Desired Things Quotes & Sayings

So let me put it thus: Hold on to your principles of morality and ethics, use your willpower to the limit, pay great heed to every noble, uplifting desire that is in you; but realize that these things alone are not enough, that they will never bring you to the desired place. We have to realize that all our best is totally inadequate, that a spiritual battle must be fought in a spiritual manner. — David Lloyd-Jones

We must learn to let go, to give up, to make room for the things we have prayed for and desired. — Charles Fillmore

Patience from a Buddhist perspective is not a "wait and see" attitude, but rather one of "just be there" ... Patience can also be based on not expecting anything.Think of patience as an act of being open to whatever comes your way. When you begin to solidify expectations, you get frustrated because they are not met in the way you had hoped ... With no set idea of how something is supposed to be, it is hard to get stuck on things not happening in the time frame you desired. Instead, you are just being there, open to the possibilities of your life. — Lodro Rinzler

... it was strange how afraid he was of her answer, even though he knew she desired him. Desire and love were two different things.
Sweat was damp on his skin, fear tight in his chest.
Love me. — Emily Gee

A physical attraction is often desired above many things but you'll discover it to be short lived. Find yourself someone that gets under your skin, seduces the dusty corners of your heart, and provides you with a mental connection. That is when you'll know true intimacy. — M.J. Abraham

All things are created twice; first mentally; then physically. The key to creativity is to begin with the end in mind, with a vision and a blue print of the desired result. — Stephen Covey

Love and marriage are of the Father's most powerful means for the making of his foolish little ones into sons and daughters. But so unlike in many cases are the immediate consequences to those desired and expected, that it is hard for not a few to believe that he is anywhere looking after their fate--caring about them at all. And the doubt would be a reasonable one, if the end of things was marriage. But the end is life--that we become the children of God; after which, all things can and will go their grand, natural course; the heart of the Father will be content for his children, and the hearts of the children will be content in their Father. — George MacDonald

God desired to reveal himself in and through His creatures by communicating to them as much of His own goodness and glory as they were capable of receiving. But this communication was not meant to give created beings something they could possess in themselves, having full charge and access apart from Him. Rather, God as the ever-living, ever-present, ever-acting One, who upholds all things by the word of His power, and in whom all things exist, meant that the relationship of His creatures to himself would be one of unceasing, absolute dependence. As truly as God by His power once created all things, so by that same power must God every moment maintain all things. — Andrew Murray

It was her company he desired. He wanted to put his arms around her and
to sit in silence, staring into the fire, drinking wine, smoking the occasional cigarette; that
would be enough. Life was made up of simple things; he was weary of all the years
he had spent searching for something, though quite what he didn't know. — Paulo Coelho

They were falling back into familiarity, into common ground, into the dirty gray. Just ordinary humans in ordinary opaque boiled-egg light, without grace, without revelation, composite of contradictions, easy principles, arguing about what they half believed in or even what they didn't believe in at all, desiring comfort as much as raw austerity, authenticity as much as playacting, desiring coziness of family as much as to abandon it forever. Cheese and chocolate they wanted, but also to kick all these bloody foreign things out. A wild daring love ... but also a rice and dal love blessed by the unexciting feel of everyday, its surprises safely enmeshed in something solidly familiar ... Every single contradiction history or opportunity might make available to them, every contradiction they were heir to, they desired. But only as much, of course, as they desired purity and a lack of contradiction. — Kiran Desai

We should earnestly desire but few things if we clearly knew what we desired. — Francois De La Rochefoucauld

At first Silas liked the subjects simply because of their strangeness, but slowly he began to believe in the possibilities of what he was reading, in a world filled with secrets and magic. When he was younger, he'd suspected his father believed in many of these things too, so that made it easy for them to talk. As he grew older, Silas began to see the glimmers of hieroglyphic logic behind the occult. There was a reason for these oddities to exist, perhaps as strange connections between the mind and the things people feared or desired. Magic was a conversation. Ghosts were real, and they were watching because something had happened that necessitated their presence. — Ari Berk

...lace is formed from the absence of substance; it is imagined in the spaces between the threads. Lace is a thing like hope. It lived, it survived, and it was desired for what it was not. If faith, as the nuns said, was the substance of things hoped for, then lace was the outline - the suggestion - of things not seen. — Iris Anthony

