Desirable Quotes (page 74)
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Then my mother shocked me. She said, " All those things that you want from your relationship, Liz? I have always wanted those things too." [She] showed me the handful of bullets she'd had to bite over the decades in order to stay happily married (and she was happily married...) to my father. "You have to understand how little I was raised to expect that I desired in life, honey. Remember- I come from a different time and place... and you have to understand how much I love your father.
Elizabeth Gilbert
People talk a lot about all the homosexuals there are to see in Greenwich Village, but it was all the neuters that caught my eye that day. These were my people -- as used as I was to wanting love from nowhere, as certain as I was that almost anything desirable was likely to be booby-trapped.
Kurt Vonnegut
One of the effects of original sin is an instinctive prejudice in favour of our own selfish desires. We see things as they are not, because we see them centered on ourselves. Fear, anxiety, greed, ambition and our hopeless need for pleasure all distort the image of reality that is reflected in our minds. Grace does not completely correct this distortion all at once: but it gives us a means of recognizing and allowing for it. And it tells us what we must do to correct it. Sincerity must be...
Thomas Merton
and yet, though desirous to be gone, she could not quit the mansion-house, or look an adieu to the cottage, with its black, dripping and comfortless veranda, or even notice through the misty glasses the last humble tenements of the village, without a saddened heart. Scenes had passed in Uppercross which made it precious. It stood the record of many sensations of pain, once severe, but now softened; and of some instances of relenting feeling, some breathings of friendship and reconciliation,...
Jane Austen
Wretched men cringe before tyrants who have no power, the victims of their trivial hopes and fears. They do not realise that anger is hopeless, fear is pointless and desire all a delusion. He whose heart is fickle is not his own master, has thrown away his shield, deserted his post, and he forges the links of the chain that holds him.
Boethius
Living in a constant chase after gain compels people to expend their spirit to the point of exhaustion in continual pretense and overreaching and anticipating other. Virtue has come to consist of doing something in less time that someone else. Hours in which honesty is permitted have become rare, and when they arrive one is tired and does not only want to "let oneself go" but actually wishes to stretch out as long and wide and ungainly as one happens to be... Soon we may well reach the...
Friedrich Nietzsche
You live as if you were destined to live forever, no thought of your frailty ever enters your head, of how much time has already gone by you take no heed. You squander time as if you drew from a full and abundant supply, so all the while that day which you bestow on some person or thing is perhaps your last. You have all the fears of mortals and all the desires of immortal? What foolish forgetfulness of mortality to defer wise resolutions to the fiftieth or sixtieth year, and to intend to...
Denis Diderot
We have also set up for them an edifying project for a continuous mitigation of their own tyranny, ascribing to them an unshakeable faith in the triumph of virtue, as well as in the moral justification of their crimes. These are the theories of well-meaning children who see everything in black or white, dream of nothing but angels or demons, and have no idea of the incredible number of hypocritical masks of every color and shape and size which men use to conceal their features when they have...
Alfred de Vigny
Man is a spiritual being, a soul, and at some period of his life everyone is possessed with an irresistible desire to know his relationship to the Infinite. . . . There is something within him which urges him to rise above himself, to control his environment, to master the body and all things physical and live in a higher and more beautiful world.
David O. McKay
We are searching for the core of our lives; our culture intuits that writing, that ancient activity, might be the pathway...Awakening does not feed ego's needs and desires; it pulverizes the self. Our society couldn't knowingly bear such reduction, so we've tricked ourselves into the same path but call it writing.
Natalie Goldberg