Top 100 What We Desire Quotes
#1. Art inspires, produces an unwillingness to settle for what we have and a desire for something better. It is the product and producer of creative activity, change; it is essential for continuous development.
Russell L. Ackoff
#2. I wondered if all creatures were drawn to what was dangerous or if we merely wanted light at any cost and were willing to burn for our desires.
Alice Hoffman
#3. The thought went through my mind that we should film ourselves in our sexual act, and project our frenzied copulation permanently onto the walls of the tea-room, as a lesson to wake up the boring people who drank tea here, and to show them what life was really all about.
Fiona Thrust
#4. Sometimes I think the difference between what we want and what we're afraid of is about the width of an eyelash.
Jay McInerney
#5. We obscure our self-knowledge with anxiety; that it is not what we desire but what we fear and dread we may desire that impedes us - a
John Cheever
#6. The walls in front of us are not there to keep us from achieving our desire. They are there to see how bad we want what we desire.
Bruce Alan Jensen
#7. Why talk about what we want? That is childish. Absurd. Of course, you are interested in what you want. You are eternally interested in it. But no one else is. The rest of us are just like you: we are interested in what we want.
Dale Carnegie
#8. We humans are unhappy in large part because we are insatiable; after working hard to get what we want, we routinely lose interest in the object of our desire. Rather than feeling satisfied, we feel a bit bored, and in response to this boredom, we go on to form new, even grander desires.
William B. Irvine
#9. Angst is not the human condition, it's the purgatory between what we have and what we want but can't get.
Miguel Syjuco
#10. Ere yet we yearn for what is out of our reach, we are still in the cradle. When wearied out with our yearnings, desire again falls asleep; we are on the death-bed.
Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
#11. We all want a United Africa, United not only in our concept of what unity connotes, but united in our common desire to move forward together in dealing with all the problems that can best be solved only on a continental basis.
Kwame Nkrumah
#12. What we insistently desire, over time, is what we become.
Neal A. Maxwell
#13. Desire, especially strong desire (e.g., cravingness), frequently blocks our getting what we want.
David R. Hawkins
#14. Lord, deliver us from what we already knew we wanted. Give us some new desires, the weirder the better.
Mark Forsyth
#15. We're born with the desire, but we don't really know how to choose. We don't know what our taste is, and we don't know what we are seeing.
Sheena Iyengar
#16. There was a brief moment after 9/11 when Colin Powell said we should not rush to satisfy the desire for revenge. It was a great moment, an extraordinary moment, because what he was actually asking people to do was to stay with a sense of grief, mournfulness, and vulnerability.
Judith Butler
#17. It was then that the seven-year-old said, "I am ready. What wonderful place will we visit tonight?"
"I can take you wherever your dreams desire," the calico pony replied on their first night together.
Cheryl Price
#18. What is in the Constitution is the burning desire and aspiration of all the people of Vietnam. So for the moment, we don't think about opposition parties.
Nong Duc Manh
#19. We don't necessarily need to know each other's name, age, profession, drug of choice, childhood trauma or recent tragedy to understand what pain feels like and offer comfort. We are strangers drawn together by a shared desire for lasting peace.
Marta Mrotek
#21. The worthy gentleman who has been snatched from us at the moment of the election, and in the middle of the contest, whilst his desires were as warm and his hopes as eager as ours, has feelingly told us what shadows we are, and what shadows we pursue.
Edmund Burke
#22. We need to stop and ask, "Can I realize my deepest aspiration if I pursue this path?" "What is really preventing me from taking the path I most deeply desire?" DEVELOPING
Thich Nhat Hanh
#24. We don't ask any people to throw away any good they have got; we only ask them to come and get more. What if all the world should embrace this Gospel? They would then see eye to eye, and the blessings of God would be poured out upon the people, which is the desire of my whole soul.
Joseph Smith Jr.
#25. It is difficult to define love; all we can say is, that in the soul it is a desire to rule, in the mind it is a sympathy, and in the body it is a hidden and delicate wish to possess what we love-Plus many mysteries.
