugs pounce on the same food, but when they are focused on different desires, people take actions that can only be described as incoherent.
— Kouhei Kadono, Boogiepop at Dawn
One must count ones riches by the means one has to satisfy his desires.
— Antoine François Prévost d'Exiles
Sexual expression is so powerful a way of bonding with others and so devastating a way of hurting others that it can never be reduced to a mere matter of personal preferences. Sexual desires have immense capacities to order or disorder the social world. Because of this, the social meanings and expressions of sexual desire, connections, and taboos are an organizing component of human societies: Who wants whom? Who belongs with whom? Who is forbidden to whom? What do infractions mean, and what are their consequences?
— Rachel Adler, Engendering Judaism: An Inclusive Theology and Ethics
A mental disease has swept the planet: banalization. Everyone is hypnotized by production and comfort -- sewage system, elevator, bathroom, washing machine. This state of affairs, which arose out of a struggle against poverty, overshoots its ultimate goal -- the liberation of humanity from material cares -- and becomes an obsessive image hanging over the present. Between love and a garbage disposal, young people of all countries have made their choice and prefer the garbage disposal. A complete and sudden change of spirit has become essential, by bringing to light forgotten desires and creating entirely new ones. And by an intensive propaganda in favor of these desires.Gilles Ivain (aka Ivan Chtcheglov)
— Tom McDonough, The Situationists and the City: A Reader
There is no Christianity unless first there is repentance. And it is not just, “Well, I am guilty.” It is not just a conviction. It is a conviction plus a desire to turn away from those things.
— Brian Richardson
I reached for her, pushing back the fall of hair-it was heavy and thick and smooth to the touch-and tilted her chin so that the moonlight shone on her wet face. We married each other that night, there on a bed of fallen pine needles-even today, the scent of pitch-pine stirs me-with Henry's distant flute for a wedding march and the arching white birch boughs for our basilica. At first, she quivered like an aspen, and I was ashamed at my lack of continence, yet I could not let go of her. I felt like Peleus on the beach, clinging to Thetis, only to find that, suddenly, it was she who held me; that same furnace in her nature that had flared up in anger blazed again, in passion.
— Geraldine Brooks, March
Could it be that desire for a good thing has become a bad thing because that desire has become a ruling thing?
— Paul David Tripp
When the mouth cries, I want to see God, the heart has reached its finest moment. Once we have sought and seen God, all other things have a way of finding us.
— Gayle D. Erwin, The Yhwh Style
I do not mind when you tell me what you want and put that first instead of last.
— John Scalzi, The Sagan Diary
But Ludmilla is always at least one step ahead of you. “I like to know that book exists that I will still be able to read…” she says, sure that existent objects, concrete albeit unknown, must correspond to the strength of her desire. How can you keep up with her, this woman who is always reading another book besides the one before her eyes, a book that does not yet exist, but which, since she wants it, cannot fail to exist?
— Italo Calvino
Supporting God's Scriptural ability to give or restrain man's desires, Jerry Bridges points to an amazing verse tucked away in Exodus 34:24. As Israel's people abandon their defense entirely to have a feast before Him three times per year, God says the surrounding peoples will be entirely devoid of even the logical desire to possess their land.
— Jerry Bridges, Trusting God: Even When Life Hurts
Gerdanlouk, he thinks. An evocative Turkish word, with Arabic roots. It means jewelry, but only jewelry adorning a woman between her lower neck and the top of her breasts. Gerdanlouk. He looks away.
— Jenny White, The Sultan's Seal
Was our intimacy paid for in the wrong currency? Or is intimacy the desired product no matter where you find it, how you acquire it, what you pay for it, black market, grey market, taxed, untaxed, under the table, over the counter.
— André Aciman, Call Me by Your Name
Desire isn't lack, it's surplus energy - a claustrophobia inside your skin -.
— Chris Kraus, I Love Dick
It is possible there are some things you want so badly that you will change your life to make them happen.
— Elizabeth Wein, The Pearl Thief
Where affluence is the rule, the true threat is the loss of desire,(...) What is new is not that prosperity depends on stimulating demand. It is that it cannot continue without inventing new vices
— John N. Gray, Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals
Desires are very cunning and complex. You are frustrated, but not because of needs. You are frustrated because of desires. And if desires take too much of your energy you will be unable to fulfill your needs also, because who is there to fulfill them? You are moving into the future; you are thinking of the future; your mind is dreaming. Who is there to fulfill ordinary needs of the day? You are not there. And you would like to remain hungry but reach the horizon. You would like to postpone needs so that the whole energy moves towards the desire. But in the end, you find that the desire is not fulfilled, and because needs have been neglected, in the end you are just a ruin. And the time that is lost cannot be regained; you cannot go back.
— Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, When the Shoe Fits: Stories of the Taoist Mystic Chuang Tzu
There is a story told of one old wise man, whose name was Mencius. He was a follower of Confucius and he died when he was very, very old. Somebody asked him: If you were given life again, how will you start it? Said Mencius: I will pay more attention to my needs and less attention to my desires. And this realisation will come to you also. But it always comes very late and then life is no more in your hands. If you were given life again....
— Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, When the Shoe Fits: Stories of the Taoist Mystic Chuang Tzu
Needs can be fulfilled, but desires cannot be. Desire is a need gone mad. Needs are simple, they come from nature; desires are very complex they don’t come from nature. They are created by the mind. Needs are moment to moment, they are created out of life itself. Desires are not moment to moment, they are always for the future. They are not created by life itself, they are projected by the mind. Desires are projections, they are not really needs. This is the first thing to be understood, and the deeper you understand, the better.
— Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, When the Shoe Fits: Stories of the Taoist Mystic Chuang Tzu
The person with an itch can't understand why everyone isn't scratching.
— Marty Rubin
I want your scent to intoxicate my passions to the point where lust is merely a word, dancing upon our flames of desire...
— Virginia Alison
Lust? I have no desire to incite lust in anyone."Veliss turned to her with a quizzical expression, her smile suddenly genuine. "Then I'm afraid you're in for a lifetime of disappointment.
— Anthony  Ryan, Queen of Fire
The root of all desire is the realization of NOT HAVING IT!
— Harrish Sairaman
People shouldn't question their desires. They should do what they want.
— Marty Rubin
In my impatience I become convinced that this desire of mine should have been fulfilled yesterday, when it belongs to a tomorrow that yesterday would have killed had I had my way.
— Craig D. Lounsbrough
Part those sheetslike holy watersand I will worship you skinlike a born-againbeliever.
— Tyler Knott Gregson, Chasers of the Light: Poems from the Typewriter Series
To delight is to desire.
— Lailah Gifty Akita