The sublimity of wisdom is to do those things living, which are to be desired when dying. — Norman Douglas

Success depends on getting good at saying no without feeling guilty. You cannot get ahead with your own goals if you are always saying yes to someone else's projects. You can only get ahead with your desired lifestyle if you are focused on the things that will produce that lifestyle. — Jack Canfield

The scenes in our life resemble pictures in a rough mosaic; they are ineffective from close up, and have to be viewed from a distance if they are to seem beautiful. That is why to attain something desired is to discover how vain it is; and why, though we live all our lives in expectation of better things, we often at the same time long regretfully for what is past. The present, on the other hand, is regarded as something quite temporary and serving as the only road to our goal. That is why most men discover when they look back on their life that they have been living the whole time ad interim, and are surprised to see that which they let go by so unregarded and unenjoyed was precisely their life, was precisely that in expectation of which they lived. — Arthur Schopenhauer

Wherefore in all great works are Clerks so much desired? Wherefore are Auditors so well-fed? What causeth Geometricians so highly to be enhaunsed? Why are Astronomers so greatly advanced? Because that by number such things they find, which else would farre excell mans minde. — Robert Recorde

They strive to attain their wishes by every available means, instructing and compelling themselves to dishonest and difficult acts. And when their labour is without reward, it is the fruitless disgrace that tortures them - they are not grieved to have desired evil things but to have desired in vain. Then remorse for what they began lays hold of them, and the fear of beginning again, and thence creeps in the agitation of mind which can find no relief - because neither can they rule nor can they obey their desires. And then comes the hesitancy of a life failing to clear a way for itself, and the dull wasting of a soul lying torpid amidst forsaken hopes. — Seneca.

The Taellywood treasure beckoned us. All of us ached for God's wisdom. We had so many questions. We wanted to know why things happened the way they did. We needed to know. We desired the truth and we yearned for answers to many of life's questions. — Pat Patrick

When you have pictured and defined your desired legacy, allow your present life activities and efforts to begin reflecting the future you desire. Begin to do what you want to see, become involved in the causes you want to be a part of. Show your legatees how you want and expect things to be done after you are gone. This will enable them to fit the vision into their own as they make their own individual unique mark. — Archibald Marwizi

It isn't humanly possible for the things radical leftists want to bring about the desired results that they choose. They claim they want a utopian happiness, and they are further and further away from it the more successful they are. — Rush Limbaugh

What is it that endowed things with meaning, value, significance? The creating heart, which desired, and, out of its desire, created. It created joy and woe. It wanted to satiate itself with woe. We must take all the suffering that has been endured by men and animals upon ourselves and affirm it, and possess a goal in which it acquires reason. — Friedrich Nietzsche

All good things desired take time and patience. If you have the patience it will take time, if you have the time you will acquire patience. -Karen Rivello — Karen Rivello

Strategy #3: Explore new things If negotiation makes you feel prickly or uncomfortable, focus on doing or exploring things that are out of your comfort zone. You don't need to become a perfect negotiator to achieve the desired results. — Patrick Kennedy

Holding on will not make something come back. In my experience, it actually pushes it farther away. You cannot go back and undo what's done, my friends. You can only move forward. And if your deepest compulsions and instincts tell you that you're meant to be with that person or doing that thing, you should let go and move forth and see how life takes you there. Clearly, things aren't going according to your desired plan already, so why not throw caution to the wind and see where you end up. — Brianna Wiest

Faith is the substance of things unseen. (Rom. 10:17). By faith, we hold as true those things that can in no way be visualized. But one cannot see all things that can be visualized in the same light. This is a statement that was firmly held by philosophers and theologians and subscribed to by popular culture long before the invisible parts of the electromagnetic spectrum were known. A difference was recognized between those things that can be seen by the light of the sun or the flame of a candle and those things that can show themselves on rare occasions without losing their status as members of a class of invisible beings. Some such visions may be everyday occurrences. Others are exceptions- some dreaded, some desired. — Barbara Duden

The role played by man in production always consists solely in combining his personal forces with the forces of Nature in such a way that the cooperation leads to some particular desired arrangement of material. No human act of production amounts to more than altering the position of things in space and leaving the rest to Nature. — Ludwig Von Mises

