Tao Te Ching
Calumny of Apelles (Sandro Botticelli)
Desire
Paragon of paradox, desire spans the range of human experience. As the Buddha so insightfully described, it’s a kind of desire at the root of our suffering. At the same time though, without the passion of desire, there would be no life, no inspiration, no transforming evolution. In the earliest of recorded times, the Sumerian garden-of-eden story depicted the serpent and desire as wisdom and the power of life. Also sacred in the Buddhist, Hindu, and Native American traditions, the snake and desire were vilified in the Old Testament as part of the transformation from matriarchal to patriarchal society. The goddess symbolism of old was vilified and the sacred feminine principle tarnished with descriptions of sinful seducer.
Quotes (110)
“Ah, no wonder the men of Troy and Argives under arms have suffered years of agony all for her, for such a woman. Beauty, terrible beauty!”
“As our desire, so is our will; as our will, so are our acts. Our desire determines what we will become.”
“No holy place existed without us then, no woodland, no dance, no sound… I prayed one word: ‘I want.’”
“Focused on uncontrived awareness, not seduced by hope and fear, grasping and fixation; they are not swayed by a desire for change.”
“Shut out from sight the things of desire so that the people's hearts shall not be disturbed.”
“As long as people desire Enlightenment and grasp after it, it means that delusion is still with them.”
“The struggle against desire is difficult, because it must be purchased at the soul's expense.”
“From the deepest desires often come the deadliest hate… The hottest love has the coldest end.”
“To want nothing is godlike; and the less we want, the nearer we approach the divine.”
“It is the privilege of the gods to want nothing, and of godlike men to want little.”
“If things do not turn out as we wish, we should wish for them as they turn out.”
“I count him braver who overcomes his desires than him who conquers his enemies; for the hardest victory is over self.”
“a sage doesn't allow like or dislikes to get in and do him harm - he just lets things be the way they are”
“Don’t spoil what you have by desiring what you don’t. Remember that what you now have was once among the things you only hoped for.”
“I desire not what is ready to hand, but long for whatever is kept under lock and key.”
“We fail to take into account the sources of our desires when we make moral choices, not recognizing, for example, that the desire for great wealth or reputation is so empty and vain.”
“A man who has never been bewitched by the lovely smile of a woman must be a Buddha made of wood, metal, or stone.”
“So long as the object of our craving is unattained, it seems more precious than anything. But once it is ours, we crave for something else.”
“Do the gods light this fire in our hearts or does each man's mad desire become his god?”
“I am dragged along by a strange new force. Desire and reason are pulling in different directions. I see the right way and approve it, but follow the wrong.”
“Curb your desire—don’t set your heart on so many things and you will get what you need.”
“First, abandon all thought of action. Then see desirable objects as mere concepts, delusory mental pictures.”
“When we are free of desire, we see where things begin. When we are subject to desire, we see where things end.”
“mists fumed up and overcast my heart, that I could not discern the clear brightness of love, from the fog of lustfulness.”
“People of this world are deluded. They're always longing for something - always, in a word, seeking.”
“And once we are free of desire, we must also forget the desire to be free of desire. Serene and at peace, the ruler does nothing, while the world takes care of itself.”
“There is no buddha, no dharma, no training and no realization - what are you so hotly chasing?”
“I desire not to desire, for my will is without value, since I am ignorant in any case.”
“From moment then to moment their desire
Gained strength, and wisdom fled before love's fire;
Passion engulfed them, and these lovers lay
Entwined together till the break of day.”
“The true nature of passions has turned out to be the sublime knowledge of emancipation.”
“Even when passion and aggression arise, I have no anxiety. I have confidence in knowing them as self-liberated.”
“The essential way is to focus on one thing and in action find absolute peace with no desire; impartial, straightforward, tranquil, and all-embracing.”
“Desire makes slaves out of kings, and patience makes kings out of slaves.”
“illuminate all conditions... clear and desireless, the wind in the pines and the moon in the water are content in their elements.”
“The wise know they have everything they need within themselves. Hence, they do not seek anything outside themselves.”
“Abandon your desire and take on the light of wisdom, for that desire would soon lead to disappointment.”
“Verily, the roots of passion are deep, and remote its sources. It can hardly be uprooted, and young and old, wise and foolish are alike its slaves.”
“You neither desire wealth nor greatness; and, indeed, I value and admire such a man much more than I do any of the great men in the world.”
“After making me fall for you so hard, where are you going? Until the day I see you, no repose: my life, like a fish washed on shore, flails in agony.”
“Those who seek the Tao begin by using wisdom to eliminate desires… Once their desires are gone, they eliminate wisdom… Thus by doing nothing, the sage can do great things… those who would rule the world should know the value of not being busy.”
“Choice... momentary as a sound, swift as a shadow, short as any dream; brief as the lightening in the collied night.”
“Leave something to wish for. That way you will not be miserable from too much happiness… If one possessed all, all would be disillusion and discontent… Surfeits of happiness are fatal… when desire dies, fear is born.”
“Arbitrary power is the natural object of temptation to a prince, as wine and women to a young fellow, or a bribe to a judge, or avarice to old age, or vanity to a woman.”
“From desire I plunge to its fulfillment, where I long once more for desire.”
“The best laid schemes of mice and men go often askew, and leave us nothing but grief and pain for promised joy.”
“The desire of the man is for the woman, but the desire of the woman is for the desire of the man.”