Francois De La Rochefoucauld
#26. We do not wish to "judge" or assess out surrounding merely as a kind of expressive activity carelessly projected onto the world, but we wish to evaluate the world "correctly," i.e., in according with that it truly is, and the desire to know is directed at determining what the world truly is.
Raymond Geuss
#27. 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
#28. Our life is a gymnasium of desire ... When Christians say "God," what do we wish to express? This word is all that we yearn for."
Saint Augustine
#29. Public transit situates us so that we are given license to accept what's right in front of us, but will likely arouse our desire to compare our narrative to someone else's, to give ourselves permission to speculate upon a person's private space, or life, with no fear of recourse or punishment.
Julie Wilson
#30. Spirituality is, ultimately, about what we do with that desire. What we do with our longings, both in terms of handling the pain and the hope they bring us, that is our spirituality.
Ronald Rolheiser
#31. We never do what we wish when we wish it, and when we desire a thing earnestly, and it does arrive, that or we are changed, so that we slide from the summit of our wishes and find ourselves where we were.
Mary Shelley
#32. Often when God does not readily give us what we want, it is because He knows what our desire would cost us. Faith sometimes means forgoing our desires because we trust Christ to have a better plan for our lives.
Beth Moore
#33. Since fire's born of fire, why should we desire
To gather up its scattered ash.
On the appointed day we surrendered what we were
To a vaster blaze, the evening sky.
Yves Bonnefoy
#34. We attract to our lives what we desire most and our intent enhances our ability to ascend or may serve as a one-way-ticket to the lowest levels of conscientiousness where many enter and few to none come out.
Seraphine Abrams
#35. What we desire, what we work for, or what we seek after, are those things that merely lead us along the paths of our lives.
Wu Wei
#36. To get or not to get what we desire can be equally disappointing.
Epictetus
#37. In spite of her desire for a contained universe, her life felt scattered, full of many small moments, without great purpose. That is what she thought, though what is most untrustworthy about our natures and self-worth is how we differe in our own realities from the way we are seen by others.
Michael Ondaatje
#38. The only freedom that lasts comes from pursuing what we want when we want what we ought.
John Piper
#39. What we teach children to love and desire will always outweigh what we make them learn.
Jim Trelease
#40. We always strive after what is forbidden, and desire the things refused us.
Ovid
#41. Our will is only as strong as our body; the desire for what we need will always trump ideals.
Penny Reid
#42. There is also a false serenity that is not at all Christian. We need feel no shame as Christians about a measure of impatience, longing, protest against what is unnatural, and a strong measure of desire for freedom and earthly happiness and the capacity to effect change. In
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
#43. We are kept out of the Garden by our own fear and desire in relation to what we think to be the goods of our life.
Joseph Campbell
#44. This life is a perpetual chequer-work of good and evil, pleasure and pain. When in possession of what we desire, we are only so much the nearer losing it; and when at a distance from it, we live in expectation of enjoying it again.
Marie De Rabutin-Chantal, Marquise De Sevigne
#45. If we do not know ourselves to be full of pride, ambition, lust, weakness, misery, and injustice, we are indeed blind. And if, knowing this, we do not desire deliverance, what can we say of a man ... ?
Blaise Pascal
#46. What we desire our children to become, we must endeavor to be before them
Andrew Combe
#47. We don't just want what we want because we want it; we want what we want because that's what we've learned to want.
Hanne Blank
#49. We are, by nature, receivers. Even if we have a desire to learn God's Word, we still listen from a default self-centered mind-set that is always asking, What can I get out of this?
David Platt
#50. My beliefs and my desires have changed. They have come into alignment with who he is and who he created you to be. And that's a wonderful thing and that's what we will always offer at Exodus.
Alan Chambers
#51. Do not desire, for what you desire you get, and with it comes terrible bondage. It is nothing but bringing "noses on us," as in the case of the man who had three boons to ask. We never get freedom until we are self-contained. "Self is the Saviour of self, none else."