I was young, so that I desired high things only. — Gene Wolfe

I told them all, "If possible, I would be here with only you, forever. But I am a man who toils, and I must go where I must. We need currency for famous nightclubs, yes? I am doing something I hate for you. This is what it means to be in love. So do not spleen me." But to be truthful, I was not even the smallest portion sad to go to Lutsk to translate for Jonathan Safran Foer. As I mentioned before, my life is ordinary. But I had never been to Lutsk, or any of the multitudinous petite villages that still endure after the war. I desired to see new things. I desired to experience volumes. And I would be electrical to meet an American. — Jonathan Safran Foer

In popular culture, the term "butterfly effect" is almost always misused. It has become synonymous with "leverage" - the idea of a small thing that has a big impact, with the implication that, like a lever, it can be manipulated to a desired end. This misses the point of Lorenz's insight. The reality is that small things in a complex system may have no effect or a massive one, and it is virtually impossible to know which will turn out to be the case. — Stanley McChrystal

Things have to be made to happen in a way you want them to happen. Without management, without the intervention of organized willpower the desired result simply cannot be obtained. — Robert Heller

My life came to a standstill. I could breathe, eat, drink and sleep, and I could not help doing these things; but there was no life, for there were no wishes the fulfilment of which I could consider reasonable. If I desired anything, I knew in advance that whether I satisfied my desire or not, nothing would come of it. Had a fairy come and offered to fulfil my desires I should not have known what to ask. If in moments of intoxication I felt something which, though not a wish, was a habit left by former wishes, in sober moments I knew this to be a delusion and that there was really nothing to wish for. I could not even wish to know the truth, for I guess of what it consisted. The truth was that life is meaningless. — Leo Tolstoy

To attain something desired is to discover how vain it is; and ... though we live all our lives in expectation of better things, we often at the same time long regretfully for what is past. The present, on the other hand, is regarded as something quite temporary and serving only as the road to our goal. That is why most men discover when they look back on their life that they have the whole time been living ad interim, and are surprised to see that which they let go by so unregarded and unenjoyed was precisely their life, was precisely in expectation of which they lived. — Arthur Schopenhauer

Then my mother shocked me. She said, " All those things that you want from your relationship, Liz? I have always wanted those things too." [She] showed me the handful of bullets she'd had to bite over the decades in order to stay happily married (and she was happily married ... ) to my father. "You have to understand how little I was raised to expect that I desired in life, honey. Remember- I come from a different time and place ... and you have to understand how much I love your father. — Elizabeth Gilbert

Focus upon the things that are desired rather than those elements that are undesirable. — Steven Redhead

She had dearly missed the northern world during her time in the South Seas. She had missed the change of seasons, and the hard, bright, bracing sunlight of winter. She had missed the rigors of a cold climate, and the rigors of the mind, as well. She was simply not made for the tropics
neither in complexion or disposition. There were those who loved Tahiti because it felt to them like Eden
like the beginning of history; she wished to live within humanity's most recent moment, at the cusp of invention and progress. She did not wish to inhabit a land of spirits and ghosts; she desired a world of telegraphs, trains, improvements, theories, and science, where things changed by the day. — Elizabeth Gilbert

The scenes of our life are like pictures in rough mosaic, which have no effect at close quarters, but must be looked at from a distance in order to discern their beauty. So that to obtain something we have desired is to find out that it is worthless; we are always living in expectation of better things, while, at the same time, we often repent and long for things that belong to the past. We accept the present as something that is only temporary, and regard it only as a means to accomplish our aim. So that most people will find if they look back when their life is at an end, that they have lived their lifelong ad interim, and they will be surprised to find that something they allowed to pass by unnoticed and unenjoyed was just their life - that is to say, it was the very thing in the expectation of which they lived. And so it may be said of man in general that, befooled by hope, he dances into the arms of death. — Arthur Schopenhauer

O, how incomprehensible everything was, and actually sad, although it was also beautiful. One knew nothing. One lived and ran about the earth and rode through forests, and certain things looked so challenging and promising and nostalgic: a star in the evening, a blue harebell, a reed-green pond, the eye of a person or a cow. And sometimes it seemed that something never seen yet long desired was about to happen, that a veil would drop from it all; but then it passed, nothing happened, the riddle remained unsolved, the secret spell unbroken, and in the end one grew old and looked cunning . . . or wise . . . and still one knew nothing perhaps, was still waiting and listening. HERMANN HESSE Narcissus and Goldmund — Peter Matthiessen

