Passionate Desire Quotes

• Much of everyday life is filled with opportunities to be distracted. Our possessions... entertainment... cares and anxieties... and even the passionate desire and pursuit of things, some good and not so good, can keep our minds and hearts caught up in a flurry of activity.

  Joyce Meyer

  Heart, Opportunity, Anxiety

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• Want of passion is, I think, a very striking characteristic of Americans, not unrelated to their predilection for violence. For very few people truly have a passionate desire to achieve, and violence serves as a kind of substitute.

  Marguerite Yourcenar

  Passion, Thinking, People

  Marguerite Yourcenar, Matthieu Galey (1984). “With Open Eyes: Conversations with Matthieu Galey”, Boston : Beacon Press

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• Our belief in education is unbounded, our reverence for it is unfaltering, our loyalty to it is unshaken by reverses. Our passionate desire, not so much to acquire it as to bestow it, is the most animated of American traits.

  Agnes Repplier

  Loyalty, Belief, Animated

  Agnes Repplier (2009). “American Austen: The Forgotten Writing of Agnes Repplier”, Intercollegiate Studies Institute

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• I have a passionate desire for personal privacy. I want to stand before the world, for good or bad, on the book I wrote, not on what I say in letters to friends, not on my husband and my home life, the way I dress, my likes and dislikes, et cetera. My book belongs to anyone who has the price, but nothing of me belongs to the public.

  Margaret Mitchell

  Husband, Book, Home

  Margaret Mitchell (1986). “Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the wind letters, 1936-1949”, Simon & Schuster Books For Young Readers

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• That prayer which does not succeed in moderating our wishes--in changing the passionate desire into still submission, the anxious, tumultuous expectation into silent surrender--is no true prayer, and proves that we have not the spirit of true prayer.

  Frederick William Robertson

  Prayer, Expectations, Wish

  Frederick William Robertson (1866). “Sermons ...”, p.33

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• Sometimes when looking through my pile of drawings, I find an image that... awakens in me a passionate desire to inhabit it, as though I were to feel more at home in it than in myself.

  Jean Helion

  Home, Drawing, Sometimes

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• My characters are driven by a passionate desire for justice. They are rebellious and incorruptible.

  Tahar Ben Jelloun

  Character, Justice, Rebellious

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• I oppose the war in Vietnam because I love America. I speak out against it not in anger but with anxiety and sorrow in my heart, and above all with a passionate desire to see our beloved country stand as a moral example of the world.

  Martin Luther King, Jr.

  Country, War, Heart

  Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (2013). “"In a Single Garment of Destiny": A Global Vision of Justice”, p.109, Beacon Press

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• I should like to sleep like a cat, with all the fur of time, with a tongue rough as flint, with the dry sex of fire; and after speaking to no one, stretch myself over the world, over roofs and landscapes, with a passionate desire to hunt the rats in my dreams.

  Pablo Neruda

  Love, Dream, Sex

  Pablo Neruda, “Cat's Dream”

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• Most of our troubles are due to our passionate desire for and attachment to things that we misapprehend as enduring entities.

  Dalai Lama

  Letting Go, Attachment, Trouble

  Dalai Lama XIV (1995). “My Tibet”, p.11, Univ of California Press

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• I write at eighty-five for the same reasons that impelled me to write at forty-five; I was born with a passionate desire to communicate, to organize experience, to tell tales that dramatize the adventures which readers might have had. I have been that ancient man who sat by the campfire at night and regaled the hunters with imaginative recitations about their prowess. The job of an apple tree is to bear apples. The job of a storyteller is to tell stories, and I have concentrated on that obligation.

  James A. Michener

  Jobs, Writing, Adventure

  James A. Michener (2014). “The World Is My Home: A Memoir”, p.17, Dial Press

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• I believe that traditional wisdom is incomplete. A composer can have all the talent of Mozart and a passionate desire to succeed, but if he believes he cannot compose music, he will come to nothing. He will not try hard enough. He will give up too soon when the elusive right melody takes too long to materialize.

  Martin Seligman

  Giving Up, Believe, Long

  Martin E. P. Seligman (1998). “Learned Optimism”, Free Press

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• When natural inclination develops into a passionate desire, one advances towards his goal in seven-league boots.

  Nikola Tesla

  Passion, League, Goal

  Nikola Tesla (2014). “My Inventions Nikola Tesla's Autobiography”, p.26, Lulu.com

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• The law of giving and receiving is fundamental, and relates just as much to God as it does to us. As we go through the door of giving ourselves to God in worship we find that God comes through that same door and gives Himself to us. God's insistence that we worship Him is not really a demand at all but an offer-an offer to share Himself with us. When God asks us to worship Him, He is asking us to fulfill the deepest longing in Himself, which is His passionate desire to give Himself to us. It is what Martin Luther called "the joyful exchange."

  Selwyn Hughes

  Doors, Law, Giving

  Selwyn Hughes (1997). “Every Day Light: Daily Inspirations from Selwyn Hughes and Thomas Kinkade”, B & H Publishing Group

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• Getting lost was not a matter of geography so much as identity, a passionate desire, even an urgent need, to become no one and anyone, to shake off the shackles that remind you who you are, who others think you are.

  Rebecca Solnit

  Thinking, Identity, Needs

  Rebecca Solnit (2010). “A Field Guide To Getting Lost”, p.26, Canongate Books

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• He caught her, she fell, he caught her in his arms, he held her tightly unconscious of what he was doing. He held her up, though tottering himself. He felt as if his head were filled with smoke; flashes of light slipped through his eyelids; his thoughts vanished; it seemed to him that he was performing a religious act, and that he was committing a profanation. Moreover, he did not feel one passionate desire for this ravishing woman, whose form he felt against his heart. He was lost in love.

  Victor Hugo

  Religious, Lost Love, Heart

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• The truth is that my work - I was going to say my mission - is to shatter the faith of men here, there, and everywhere, faith in affirmation, faith in negation, and faith in abstention in faith, and this for the sake of faith in faith itself; it is to war against all those who submit, whether it be to Catholicism, or to rationalism, or to agnosticism; it is to make all men live the life of inquietude and passionate desire.

  Miguel de Unamuno

  War, Live Life, Men

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