Swami Vivekananda
#52. If we go down into ourselves, we find that we possess exactly what we desire.
Simone Weil
#53. Too often, we put up with mediocrity, telling ourselves that later in life we'll do what we want.
Daniel Willey
#54. What does the Atonement have to do with missionary work? Any time we experience the blessings of the Atonement in our lives, we cannot help but have a concern for the welfare of others ... A great indicator of one's personal conversion is the desire to share the gospel with others.
Ezra Taft Benson
#55. We desire peace. But peace is a goal, not a policy. Lasting peace is what we hope for at the end of our journey. It doesn't describe the steps we must take nor the paths we should follow to reach that goal.
Ronald Reagan
#56. 90% of what we do daily is not what we think, it's just driven by our desires and not potentials.
Auliq Ice
#57. A true desire is not to have but to be. We are whole creatures in potential, and the true purpose of desire is to unfold that wholeness, to become what we can be.
Eric Butterworth
#58. Happiness - in part at least - the fruit of the desire and ability to sacrifice waht we want for what we want eventually
Stephen R. Covey
#59. What we will criticize 'modern' eroticism for is its lack of genuine sensuality, a sensuality which implies beauty or charm, passion or modesty, power over the object of desire, and fulfilment.
Henri Lefebvre
#60. If we persist in our restless desire to know everything about the universe and ourselves, then we must not be afraid of what the artist brings back from his voyage of discovery.
Herbert Read
#61. We have an innate desire to endlessly learn, grow, and develop. We want to become more than what we already are. Once we yield to this inclination for continuous and never-ending improvement, we lead a life of endless accomplishments and satisfaction.
Jack Canfield
#62. Commitment to a plan or thought carries with it a force that can influence the unconscious mind and bring about the desired effect. In other words, once we decide to have something, the mind unconsciously begins to create the reality necessary to bring to pass what we desire.
Richard Paul Evans
#63. On the way to discovering what we love we find what we hate and everything that blocks are path to what we desire
John O'Callaghan
#64. What if our loneliness is the result not simply of needing a partner but of needing people? We are made in the image of a relational God; it makes sense that we possess the desire to be together.
Debra Fileta
#65. What I find disturbing in America is the consuming desire for leisure, convenience, and fun. It seems we, as a nation, have traded God for gadgets. We have traded eternal truth for momentary self-gratification - worshipping false gods of materialism and humanism instead of the Creator of all things.
Billy Graham
#66. It isn't normal to know what we want. It is a rare and difficult psychological achievement.
Abraham H. Maslow
#67. I would say much of religious heresy is the result of a misunderstanding of the basic nature of God. And once we have a proper understanding of God, then usually most of the areas of our life coincide with who God is and what He desires for each one of us.
Josh McDowell
#69. Things and actions are what they are, and the consequences of them will be what they will be: why then should we desire to be deceived?
Joseph Butler
#70. We embark on this quest not from a simple desire, but from a mandate of our species to search for our place in the cosmos. The quest is old, not new. And has garnered the attention of thinkers great and small, across time and across culture. What we have discovered, the poets have known all along.
Neil DeGrasse Tyson
#71. There's a great spirit gone! Thus did I desire it.
What our contempts doth often hurl from us,
We wish it ours again. The present pleasure,
By revolution lowering, does become
The opposite of itself. She's good, being gone.
The hand could pluck her back that shoved her on.
William Shakespeare
#72. The inspired life is living life in deepest connection with our true selves, acting on what we truly need, want and desire, and basing happiness on what is in our control.
Elaina Marie
#73. It is not the actual enjoyment of pleasure that we desire. What we want is to test the futility of that pleasure, so as to be no longer obsessed by it.
Cesare Pavese
#74. When we pour out our miseries, He hears a melody of us needing and desiring what only He can give.