[ ... ] it is a strange thing that most of the feeling we call religious, most of the mystical outcrying which is one of the most prized and used and desired reactions of our species, is really the understanding and the attempt to say that man is related to the whole thing, related inextricably to all reality, known and unknowable. This is a simple thing to say, but the profound feeling of it made a Jesus, a St. Augustine, a St. Francis, a Roger Bacon, a Charles Darwin, and an Einstein. Each of them in his own tempo and with his own voice discovered and reaffirmed with astonishment the knowledge that all things are one thing and that one thing is all things - plankton, a shimmering phosphorescence on the sea and the spinning planets and an expanding universe, all bound together by the elastic string of time. It is advisable to look from the tide pool to the stars and then back to the tide pool again. — John Steinbeck

The true meaning of life lies in learning. When you learn, you understand the things better, when you understand the things better, it reflects in your actions, and when your actions are right, according to the process of life, you are bound to receive the desired result. — Roshan Sharma

Fiction started up, and we started burning brain cells on stories about things that didn't happen to people who didn't exist. Why? The only answer can be that humans deeply, deeply desired it. — Lee Child

You know how they say revenge is best served up cold? I'd say it's best not served up at all. Revenge is a great motivator, but it doesn't help achieve the desired results. I've seen guys lose buddies, then go off half-cocked, piss fuel running through their veins. Things never turned out well. — Ellen Hopkins

Happy bridegroom, Hesper brings All desired and timely things. All whom morning sends to roam, Hesper loves to lead them home. Home return who him behold, Child to mother, sheep to fold, Bird to nest from wandering wide: Happy bridegroom, seek your bride. — A.E. Housman

If everyone realized this truth about their own inherent power to create and to attract whatever they desired, not everyone would want to be the president of a country, not everyone would want to live on that mansion on the hill, and not everyone would want the same things you would. — Stephen Richards

Yahweh: You've been unhappy because you've desired things that cannot be.
Lucifer: That's what desire IS. The need for what we can't have. The need for what's readily available is called greed. — Mike Carey

The men and women who forged this nation [USA] were straight-up maniacs about freedom. It was just about the only thing they cared about, so they jammed it into everything. This is understandable, as they were breaking away from a monarchy. But it's also a little bonkers, since one of the things they desired most desperately was freedom of religion, based on the premise that Europe wasn't religious enough and that they needed the freedom to live by non-secular laws that were more restrictive than that of any government, including provisions for the burning of suspected witches. — Chuck Klosterman

It was only that she wanted him to be happy, resenting, however, his inability to be so with things as they were, and never acknowledging that though she did want him to be happy, it was only in her own way and by some plan of hers for him that she truly desired him to be so. — Nella Larsen

Journey to Excellence involve identifying the right things, at the right time, and to act upon them with the right way to achieve desired measurable outcome. — Bharat Shah

For him, behind every feeling and thought was the sense of the open door leading into nothingness. To be sure, he suffered from dread of many things, of madness, the police, insomnia, and also dread of death. But everything he dreaded he likewise desired and longed for at the same time. He was full of burning curiosity about suffering, destruction, persecution, madness and death. — Hermann Hesse

The Presence, indeed, was with him, and he felt it, but he knew it only as the wind and shadow, the sky and closed daisies: in all these things and the rest it took shape that it might come near him. Yea, the Presence was in his very soul, else he could never have rejoiced in friend, or desired ghost to mother him: still he knew not the Presence. But it was drawing nearer and nearer to his knowledge -- even in sun and air and night and cloud, in beast and flower and herd-boy, until at last it would reveal itself to him, in him, as Life Himself. Then the man would know that in which the child had rejoiced. — George MacDonald

I stayed because there was no other place I could learn what I desired. Mere whipping could not keep me away from it."
There are things I desire to learn, and I can only learn them here."
I handed her the hard, dark piece of wood. "If you want me to leave, you must do worse than welts. — Patrick Rothfuss

Thoughts are to the Desires as Scouts and Spies, to range abroad, and find the way to the things Desired. — Thomas Hobbes

