For me, what's compelling about sexuality is the way that desire transforms what we take in through our senses, the ways in which our bodies betray us or rescue us by insisting on their own non-negotiable truths. Anything but frank or pragmatic.
It is one of my sources of happiness never to desire a knowledge of other people's business.
Civility does not. . . mean the mere outward gentleness of speech cultivated for the occasion, but an inborn gentleness and desire to do the opponent good.
Women are to be valued for so much more than their sexuality. We aren’t merely objects of desire.
We sabotage our creative possibilities because the world revealed by our imagination may not fit well with the life we have taken so much trouble to construct over the years. Faced with the pain of that distance, the distance between desire and reality, we turn just for a moment and quickly busy ourselves.
I am not the kind of person that wants to enforce my wants, likes, desires, on everybody else. I have no desire that everybody like what I like. I have no desire everybody say what I want to hear said. I have no desire everybody stop whatever they're doing and listen to what I have to say. I have no desire that everybody agree. No, that's not true. I do wish everybody agreed, but I'm not gonna sit around and force that on people.
The U. S. will ignore the opinion of the Iraqi people and it will compose the new government according to its own desires.
In the East we call this state meditation: no belief, no thought, no desire, no prejudice, no conditioning - in fact, no mind at all. A state of no-mind is meditation. When you can look without any mind interfering, distorting, interpreting, then you see the truth. The truth is already all around; just you have to put your mind aside.
The ultimate end of human acts is eudaimonia, happiness in the sense of living well, which all men desire; all acts are but different means chosen to arrive at it.
It is the thing that is most remote from the world in which we ourselves live that attracts us most. We are under the spell of what is distant from us. It is not our nature to desire passionately what is near at hand.
In thy discourse, if thou desire to please; All such is courteous, useful, new, or wittie: Usefulness comes by labour, wit byease; Courtesie grows in court; news in the citie.
Do not impose on others what you yourself do not desire.
I feel. . . an ardent desire to see knowledge so disseminated through the mass of mankind that it may, at length, reach even the extremes of society: beggars and kings.
Even if it is indifferent to human desires, as it seems to be; if human life is a passing episode, hardly noticeable in the vastness of cosmic processes; if there is no superhuman purpose, and no hope of ultimate salvation, it is better to know and acknowledge this truth than to endeavor, in futile self-assertion, to order the universe to be what we find comfortable.
The foundation of individual rights is the assumption that people have wants and needs and are authorities on what those wants and needs are. If people's stated desires were just some kind of erasable inscription or reprogrammable brainwashing, any atrocity could be justified.
Unobstructed access to facts can produce unlimited good only if it is matched by the desire and ability to find out what they mean and where they lead.
Not only do you want to leave the audience wanting more, you want to leave yourself wanting more.
When we're in touch with our body, we're attuned to our intuition, needs, and desires and will be in the best position to make evolutionary choices for our health and wellbeing.
How do you resign yourself to something that will never be? You stop wanting just that thing. You go numb. Or you kill the agent of desire.
Lust is weak desire. A woman without a good head on her shoulders is nothing but a piece of meat.