“Don’t live by generalities, unless it be to act virtuously, and don’t ask desire to follow precise laws, for you will have to drink tomorrow from the water you scorn today.”
-Baltasar Gracián
(more…)Desire
784 – “I am imperfect in many things, nevertheless I want my brethren and kinsfolk to know my nature so that they may be able to perceive my soul’s desire.”
719 – “Life ought to be a struggle of desire towards adventures whose nobility will fertilise the soul and lead to the conception of new, glorious things.”
–Rebecca West
650 – “I fell in love with her courage, her sincerity, and her flaming self respect. And it’s these things I’d believe in, even if the whole world indulged in wild suspicions that she wasn’t all she should be. I love her and it is the beginning of everything.”
–F Scott Fitzgerald referring to his soon to be wife, Zelda Sayre
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556 – “To desire and expect nothing for oneself—and to have profound sympathy for others—is genuine holiness.”
–Ivan Turgenev
544 – “It is the desire of the good people of the whole country that sectionalism as a factor in our politics should disappear.”
–Rutherford B Hayes, 19th President of the United States of America
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491 – “If there were in the world today any large number of people who desired their own happiness more than they desired the unhappiness of others, we could have paradise in a few years.”
–Bertrand Russell [Attributed]
478 – Definition of Love from 1690s Advice Column
“Q: What’s love?
A: Love, and you’ll know … We’ll give you the best description we can of that passion, which we have some reason to know … ‘Tis a mixture of friendship and desire, bounded by the rules of honor and virtue … Love, being a medium between pure friendship and perfect desire, ’tis warm enough to keep friendship from an ague, but not so furiously hot as to set all on fire. They manage matters so between ’em, that the sweet melts the strong; and from this agreeable mixture or harmony, especially where reciprocal, result the tenderest, noblest pleasure that’s purely humane. …”
–A Member of the Athenian Society
[Note this quote has been edited for clarity and length, the quote in its entirety can be found in the original source posted below]
423 – “If your desires are not great, a little will seem much to you; for small appetite makes poverty equivalent to wealth.”
345 – “Art is the desire of a man to express himself, to record the reactions of his personality to the world he lives in.”
–Amy Lowell
1000 Quotes Project 