Even though prayers are not offered only to get a desired result, there is little doubt that most miracles are the result of prayer. God wants us to pray to him and ask him for things, just as any loving father and mother want their children to come to them with whatever is on their minds. But if our focus is solely on getting the outcome we want, the prayer will fail, precisely because our belief is placed in the wrong place. It's a great irony. If all we care about is the result, then we are effectively making that result our God, rather than God himself. So if we are praying to our "God" - the God of results - rather than to God himself, then we are praying to a "God" who is not God, and who is therefore powerless to help us. — Eric Metaxas

Progress means movement in a desired direction, and we do not all desire the same things for our species. — C.S. Lewis

Peace, above all things, is to be desired, but blood must sometimes be spilled to obtain it on equable and lasting terms. — Andrew Jackson

Is it easy to love God' asks an old author. 'It is easy,' he replies, 'to those who do it.' I have included two Graces under the word Charity. But God can give a third. He can awake in man, towards Himself, a supernatural Appreciative love. This is of all gifts the most to be desired. Here, not in our natural loves, nor even in ethics, lies the true centre of all human and angelic life. With this all things are possible. — C.S. Lewis

How do I describe the feeling that envelopes my being when he is near? It is like a cocoon of warmth and peace, but beneath that there is a deep longing, a hunger that one kiss would not be able to satisfy, one kiss would only make the hunger greater. But oh, how I long for that kiss, a kiss that might never come.
Being close to him does things to me, makes me feel things I never knew existed, makes me want things I have never wanted before. I have never desired to know a man's body before I met Ariston. I wonder if he knows that I desire him in such a way, that I not only want to know his body, but that I want him to know mine. There is a part of me that would not care if he loves me or not if I could just have one beautiful, passionate night with him, while the rest of me knows that one night would never be enough. — Jasmine Dubroff

It was the secrets of heaven and earth that I desired to learn; and whether it was the outward substance of things or the inner spirit of nature and the mysterious soul of man that occupied me, still my inquiries were directed to the metaphysical, or in its highest sense, the physical secrets of the world. — Mary Shelley

We always want what is not ours. It's intriguing. We think if we can just get that, we'll finally be happy. The lure of what we do not have is deceptive.
True freedom, however, is found in being content with what we already have.
Can you imagine it?
Can you imagine being whole, complete, fulfilled - content with what you already have? It sounds too good to be true.
Utter satisfaction?
That is freedom.
That is what everyone is searching for.
Where, though, can you find this kind of contentment?
I've noticed that the more I've come to know Jesus, the less I've desired material things.
Materialism is what happens when you find your joy in things. Contentment is what happens when you find your joy in Jesus. They're complete opposites. You can easily differentiate a materialistic person from a content person. — Cole Ryan

Science only means knowledge; and for [Greek] ancients it did only mean knowledge. Thus the favorite science of the Greeks was Astronomy, because it was as abstract as Algebra ... We may say that the great Greek ideal was to have no use for useful things. The Slave was he who learned useful things; the Freeman was he who learned useless things. This still remains the ideal of many noble men of science, in the sense they do desire truth as the great Greeks desired it; and their attitude is an external protest against vulgarity of utilitarianism. — Gilbert K. Chesterton

Sometimes what we lack is the thrill of anticipation or the delay of gratification. We enjoy things far more when we've really desired them but had to wait for them. The real value is found in our self control and patience, which allows us to delay gratification and build anticipation. Letting desire build is an abstract way to achieve balance and moderation in your life... Moderation just may be the answer to boredom - go figure! -- pg 145-146 — Cristin Frank

I bear my witness that the worst days I have ever had have turned out to be my best days. And when God has seemed most cruel to me he has then been most kind. If there is anything in this world for which I would bless him more than for anything else it is for pain and affliction. I am sure that in these things the richest tenderest love has been manifested to me. Our Father's wagons rumble most heavily when they are bringing us the richest freight of the bullion of his grace. Love letters from heaven are often sent in black-edged envelopes. The cloud that is black with horror is big with mercy. Fear not the storm. It brings healing in its wings and when Jesus is with you in the vessel the tempest only hastens the ship to its desired haven. — Charles Haddon Spurgeon