“The man's desire is for the woman; but the woman's desire is rarely other than for the desire of the man.”
“Passion is universal humanity. Without it religion history art and romance would be useless.”
“As men's prayers are a disease of the intellect, so are their creeds a disease of the will.”
“what trances of torments does the man endure who is consumed with one unachieved revengeful desire. He sleeps with clenched hands; and wakes with his own bloody nails in his palms.”
“Now he found out a new thing - namely, that to promise not to do a thing is the surest way in the world to make a body want to go and do that very thing.”
“We work in the dark — we do what we can — we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.”
“In this world there are only two tragedies. One is not getting what one wants and the other is getting it”
“There are two tragedies in life. One is not to get your heart's desire. The other is to get it.”
“There is nothing like desire for preventing the things one says from having any resemblance to the things in one's mind.”
“as long as one is in any way held by the domination of cupiditas, the veil is not lifted, and the heights of consciousness, empty of content and free of illusion, are not reached, nor can any trick nor any deceit bring it about.”
“You find yourself in your desire… wherever the creative power of desire is, there springs the soil’s own seed. But do not forget to wait.”
“All that is best for us comes of itself into our hands—but if we strive to take, it perpetually eludes us.”
“Desire is when you do what you want, will is when you can do what you do not want.”
“All that produces longing in the heart deprives the heart of freedom.”
“This is true happiness: to have no ambition and to work like a horse as if you had every ambition.”
“I would make health a required course in every year of schooling... have our physicians [teach] preventative health in the classroom... form follows function, functin follows desire, and desire is the essence of life.”
“Our human life is always a hell, says the poet (Dante) until wisdom (Virgil) purges us of evil desire, and love (Beatrice) lifts us to happiness and peace.”
“Regard life with passion to see its manifest forms, do away with passion to see the Secret of Life.”
“I am slow thinking and full of interior rules that act as brakes on my desires... Everyone suspects himself of at least one of the cardinal virtues, and this is mine”
“Without desire you are dead. But with low desires you are a ghost. Shun not desire; see only that it flows into the right channels.”
“Surely it is the right wish that draws us to the right place. Nothing of importance happens accidentally in our life.”
“Desire killed that man, as desire has killed many before and after him If this earth should ever be destroyed, it will be by desire, by the lust of pleasure and self-gratification, by greed.”
“Try not to achieve anything special. You already have everything in your own pure quality.”
“As long as you think, ‘I must attain something special,’ you are actually not doing anything. When you give up, when you no longer want something… then you do something.”
“Passion and marriage are essentially irreconcilable. Their origins and their ends make them mutually exclusive. Their co-existence in our midst constantly raises insoluble problems, and the strife thereby engendered constitutes a persistent danger for every one of our social safeguards.”
“Unless there are conscious efforts to the contrary, wants will always rise faster than the ability to meet them.”
“You can say the Jesus Prayer from now til doomsday but if you don't realize that the only thing that counts in the religious life is detachment, I don't see how you'll ever even move an inch. Detachment, buddy, and only detachment. Desirelessness.”
“Grasping at things can only yield one of two results: Either the thing you are grasping at disappears, or you yourself disappear. It is only a matter of which occurs first.”
“Desire creates love through attachment to pleasurable circumstances: love creates anger by controlling through grasping. The basis of both is ignorance which creates only darkness by confusing love with anger through grasping.”
“Sexual desires are usually not directly announced but concealed under a series of feints, gestures, styles of dress, and showy behavior. Seductions are staged, scripted, costumed... Like all finite play, it proceeds largely by deception.”
“Desire, any sort of gaining idea only distorts and diminishes the natural progression of wisdom into enlightened society.”
“When we find… something familiar, we are dying to get on to the next… and we rush. We are constantly looking for. We don’t really want to read the pages of life properly and we panic.”
“It’s okay. Everything is okay… Don’t rush; everything is going to be okay… Just cool it. You don’t have to do a complete job, all at once. If you go too far, if you are too hungry, you could become a cosmic monster. That message is very courageous, but very few people have the courage to say that.”
“If we are passionate, if we are in love or in a lustful state, we begin to feel that there is an enormous amount of glue sprayed all over the world… We want to be stuck to things, to objects, wealth, money, friends… so we begin to spray this crude glue all over the place. We are asking to be stuck.”
“Nothing would be possible without desire and passion. It is only the root problem of grasping at a permanent self that turns them into poison... the five poisons cannot simply be denied, but must be transmuted”
“You can be totally entranced by the glow of something one minute, be willing to sacrifice everything to make it yours, but then a little time passes, or your perspective changes a bit, and all of a sudden you're shocked at how faded it appears.”
“So what is wild? What is wilderness? What are dreams but an internal wilderness and what is desire but a wildness of the soul?”
“it is almost impossible to legislate away the desire for hedonistic pleasures. We are drawn to hedonism like moths to torchlight.”
“Continuously longing for what we don't have... We are restless with this scent of something better close by, but out of reach... That grass is better than this grass—all day long.”
“If we understand that our desires are not the magical manifestations of free choice but are rather the product of biochemical processes (influenced by cultural factors that are also beyond our control), we might be less preoccupied with them.”
“The most common reaction of the human mind to achievement is not satisfaction, but craving for more.”
“When we see the world through the lens of desire, reality becomes fractured into what we want and what we do not want.”
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