This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"A wise Man will desire no more than what he may get justly, use soberly, distribute cheerfully, and leave contentedly." - Benjamin Franklin
"It is easier to suppress the first desire than to satisfy all that follow it." - Benjamin Franklin
"Remember, that time is money... Remember that credit is money... In short, the way to wealth, if you desire it, is as plain as the way to market. It depends chiefly on two words, industry and frugality; that is, waste neither time nor money, but make the best use of both. Without industry and frugality, nothing will do. With them, everything." - Benjamin Franklin
"Taboos are very ancient prohibitions which at one time were forced upon a generation of primitive people by an earlier generation. These prohibitions concerned actions for which there existed a strong desire. The prohibitions maintain themselves from generation to generation, perhaps only as the results of a tradition set up by paternal and social authority." - Sigmund Freud, born Sigismund Schlomo Freud
"What we call love is the desire to awaken and to keep awake in another's body, heart and mind, the responsibility of flattering, in our place, the self of which we are not very sure." - Paul Géraldy, pen name of Paul Lefevre
"Love is the irresistible desire to be desired irresistibly." - Louis Ginsberg
"Cling to the flying hours; and yet let one pure hope, one great desire, like song on dying lips be set - that ere we fall in scattered fire our hearts may life the world's heart higher." - Edmund Gosse, fully Sir Edmund William Gosse
"Send your audience away with a desire for, and an impulse toward spiritual improvement, or your preaching will be a failure." - Meyrick Goulburn, fully Edward Meyrick Goulburn
"Desire of knowledge, and arts of peace, inclineth men to obey a common power: for such desire containeth a desire of leisure, and consequently protection from other power than their own." - Thomas Hobbes
"The nature of God is incomprehensible; that is to say, we understand nothing of what He is, but only that He is; and therefore the attributes we give Him are not to tell one another what He is, nor to signify our opinion of His nature, but our desire to honor Him with such names as we conceive most honorable amongst ourselves." - Thomas Hobbes
"Desire creates the power." - Raymond Holliwell
"Desire blinds the wise." - Abraham ben Meir ibn Ezra, also known as Ben Ezra or Abenezra
"I hope always, I desire much, I expect little." - Ze'ev Jabotinsky, born Vladimir Jabotinsky
"The Great Society is a place where every child can find knowledge to enrich his mind and to enlarge his talents... It is a place where the city of man services not only the needs of the body and the demands of commerce but the desire for beauty and the hunger for community... It is a place where men are more concerned with the quality of their goals than the quantity of their goods." - Lyndon Johnson, fully Lyndon Baines Johnson, aka LBJ
"Violence attempts to constrain the other's freedom, to force him to act in the way we desire, but with ultimate lack of concern, with indifference to the other's own existence or destiny." - R. D. Laing, fully Ronald David Laing
"Where there is no desire, there will be no industry." - John Locke
"Art is the desire of a man to express himself, to record the reactions of his personality to the world he lives in." - Amy Lowell, born Amy Lawrence Lowell
"It is one of my sources of happiness never to desire a knowledge of other people's business." - Dolley Madison, fully Dolley Payne Todd Madison
"Neither dread your last day nor desire it." - Martial, full name Marcus Valarius Martialis NULL
"If men could regard the events of their own lives with more open minds, they would frequently discover that they did not really desire the things they failed to obtain." - André Maurois, born born Emile Salomon Wilhelm Herzog
"When a man is sure that all he wants is happiness, then most grievously he deceives himself. All men desire happiness, but they need something far different, compared to which happiness is trivial, and in the lack of which happiness turns to bitterness in the mouth. There are many names for that which men need - "the one thing needful" - but the simplest is "wholeness."" - John Middleton Murry
"Perfection does not exist. To understand it is the triumph of human intelligence; to desire to possess it is the most dangerous kind of madness." - Alfred de Musset, fully Alfred Louis Charles de Musset
"When a pump is frequently used, the water pours out at the first stroke, because it is high; but, if the pump has not been used for a long time, the water gets low, and when you want it you must pump a long while; and the water comes only after great efforts. It is so with prayer. If we are instant in prayer, every little circumstance awakens the disposition to pray, and desire and words are always ready; but, if we neglect prayer, it is difficult for us to pray, for the water in the well gets low." - Felix Neff