'Everything has its place. Let in only those things that are greatly desired, no more and no less. That's how to make sense of the world, and the only real way to achieve happiness.' — Vicki Pettersson

The young of the town, preoccupied with their own germinating angst, which each possessed in varying degree (though few were ever fully aware of its existence), felt no particular connection to the land, its people, its structures, or its history. As such, they had no inclination to defend its invisible borders from declared enemies within or without. They desired only escape from this small village, which each viewed as an existential prison built upon the antiquated expectations of their parents and their parents' parents. And because of their invisible bondage, the young of this town were possessed by a quiet rage. But this rage laid torpid and inert within them, dulled to sleep by the tired repetition of nothing happening over and over and over again, day after day after day.
This is the story of one of those young people, and the terrible things that happened to her, and the terrible things she did as a result. — P.S. Baber

The most uncomplicated thing of all!' he replied. 'For someone well acquainted with the fifth dimension, it costs nothing to expand space to the desired proportions. I'll say more, respected lady - to devil knows what proportions! I, however,' Koroviev went on chattering, 'have known people who had no idea, not only of the fifth dimension, but generally of anything at all, and who nevertheless performed absolute wonders in expanding their space. Thus, for instance, one city-dweller, as I've been told, having obtained a three-room apartment on Zemlyanoy Val, transformed it instantly, without any fifth dimension or other things that addle the brain, into a four-room apartment by dividing one room in half with a partition. — Mikhail Bulgakov

Daily communication with God must be desired and pursued above all other things. — Lailah Gifty Akita

It was tempting to fall back on reliable tactics and pretend things were ... perfect. To pretend he was only a boy and I was only a girl and we desired each other. I wanted him to hold and kiss me and pretend he would do anything to protect me. I wanted to pretend he felt a fraction of the things I couldn't seem to stop myself from feeling for him. My heart hurt. As much as my shoulder and ribs screamed with pain, they were eclipsed by the sorrow in my heart. I couldn't pretend anymore. The time for it had passed; there was only the reality of things left to deal with. — C.J. Roberts

There was a language in the world that everyone understood, a language the boy had used throughout the time that he was trying to improve things at the shop. It was the language of enthusiasm, of things accomplished with love and purpose, and as part of a search for something believed in and desired. — Paulo Coelho

Everything has a personality: everything sends an emotional signal. Even where this was not the intention of the designer, the people who view the website infer personalities and experience emotions. Bad websites have horrible personalities and instill horrid emotional states in their users, usually unwittingly. We need to design things-products, websites, services-to convey whatever personality and emotions are desired. — Donald A. Norman

The eclipse of your faith, the darkness of your mind, the fainting of your hope, all these things are but parts of God's method of making you ripe for the great inheritance upon which you shall soon enter. These trials are for the testing and strengthening of your faith
they are waves that wash you further upon the rock
they are winds which waft your ship the more swiftly towards the desired haven. — Charles Haddon Spurgeon

I have desired, like every artist, to create a little world out of the beautiful, pleasant, and significant things of this marred and clumsy world, and to show in a vision something of the face of Ireland to any of my own people who would look where I bid them. I have therefore
written down accurately and candidly much that I have heard and seen,
and, except by way of commentary, nothing that I have merely imagined. — W.B.Yeats

Scientific method seeks to understand things as they are, while alchemy seeks to bring about a desired state of affairs. To put it another way, the primary objective of science is truth, - that of alchemy, operational success. — George Soros

Stephan was secretive and a liar, but he was a very gentle and expert lover. She was the petted, cherished child, the desired mistress, the worshipped, perfumed goddess. She was all these things to Stephan - or so he made her believe. — Jean Rhys

Count your years, and you will be ashamed to desire and pursue the same things you desired in your boyhood days. — Seneca.

