Desire makes everything blossom; possession makes everything wither and fade.
For, just as in the beginning it is formed by desire, so afterwards love is kept in existence only by painful anxiety.
The tiny, initial clue ... by allowing us to imagine what we do not know, stimulates a desire for knowledge.
There's nothing like desire to prevent the things one says from having any resemblance to the things in one's mind.
We do not succeed in changing things according to our desire, but gradually our desire changes.
It is desire that engenders belief and if we fail as a rule to take this into account, it is because most of the desires that create beliefs end only with our own life.
We do not succeed in changing things according to our desire, but gradually our desire changes. The situation that we hoped to change because it was intolerable becomes unimportant. We have not managed to surmount the obstacle, as we were absolutely determined to do, but life has taken us round it, led us past it, and then if we turn round to gaze at the remote past, we can barely catch sight of it, so imperceptible has it become.
There can be no peace of mind in love, since the advantage one has secured is never anything but a fresh starting-point for future desires.
Desire makes everything blossom
Our desires cut across one another, and in this confused existence it is rare for happiness to coincide with the desire that clamoured for it.
In the sort of screen dappled with different states of mind which my consciousness would simultaneously unfold while I read, and which ranged from the aspirations hidden deepest within me to the completely exterior vision of the horizon which I had, at the bottom of the garden, before my eyes, what was first in me, innermost, the constantly moving handle that controlled the rest, was my belief in the philosophical richness and beauty of the book I was reading, and my desire to appropriate them for myself, whatever that book might be.
To understand a profound thought is to have, at the moment one understands it, a profound thought oneself; and this demands some effort, a genuine descent to the heart of oneself . . . Only desire and love give us the strength to make this effort. The only books that we truly absorb are those we read with real appetite, after having worked hard to get them, so great had been our need of them.
Fashions, being themselves begotten of the desire for change, are quick to change also.
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