If we desire to secure peace. . . it must be known that we are at all times ready for war.
[As a writer] you have to have the three D's: drive, discipline and desire. If you're missing any one of those three, you can have all the talent in the world, but it's going to be really hard to get anything done.
Burning desire is the eternal flame.
But the reason we have this built-in desire for happiness is because we're created in God's image. He wired us to want to be happy. Unfortunately, we sometimes disassociate happiness from its true source, which is God Himself. Satan tempts us by offering us happiness, because he knows that's what we want. But he offers it in the wrong places, at the wrong times, and in the wrong things.
There cannot be self-restraint in the absence of desire: when there is no adversary, what avails thy courage? Hark, do not castrate thyself, do not become a monk: chastity depends on the existence of lust.
We all have that desire to be kind of wild and bad.
I want to live faster, faster, faster!. . . I fear that this desire to live always at high pressure is the presage of a short existence. Who knows?
The secret point of money and power in America is neither the things that money can buy nor power for power's sake. . . but absolute personal freedom, mobility, privacy. It is the instinct which drove America to the Pacific, all through the nineteenth century, the desire to be able to find a restaurant open in case you want a sandwich, to be a free agent, live by one's own rules.
I have a fierce desire to paint colour.
A bride should look at everything she possibly can. . . just so she can experiment and see what makes her really feel beautiful or glamorous or classical or whatever she desires to be on that particular day.
And I wonder: Have I squandered my dogness? Have I forsaken my nature for my desires? Have I made a mistake by anticipating my future and shunning my present?
Believe it, through jihad, a man gets everything he desires.
The great chasm between the thing I say, and the thing I would say, would be quite dispiriting to me, in spite even of such kindnesses as yours, if the desire did not master the despondency.
Women of the world today dress alike. They are like so many loaves of bread. To be beautiful one must be unhurried. Personality is needed. There is too much sameness. The world seems only to have a desire for more of this sameness. To be different is to be alone.
A new opinion counts as true just in proportion as it gratifies the individual's desire to assimilate the novel in his experience to his beliefs in stock
Envy is the consuming desire to have everybody else as unsuccessful as you are.
Discipline imposed from the outside eventually defeats when it is not matched by desire from within.
. . . I just gave up trying to be a Christian. . . Let's face it, I ain't got the knack for holiness. Besides, I didn't have the slightest little desire to join the likes of Reverend Pelham at the dinner table for fourteen minutes, much less at the banquet table of Heaven eternally. Eternity is a mighty long time to be stuck with people who judge every word you say and think and condemn most of what you do. It struck me as pretty miserable company. And if Reverend Pelham was the kind of company God preferred to keep, well, I just hoped they'd be happy together.
Man's pursuit of physical desires and earthly possessions is an indication of his lack of conviction that the purpose of his existence is the attainment of spirituality.
O love, please give me a passionate red recycling bin. I will put my desire in it. I don't ever want to throw love away.