Egoism holds, therefore, is that each man's happiness is the sole good--that a number of different things are each of them the only good thing there is--an absolute contradiction! No more complete and thorough refutation of any theory could be desired. — G.E. Moore

Between temporal and eternal things there is this difference: a temporal thing is loved more before we have it, and it begins to grow worthless when we gain it, for it does not satisfy the soul, whose true and certain rest is eternity; but the eternal is more ardently loved when it is acquired than when it is merely desired. — Augustine Of Hippo

They have cast my life like dice, in a game that is not a game. The unusual erupted into my life like a storm; I mean unusual in my actual perception of things. Do not mistake me; I never desired things that are certainly harder to bear, and nobody asked me if I really wanted an extraordinary life. That is not entirely true; I was asked, in the way a child seeing a cake is asked if he really wants to eat it. — Florian Armas

Sing, O Muse, of the man of many devices, who wandered full many ways after he had sacked the sacred citadel of Troy. Many were the men whose cities he saw and whose mind he learned, aye, and many the woes he suffered in his heart upon the sea, seeking to win his own life and the return of his comrades. Yet even so he saved not his comrades, though he desired it sore, for through their own blind folly they perished - fools, who devoured the kine of Helios Hyperion; but he took from them the day of their returning. Of these things, goddess, daughter of Zeus, beginning where thou wilt, tell thou even unto us. — Homer

The Apple Marketing Philosophy" that stressed three points. The first was empathy, an intimate connection with the feelings of the customer: "We will truly understand their needs better than any other company." The second was focus: "In order to do a good job of those things that we decide to do, we must eliminate all of the unimportant opportunities." The third and equally important principle, awkwardly named, was impute. It emphasized that people form an opinion about a company or product based on the signals that it conveys. "People DO judge a book by its cover," he wrote. "We may have the best product, the highest quality, the most useful software etc.; if we present them in a slipshod manner, they will be perceived as slipshod; if we present them in a creative, professional manner, we will impute the desired qualities. — Walter Isaacson

Our lord is a magic lord as we all desired, and magical things have sought him from over there, and they all obey his hests."
"It is so," said all but Gazic. And Gazic rose up in a pause of their gladness.
"Many strange things," he said, "have entered our village, coming from over there. And it may be that human folk are best, and the ways of the fields we know. — Lord Dunsany

To wake, and sleep, and know that one is loved; to hear, as I hear now, the whisper of a footfall; to feel the touch of hands; these things, above all else, are to be desired. I count myself fortunate, in that, for a little while, I have known them. — Keith Roberts

I should have wished to possess the intellectual equilibrium that characterizes you and permits you to achieve without fail the desired end ... Chance has not favoured me with an equal self-assurance, it is the only regret I have about things of this earth. — Paul Cezanne

The regenerate man's desires are rectified; they are set on God himself, and the things above ... Before, he saw no beauty in Christ, for which he was to be desired; but now he is all he desires, he is altogether lovely ... regenerating grace sets the affections so firmly on God, that the man is disposed, at God's command, to quit his hold of every thing else, in order to keep his hold of Christ ... If the stream of our affections were never thus turned, we are, doubtless, going down the stream into the pit. — Thomas Boston

All her life, she was used to being pampered, to having everything she desired, but the things that she valued were never those that could be bought but those small tokens of truth and dogged fidelity which she, herself, could not give to anyone. — F. Sionil Jose

Oh, but it was splendid the things women were doing for men all the time, thought Jane. Making them feel, perhaps sometimes by no more than a casual glance, that they were loved and admired and desired when they were worthy of none of these things - enabling them to preen themselves and puff out their plumage like birds and bask in the sunshine of love, real or imagined, it didn't matter which. — Barbara Pym

Faith is that quality or power by which the things desired become the things possessed. — Kathryn Kuhlman

The things I was good at had no real application: addressing envelopes in bubble letters with smiling creatures on the flap. Making sludgy coffee I drank with grave affect. Finding a certain desired song playing on the radio, like a medium scanning for news of the dead. — Emma Cline

Two things are desired in order that intercourse may be had: First, that a minister or agent be allowed to reside at the capital. Second, that commerce between different countries be freely allowed. — Townsend Harris

Things had changed between them nevertheless. They were children of a time and culture which mistrusted love, 'in love', romantic love, romance in toto, and which nevertheless in revenge proliferated sexual language, linguistic sexuality, analysis, dissection, deconstruction, exposure. They were theoretically knowing: they knew about phallocracy and penisneid, punctuation, puncturing and penetration, about polymorphous and polysemous perversity, orality, good and bad breasts, clitoral tumescence, vesicle persecution, the fluids, the solids, the metaphors for these, the systems of desire and damage, infantile greed and oppression and transgression, the iconography of the cervix and the imagery of the expanding and contracting Body, desired, attacked, consumed, feared. — A.S. Byatt

one of the things they desired most desperately was freedom of religion, based on the premise that Europe wasn't religious enough — Chuck Klosterman

