Quotes about Desires

Is the world crucified to you or does it fascinate you?

O never give me over to my own heart's desires, nor let me follow my own imaginations!

Daily, constantly, we choose by our desires, our thoughts, and our actions whether we want to be blessed or cursed, happy or miserable.

My dreams had to be His dreams, the ones He placed in my heart. They couldn't be the ones I thought I should have, or needed for the purpose of making other people like me.

Turn on the full powers of your will and take complete control of your own mind. It is your own mind! It was given to you as a servant to carry out your desires. And no one may enter it or influence it in the slightest degree without your consent and cooperation. What a profound fact this is!

If you fail to plant DESIRES in your subconscious mind, it will feed upon the thoughts which reach it as the result of your neglect.

We live in a society whose whole policy is to excite every nerve in the human body and keep it at the highest pitch of artificial tension, to strain every human desire to the limit and to create as many new desires and synthetic passions as possible, in order to cater to them with the products of our factories and printing presses and movie studios and all the rest.

The things that we love tell us what we are.

If the impulse to worship God and to adore Him in truth by the goodness and order of our own lives is nothing more than a transitory and emotional thing, that is our own fault. It is so only because we make it so, and because we take what is substantially a deep and powerful and lasting moral impetus, supernatural in its origin and in its direction, and reduce it to the level of our own weak and unstable and futile fancies and desires.

To eat in a monastery refectory is an exercise in humility; daily, one is reminded to put communal necessity before individual preference. While consumer culture speaks only to preferences, treating even whims as needs to be granted (and the sooner the better), monastics sense that this pandering to delusions of self-importance weakens the true self, and diminishes our ability to distinguish desires from needs. It's a price they're not willing to pay.

It would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.

This is what women want: to be safe, to be valued, to live in peace, to have their own resources, to be connected, to have control over their bodies and lives, and above all, to be loved.