Quotes about Desire

When God desires to destroy a thing, he entrusts its destruction to the thing itself. Every bad institution of this world ends by suicide.

A beautiful woman is a picture which drives all beholders nobly mad.

What can still that hunger of the heart which sickens the eye for beauty, and makes sweet-scented ease an oppression?

Your heart may be paltry compared with the heart of a great saint, but your heart is what God wants from you.

One of the reasons lust is bad (not the only reason) is that it makes you stupid. Like any addiction, it blinds your vision to everything else and focuses it on the one thing that is the object of your addiction.

What is voluntary comes from the will; what is forced comes to the will from outside and prevents it from doing what it will.

For everything naturally desires good

We want to complexify our lives. We don't have to, we want to. We want to be harried and hassled and busy. Unconsciously, we want the very thing we complain about. For if we had leisure, we would look at ourselves and listen to our hearts and see the great gaping hole in our hearts and be terrified, because that hole is so big that nothing but God can fill it.

We are bored with God because our heartsq do not hunger for God, seek God, love God

Hence man never desires infinite meat, or infinite drink. . . . But non-natural concupiscence is altogether infinite . . . Hence he that desires riches, may desire to be rich not up to a certain limit but to be simply as rich as possible (I-II,30,4).

Greed for the things money can buy ("natural wealth") is a bad thing, but it is finite. You can only enjoy a finite amount of food or drink, houses or cars, or even sex. But greed for money ("artificial wealth") is infinite. You can always want more. It's like a drug: you have to have higher and higher doses of it to give you the same "buzz" you used to get from little bits of it. And this never stops. It is Hell's false infinite.

However, when once perfect happiness has been attained, nothing will remain to be desired because then there will be full enjoyment of God