Top 100 Desire Less Quotes
#1. 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
#2. There are two ways to get enough. One is to continue to accumulate more and more. The other is to desire less.
G.K. Chesterton
#3. Enriching others is the only way to get rich, if that is what we desire. The more we serve, the more we deserve, getting what we give, no more and no less.
Ernie J Zelinski
#4. Whenever we do good to another self, just because it is a self, made (like us) by God, and desiring its own happiness as we desire ours, we shall have learned to love it a little more or, at least, to dislike it less.
C.S. Lewis
#5. Even when I went to the playground, I never picked the best players. I picked guys with less talent, but who were willing to work hard and had the desire to be great.
Magic Johnson
#6. I have always believed that somehow the less we reveal the more the other desires to see.
Annette Messager
#7. The desire to succeed has a lot less compulsion than the fear of failure.
Gerald Seymour
#8. Pleasure once tasted satisfies less than the desire experienced for its torments.
Philibert Joseph Roux
#9. I don't pay attention to auction prices. Nothing interests me less. One of the benefits of not being an artist is I don't have to navigate the social hierarchies of the art world as a person of desire. I don't need anything. I live in a different way.
Rachel Kushner
#10. You can keep going on much less attention than you crave.
Idries Shah
#11. However rich or elevated, a name less something is always wanting to our imperfect fortune.
Horace
#12. In the past the French came to Germany less with the desire to understand it than with a zealous desire to interpret, to analyze it dispassionately something for which their training at the Ecole Normale Superieure or the Ecole des Hautes Etudes and the French language superbly equipped them to do.
Walter Abish
#13. The good thing about getting older is that, as you become less attractive, so you have less desire to go out and conquer everyone you see.
Julian Clary
#14. He gave Dancer one last pat. 'You're luckier than you know, pal. Living without a set of balls makes life a lot less complicated.
Susan Elizabeth Phillips
#16. Mental chemistry creates interest, Emotional chemistry Generates Affection, Physical chemistry generates desire, and Spiritual chemistry creates love. A soulmate includes all four...and I will not settle for anything less!
John Gray
#17. Warner laces his boots and sings the songs and marches the marches, acting less out of duty than out of a time worn desire to be dutiful.
Anthony Doerr
#18. Nothing retains less of desire in art, in science, than this will to industry, booty, possession.
Andre Breton
#19. One is creeping into middle age and is less easily distracted by one's appetites, which have grown feeble, and by one's passions, which seem such a bore - all but the consuming desire for knowledge and understanding. That grows. - Aldous Huxley
Nicholas Murray
#20. Erotic acts are instinctive; they fulfill a role in nature. The idea is familiar, but it is one that contains a paradox: there is nothing more natural than sexual desire; there is nothing less natural than the forms in which it is made manifest and satisfied.
Octavio Paz
#21. Today, as always, the people, no less than the courts, must remain vigilant to preserve the principals of our Bill of Rights, lest in our desire to be secure we lose our ability to be free.
Earl Warren
#22. We should be content with the incomprehensibility of the universe; the desire to understand makes us less than human, for to be human is to know that one does not understand.
Fernando Pessoa
#23. To be ignorant or unconvinced of one's own needs has become the unforgivable anti-social act. The good citizen is one who imputes standardized needs to himself with such conviction that he drowns out any desire for alternatives, much less the renunciation of need.
Ivan Illich
#24. There is often less danger in the things we fear than in the things we desire.
John Churton Collins
#25. If she did experience sex
or something close to it
in high school, I'm sure it would have been less out of sexual desire or love than literary curiosity.
Haruki Murakami
#26. There's this parallel, perhaps less conscious desire, which is to numb myself to the world. To deal with the world tomorrow. Living is difficult. Dying is difficult.
Jowita Bydlowska
#27. We are made in the image of God; we carry within us the desire for our true life of intimacy and adventure. To say we want less than that is to lie.
John Eldredge
#28. When the Lord starts out to make an oak tree, he takes a hundred years to do it in, but he can make a pumpkin in 90 days. More or less life is like that. We must choose whether we desire to become and oak tree or a pumpkin.
