12 Quotes About Love Lust and Longing For Our Heart's Most Intense Desire

If nothing else I need you now more than ever.

Brianna Wiest
August 3, 2016

“All human activity is prompted by desire. There is a wholly fallacious theory advanced by some earnest moralists to the effect that it is possible to resist desire in the interests of duty and moral principle. I say this is fallacious, not because no man ever acts from a sense of duty, but because duty has no hold on him unless he desires to be dutiful. If you wish to know what men will do, you must know not only, or principally, their material circumstances, but rather the whole system of their desires with their relative strengths.”

— Bertrand Russell, The Conquest of Happiness

Tagged: How To Think, The Art of Awareness, Psychology, Philosophy

“Vanity is a motive of immense potency. Anyone who has much to do with children knows how they are constantly performing some antic, and saying ‘Look at me.’ ‘Look at me’ is one of the most fundamental desires of the human heart. It can take innumerable forms, from buffoonery to the pursuit of posthumous fame.”

— Bertrand Russell, A History Of Western Philosophy

“Men go to far greater lengths to avoid what they fear than to obtain what they desire.”

— Dan Brown, The Da Vinci Code

“Do not spoil what you have by desiring what you have not; remember that what you now have was once among the things you only hoped for.”

— Epicurus, Epicurus

“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

“She leaned forward and caught at his hand, pressing it between her own. The touch was like white fire through his veins. He could not feel her skin only the cloth of her gloves, and yet it did not matter. You kindled me, heap of ashes that I am, into fire. He had wondered once why love was always phrased in terms of burning. The conflagration in his own veins, now, gave the answer.”

— Cassandra Clare, Clockwork Princess

“I felt like an animal, and animals don’t know sin, do they?”

— Jess C. Scott, Wicked Lovely

“Ultimately, it is the desire, not the desired, that we love.”

— Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will To Power

“But if you love and must needs have desires, let these be your desires: To melt and be like a running brook that sings its melody to the night. To know the pain of too much tenderness. To be wounded by your own understanding of love, and to bleed willingly and joyfully. To wake at dawn with a winged heart and give thanks for another day of loving. To rest at noon hour and meditate love's ecstasy. To return home at eventide with gratitude, and then to sleep with a prayer for the beloved in your heart and a song of praise on your lips.”

— Khalil Gibran, Khalil Gibran

“I have outlasted all desire,
My dreams and I have grown apart;
My grief alone is left entire,
The gleamings of an empty heart.

The storms of ruthless dispensation
Have struck my flowery garland numb,
I live in lonely desolation
And wonder when my end will come.

Thus on a naked tree-limb, blasted
By tardy winter's whistling chill,
A single leaf which has outlasted
Its season will be trembling still.”

— Alexander Pushkin, Alexander Pushkin: The Collected Stories

“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

“Everyone believes very easily whatever he fears or desires.”

— Jean de La Fontaine, Jean de La Fontaine