Stacey Thacker
#75. Cash Is King Money is a guarantee that we may have what we want in the future. Though we need nothing at the moment it insures the possibility of satisfying a new desire when it arises. - Artistotle
Sophia Amoruso
#77. The apparently bottomless gulf between what we say we want and why we do want, between what we officially admire and secretly desire, between, in the largest sense, the people we marry and the people we love.
Joan Didion
#78. We are who we are. I have no desire to be something else. But right now I'm afraid of what it means for those who I care about.
Andrea Cremer
#80. Directing intention to alter energy and form means more than thinking we want to change. It means more than thinking about what we want to change. Like the shamans mentioned above, it requires us to engage body, heart and imagination. We must take on the qualities of what we desire or want to be.
Llyn Roberts
#81. The desire for transcendence is intimately connected with the desire for creativity. It is just as essential to who and what we are.
Marianne Williamson
#82. Sometimes what we want to do and what we must do are not the same. Pasquo, the smaller the space between your desire and what is right, the happier you will be.
Jess Walter
#83. What is the use of fighting for the vote if we do not have a country to vote in? With that patriotism that has nerved women to endure torture in prison for the national good, we ardently desire that our country shall be victorious.
Emmeline Pankhurst
#84. Sometimes what we desire the most can change who we are, and it's up to us to decide if that's for better or worse. You must learn to control those desires so that you're always on the right path, even if that means never attaining or holding on to the thing you want most." Niko's
Dannika Dark
#86. Wealth is not an absolute. It is relative to desire. Every time we yearn for something we cannot afford, we grow poorer, whatever our resources. And every time we feel satisfied with what we have, we can be counted as rich, however little we may actually possess.
Alain De Botton
#87. What is this thing that makes us human? Birth, heartbreak, a desire for safety and order? Is it anger, shame, or fear? What we desire is unattainable and although we know it, we keep striving for it. Sisyphus, the Greek god, and all that.
Fadia Faqir
#89. Young girls think they know what their hearts desire, what they want the most. When really, we know nothing of love, devotion and utter loyalty. Not until we break our own hearts when we learn that what we desire is nothing like what we thought it would be. ~Papercut Doll
Alexia Purdy
#90. We have lived for too long in a world, and tragically in a Church, where the wills and affections of human beings are regarded as sacrosanct as they stand, where God is required to command what we already love, and to promise what we already desire.
N. T. Wright
#91. Our intention - what we desire, focus on, and think about - creates our reality.
Louise Johnson
#92. We inhabit a world where we're taught that we can have what we desire, and tend to act on it - the least we can do is admit to it when we succumb to our instincts.
Mariella Frostrup
#93. In God's name, Monsieur, let us remain indifferent; let us strive to be equally attached to whatever obedience marks out for us, be it agreeable or disagreeable. By the grace of God, we belong to Him; what else should we desire except to please Him?
Vincent De Paul
#94. The whole Twitter phenomenon is really indicative of what's happening in this country. And I say this in condemnation of myself as much as anyone else - we are growing into a nation that has no time, desire or capacity for truth. All we can handle is 140 characters of knowledge.
Kurt Sutter
#95. Within our control are our own opinions, aspirations, and desires and the demons that distract us from these goals. Outside of our control are such things as what kind of body we have, whether or not we are born into wealth, and how we are regarded by others.
Epictetus
#96. Our vanity desires that what we do best should be considered what is hardest for us.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#98. What we have is two important values in conflict: freedom of speech and our desire for healthy campaigns in a healthy democracy. You can't have both.
Dick Gephardt
#99. What ever we desire to do should start with authenticity and end with authenticity. This simply means we should be ourselves in every step we take to pursue our dreams. Authenticity is the back bone of every dream that lives inside of us.
Euginia Herlihy
#100. I was thinking about another kind of river, one that runs through every one of us, no matter where we come from, all over the world. It's the river of the heart, and the heart's desire. It's the pure, essential truth of what each one of us is, and can achieve.
Gregory David Roberts