Sterling W. Sill
#29. If I take a less defensive tone, I'd admit that I couldn't write today a very jazzy, contemporary look at America as I did in 1979 in States of Desire.
Edmund White
#30. Man's mastery over nature, then, is a mastery which has less and less control over itself ... A world where techniques are paramount is a world given over to desire and fear; because every technique is there to serve some desire or fear.2 - Gabriel Marcel
Stephen Batchelor
#31. Nothing more or less than the deepest, most desperate desire of our hearts.
J.K. Rowling
#32. A desire that has never been fulfilled is considerably less acute than one that has been fulfilled and then checked at the source.
Phyllis Bottome
#33. AMERICANISM, n. 1) The desire to purge America of all those qualities which make it a more or less tolerable place in which to live; 2) The ability to simultaneously kiss ass, follow your boss's orders, swallow a pay cut, piss in a bottle, cower in fear of job loss, and brag about your freedom.
Ambrose Bierce
#34. The dream arises from a part of the mind unknown to us, but none the less important, and is concerned with the desires for the approaching day.
Carl Jung
#35. Yet none of these things gave him confidence. All they gave him was egotism, which is less the conviction of one's worth than the desire for that conviction.
Jetta Carleton
#36. The less satisfaction we derive from being ourselves, the greater is our desire to be like others.
Eric Hoffer
#37. The more we obey God, the more we desire to help others. The more we help others, the more we love God and on and on. Conversely, the more we disobey God and the more selfish we are, the less love we feel.
John H. Groberg
#38. When we exaggerate our friends' tenderness towards us, it is often less from gratitude than from a desire to exhibit our own virtue.
Francois De La Rochefoucauld
#39. Scatology was strictly out, as nowhere in my psyche do I harbor the desire to shit on someone and even less do I have the inclination to be shat upon. And if I a a snob for not participating in films that involve sex with animals, then so be it; I am a snob.
Andrew Davidson
#40. She sees how you diminish her solitude, and, more meaningfully, she sees you seeing, which sparks in her that oddest of desires an I can have for a you, the desire that you be less lonely.
Mohsin Hamid
#41. The running commentary, the loving support, the jokes and the observations and the random thoughts that are made a little less random when they're shared. The desire to be heard is as deeply seeded as the desire to be loved.
David Levithan
#42. Despite the myth that men are less committed, they are predisposed to desire marriage.
Helen Fisher
#43. I hear many people talk about their longing for a balanced life. What I think they are really expressing is a desire for a life with less pressure.
Mary Anne Radmacher
#44. Let the mechanics of desire bring your fulfilment without interference.the more you interfere, the less likely you will get what you want.
Deepak Chopra
#45. We can most easily fulfill our desires when our actions are motivated by love. We expand the least effort, and we offer no resistance. We tap into the infinite organizing power of the universe to do less and accomplish everything.
Deepak Chopra
#46. If you desire anything less for yourself than absolute obedience to God, a life of total devotion to the Lord, a life of absolute sin-less-ness - if you desire anything less, you are fighting against God's desire for you.
Sinclair B. Ferguson
#47. Money destroys human roots wherever it is able to penetrate, by turning desire for gain into the sole motive. It easily manages to outweigh all other motives, because the effort it demands of the mind is so very much less. Nothing is so clear and so simple as a row of figures.
Simone Weil
#48. We've all had that fear, that despair of losing someone, or this fierce desire because it's not reciprocated. The less reciprocation there is, the more desire we have.
Emmanuelle Beart
#49. In these random impressions, and with no desire to be other than random, I indifferently narrate my fact-less autobiography, my lifeless history. These are my Confessions, and if in them I say nothing, it's because I have nothing to say.
Fernando Pessoa
#50. If we desire the "hand of God" (i.e., his power) to return to our churches, we should focus less on the personalities and abilities of people, and more on Jesus and the power of the Holy Spirit.
Jim Cymbala
#51. Man desires to be free and he desires to feel important. This places him in a dilemma, for the more he emancipates himself from necessity the less important he feels.