Mrs. Tulliver had lived thirteen years with her husband, yet she retained in all the freshness of her early married life a facility of saying things which drove him in the opposite direction to the one she desired. Some minds are wonderful for keeping their bloom in this way, as a patriarchal goldfish apparently retains to the last its youthful illusion that it can swim in a straight line beyond the encircling glass. Mrs. Tulliver was an amiable fish of this kind, and after running her head against the same resisting medium for thirteen years would go at it again to-day with undulled alacrity. — George Eliot

Perhaps the mere existence of things undone should be a sort of satisfaction in itself, though the idea would appear to be paradoxical. Only one who is long since dead while still seemingly alive does not have many "promises to keep, and miles to go before I sleep," and that state of inertness is not to be desired. To the wise advice that we live every day as though it will be our last, we do well to add the admonition to live every day as though we will be on this earth forever. — Sherwin B. Nuland

That which we most desire, we worship as our god; for that which is chiefly desired is the chief good in his account, who so desires it. And what he counts his chief good, that he makes his god. Desire is an act of worship ... and to be most desired is that worship, that honor, which is due only to God. To desire anything more or so much as the enjoyment of God is to idolize it, to prostrate the heart to it, and worship it as God only should be worshipped. He only should be that one thing desirable to us above all things ... — David Clarkson

One of the great things about rap music ... it leaves a lot to be desired, as far as I'm concerned, musically, but I do recognize the very important place that it has in music and in creating role models for younger kids to emulate, giving them the dream that they can make it out of whatever situation they're in. — Graham Nash

Verily all things move within your being in constant half embrace, the desired and the dreaded, the repugnant and the cherished, the pursued and that which you would escape. — Khalil Gibran

It were much to be desired, that when mathematical processes pass through the human brain instead of through the medium of inanimate mechanism, it were equally a necessity of things that the reasonings connected with operations should hold the same just place as a clear and well-defined branch of the subject of analysis, a fundamental but yet independent ingredient in the science, which they must do in studying the engine. — Ada Lovelace

When a man rides a long time through wild regions he feels the desire for a city. Finally he comes to Isidora, a city where the buildings have spiral staircases encrusted with spiral seashells, where perfect telescopes and violins are made, where the foreigner hesitating between two women always encounters a third, where cockfights degenerate into bloody brawls among the bettors. He was thinking of all these things when he desired a city. Isidora, therefore, is the city of his dreams: with one difference. The dreamed-of city contained him as a young man; he arrives at Isidora in his old age. In the square there is the wall where the old men sit and watch the young go by; he is seated in a row with them. Desires are already memories. — Italo Calvino

The second trait of narcissism in which asceticism plays a role is blankness. "If only I could feel" - in this formula the self-denial and self-absorption reach a perverse fulfillment. Nothing is real if I cannot feel it, but I can feel nothing. The defense against there being something real outside the self is perfected, because, since I am blank, nothing outside me is alive. In therapy the patient reproaches himself for an inability to care, and yet this reproach, seemingly so laden with self-disgust, is really an accusation against the outside. For the real formula is, nothing suffices to make me feel. Under cover of blankness, there is the more childish plaint that nothing can make me feel if I don't want to, and hidden in the characters of those who truly suffer because they go blank faced with a person or activity they always thought they had desired, there is the secret, unrecognized conviction that other people, or other things as they are, will never be good enough. — Richard Sennett

she had been interested in many things, but nothing had completely satisfied her; indeed, she hardly desired complete satisfaction. Her intellect was at the same time inquiring and indifferent; her doubts were never soothed to forgetfulness, and they never grew strong enough to distract her. Had she not been rich and independent, she would perhaps have thrown herself into the struggle, and have known passion. But life was easy for her, though she was bored at times, and she went on passing day after day with deliberation, never in a hurry, placid, and only rarely disturbed. — Anton Chekhov

The US wished things to turn out as they did, and worked to bring this about. The department of state desired that the UN prove utterly ineffective in whatever measures it undertook. This task was given to me, and I carried it forward with no inconsiderable success. — Daniel Patrick Moynihan