You pray in your distress and in your need; would that you might pray also in the fullness of your joy and in your abundance.
—Kahlil Gibran
Love is when the desire to be desired takes you so badly that you feel you could die of it.
—Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec
I have found the best way to give advice to your children is to find out what they want and then advise them to do it.
—Harry S. Truman
I think I wanted it too much and you didn’t want it enough.
—Jay Crownover in Rule
A person who believes… that there is a whole of which one is part, and that in being a part, one is whole: such a person has no desire whatever, at any time, to play God. Only those who have denied their being yearn to play at it.
—Ursula K. Le Guin
Let others laugh when you sacrifice desire to duty, if they will. You have time and eternity to rejoice in.
—Theodore Parker
Perhaps the most valuable result of all education is the ability to make yourself do the thing you have to do, when it ought to be done, whether you like it or not.
—Thomas Henry Huxley
Whosoever desires constant success must change his conduct with the times.
—Niccolo Machiavelli
There's an African proverb: "When death finds you, may it find you alive." Alive means living your own damn life, not the life that your parents wanted, or the life some cultural group or political party wanted, but the life that your own soul wants to live.
—Michael Meade
Happy and content one day, / ambition and desire eat you alive the next. / It's always been this way. Back and forth, / back and forth. That's the way it goes.
—David Budbill
He who has made a thousand things and he who has made none, both feel the same desire: to make something.
—Antonio Porchia
Nonattachment is not the elimination of desire. It is the spaciousness to allow any quality of mind, any thought or feeling, to arise without closing around it, without eliminating the pure witness of being. It is an active receptivity to life.
—Stephen Levine
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
You desire to know the art of living, my friend? It is contained in one phrase: make use of suffering.
—Henri Frederic Amiel
It's not a compliment to know a man wants to sleep with you. It's only a compliment when he will go to great lengths for you.
—Donna Lynn Hope