W. H. Auden
#52. Once a man criticized my desire for knowledge by saying that it was not fitting for a woman to possess learning because there was so little of it. I replied that it was even less fitting for a man to possess ignorance because there was so much of it.
Christine De Pizan
#53. It is not the act of making art that is painful. It is the desire to make something and not acting on it that causes pain ... A day when I don't write is less happy. This is not discipline. It is affection, enthusiasm, adventure-any number of other words besides discipline.
Julia Cameron
#54. A man of limited desire will always have less or perhaps nothing to worry and sensibly no fear of losing anything or everything in life.
Anuj
#55. All fashions are charming, or rather relatively charming, each one being a new striving, more or less well conceived, after beauty, an approximate statement of an ideal, the desire for which constantly teases the unsatisfied human mind.
Charles Baudelaire
#56. I don't make money on the road, and so there's less and less incentive for me to do it when I don't have that adolescent desire for whatever it is, glory or fame.
Juliana Hatfield
#57. The more we pray, the more we shall want to pray. The more we pray, the more we can pray. The more we pray, the more we shall pray. He who prays little will pray less, but he who prays much will pray more. And he who prays more, will desire to pray more abundantly.
Charles Spurgeon
#58. I think that this place can strip a person of human traits. It can make one desire nothing and hope for even less.
Gemma Liviero
#59. Victory is plesant, not only to those who love to conquer, bot to all; for there is produced an idea of superiority, which all with more or less eagerness desire.
Aristotle.
#60. 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
#61. The basis of conservatism is a desire for less government interference or less centralized authority or more individual freedom.
Ronald Reagan
#62. The craving today is for something light and spicy, and few have patience, still less desire, to examine carefully that which would make a demand both upon their hearts and
Arthur W. Pink
#63. To me, a political song is also a personal song. Most political activism has been driven by empathy for other people and the desire for a world that's less divisive. Even if songs aren't overtly political, they can make a listener more empathetic.
Conor Oberst
#64. I understand you only too well, but Rachel's needs are no less important than your desire to be part of history. Find a balance. Happiness is like good health. You only miss it when it disappears.
Tariq Ali
#65. - but Surge was not mad, had never been completely drained of his compassion and he could never forget, nor could he since then look upon the helpless and the innocent with anything less than outrage and a desire for justice.
John Spencer
#66. [N]othing is less reliable than unchecked claims from political officials that their secret conduct is justified by National Security Threats and the desire to Keep Us Safe.
Glenn Greenwald
#67. Addiction is an increasing desire for an act that gives less and less satisfaction
Aldous Huxley
#68. All I knew was that once again I found myself alone, with even less desire to live and nothing to look forward to but aggravations.
Michel Houellebecq
#69. She sowed in my mind the idea that reality is not only what we see on the surface; it has a magical dimension as well and, if we so desire, it is legitimate to enhance it and color it to make our journey through life less trying.
Isabel Allende
#71. I felt curiously aloof from my own self. No temptations maddened me. The plump, glossy little Eskimo girls with their fish smell, hideous raven hair and guinea pig faces, evoked even less desire in me than Dr. Johnson had.
Vladimir Nabokov
#72. The very instant I saw you, did My heart fly to your service; there resides To make me slave to it ... mine unworthiness, that dare not offer What I desire to give, and much less take What I shall die to want.
William Shakespeare
#73. The less we read the Word of God, the less we desire to read it, and the less we pray, the less we desire to pray.
George Muller
#74. It is easy, when you are young, to believe that what you desire is no less than what you deserve, to assume that if you want something badly enough, it is your God-given right to have it.
Jon Krakauer
#75. Our desires, once realized, haunt us again less readily.
Margaret Fuller
#76. It is our will That thus enchains us to permitted ill. We might be otherwise, we might be all We dream of happy, high, majestical. Where is the love, beauty and truth we seek, But in our mind? and if we were not weak, Should we be less in deed than in desire?
Percy Bysshe Shelley
#77. The less the power, the greater the desire to exercise it.
Bernard Levin
#78. But if I decide to decide there's a different, less selfish, less lonely point to my life, won't the reason for this decision be my desire to be less lonely, meaning to suffer less overall pain? Can the decision to be less selfish ever be anything other than a selfish decision?
David Foster Wallace
#79. As a father, he was generous. More or less. The "less" was because he never gave me what I wanted. He gave me only what he wanted me to have. I found this was often true with philanthropy and with love. The giver's desire and fulfillment played an important role.
Monique Truong
#80. Where dreams may take you fathoms deep within the soul of the forest. Mists close in around your feathered visions, floating phantoms of days gone by, and days to come, their twirling tendrils tempting your thoughts blossom with the unbound less love and passion you hide within.....
Virginia Alison
#81. We consider ourselves as defective in memory, either because we remember less than we desire, or less than we suppose others to remember.
Samuel Johnson
#82. There is no doubt that Iraqis, like Australians and Americans, love and desire freedom. However, if freedom doesn't mean the right to complete self-determination, unfettered by interests other than one's own, then that freedom is less than worthless - it's oppression.
Amir Butler
#83. He who has it in his power to commit sin, is less inclined to do so. The very idea of being able, weakens the desire.
Ovid
#84. 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
#85. A meal that can be packed and frozen and thawed is nothing you should desire
much less teach your kids to want.
Mireille Guiliano
#86. Although prey to the dictates of physical desire, he remained no less a romantic man, believing that the realm of women could be shrunk to one woman.
David Foenkinos
#87. For me, the desire exists less to get myself a degree than to just go and have the whole college experience, and throw myself into the brain pool and see if I can swim.
Joshua Jackson
#88. Would that thy love, beloved, had less trust in me, that it might be more anxious!
Heloise D'Argenteuil
#89. This was the advantage of desire. Desire focused the mind. It eliminated extraneous thought. The greater the desire, the less the burden of the mind. She would like to live her life this way. Perhaps it was how to survive intact. Live to satisfy her desires. Desire only what she could have.
Alexander Maksik
#90. The more my trust rests in God, the less I trust myself. If we truly desire to live the crucified life, we must get rid of self-trust and trust only in God.
A.W. Tozer
#91. Sincere friendship towards God, in all who believe him to be properly an intelligent, willing being, does most apparently, directly, and strongly incline to prayer; and it no less disposes the heart strongly to desire to have our infinitely glorious.
Jonathan Edwards
#92. As long as she is near or within his power to reach, he will be drawn to her, leaving less of him for others and that's why she had to leave. She knew, despite her own great desire, that there are consequences and responsibilities that are more important and life-altering than personal feelings.
Donna Lynn Hope
#93. Spirituality is rooted in desire. We long for something we can neither name nor describe, but which is no less real because of our inability to capture it with words.
Mary Jo Weaver
#94. There is nothing man desires more than a heroic life: there is nothing less common to men than heroism.
Jacques Maritain
#95. The constant desire to win is a very American kind of trouble. Less glamorous gains made along the way--learning, wisdom, growth, and confidence, dealing with failure--aren't given the same respect because they can't be given a grade.
William Zinsser
#96. It's not just love, or desire, but something profoundly less complex, as unadorned and simple as the vehicle code. Officer laughs, cries. Tearful and giddy, she whales on her demonstrator with what she realizes is joy in her heart.
Daniel Orozco
#97. The more you seek security, the less of it you have. But the more you seek
opportunity, the more likely it is that you will achieve the security that you
desire.
Brian Tracy
#98. If Harry had been less noble, less fair-minded, Cedric would have lived. It is a very classic example of how noble intentions often lead to tragic results." He straightened, squared off with the hunter. "I have no desire to be Harry Potter.
Joey W. Hill
#99. The deeper problems connected with advertising come less from the unscrupulousness of our 'deceivers' than from our pleasure in being deceived, less from the desire to seduce than from the desire to be seduced.
Marston Bates
#100. You can't get out-fought and out-desired. I don't want to see that again. I won't tolerate less than 100 percent desire. I'm their manager, not their babysitter.
Tim Sherwood