"The word "teaching" is basically misleading. Schools cannot really teach; they can only instill a desire for learning." - Byron J. Nichols
"Experience, as a desire for experience, does not come off. We must not study ourselves while having an experience." - Friedrich Nietzsche, fully Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
"The desire to take medicine is perhaps the greatest failure which distinguishes man from animals." - William Osler, fully Sir William Osler
"No man’s spirits were ever hurt by doing his duty; on the contrary, one good action, one temptation resisted and overcome, one sacrifice of desire or interest, purely for conscience’ sake, will prove a cordial for weak and low spirits, far beyond what either indulgence or diversion or company can do for them." - William Paley, Archdeacon of Saragossa
"All destiny begins with thinking. Responsibilities connected with the present duty. Duty of which leads to the balancing of the thought. One of the objects of life is to think without creating thoughts. That is without being attached to the object for which the thought is created and can be attained only when desire is self-controlled and directed by thinking. Until then, thoughts are created and are destiny." - Harold W. Percival, fully Sir Harold Waldwin Percival
"Life is a race; desire the goal." - Chevalier Ramsay, formally Andrew Michael Ramsay
"There is in all of us an impediment to perfect happiness, namely, weariness of what we possess, and a desire for what we have not." - Madame de Rieux, Virginie de
"Commerce tends to wear off prejudices which maintain destruction and animosity between nations. It softens and polishes the manners of men. It unites them by one of the strongest of all ties - the desire of supplying their mutual wants. It disposes them to peace by establishing in every state an order of citizens bound by their interest to be the guardians of public tranquillity." -
"Disagreement is refreshing when two men lovingly desire to compare their view to find out truth. Controversy is wretched when it is only an attempt to prove another wrong. Religious controversy does only harm. It destroys humble inquiry after truth, and throws all the energies into an attempt to prove ourselves right - a spirit in which no man gets at truth." -
"Biological possibility and desire are not the same as biological need. Women have child-bearing equipment. For them to choose not to use the equipment is no more blocking what is instinctive than it is for a man who, muscles or no, chooses not to be a weightlifter." - Betty Rollin
"Insatiable ambition, the thirst of raising their respective fortunes, not so much from real want as from the desire to surpass others, inspired all men with a vile propensity to injure one another, and with a secret jealousy, which is the more dangerous, as it puts on the mask of benevolence, to carry its point with greater security. In a word, there arose rivalry and competition on the one hand, and conflicting interests on the other, together with a secret desire on both of profiting at the expense of others. All these evils were the first effects of property, and the inseparable attendants of growing inequality." - Jean-Jacques Rousseau
"Slaves lose everything in their chains, even the desire of escaping from them." - Jean-Jacques Rousseau
"The only way to judge an event in life is to look at it from high enough, to see it in the order and dimension of the timeless. When we see pain, suffering and inequalities, we don’t understand or we jump to false conclusions. We see only the broken arc of a complete circle. Instead, life is a field for progress and progressive harmony. Each one of us has a part to play which he alone can execute. This role, based on our real nature - what Hindu scriptures call svabhava - can be discovered. An individual’s aim in life must be to find out the “law of his being” and act according to his svadharma. This discovery is no easy task. Normally, we are aware of our ego, the surface self that is a bundle of contradictory impulses. But we can find the true self, our best self, by a process of standing back and surveying our needs. Abandoning desire and self-assertion, accepting the challenges of life in a state of stable, unwavering peace will result in this supreme revelation. When life’s shocks turn our eyes inward, we rise above contingencies of time and place. Our perspective changes. The greatest sorrows is transformed into a luminous vibration. We see into the life of things. Life itself, a single, immense organism, moves toward a greater and higher harmony as more and more cells become conscious of their uniqueness. Life, then, is not Macbeths’s “tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” It is a grand orchestra in which discordant notes contribute to the total harmony." - V. S. Seturaman
"Man is born ignorant of the causes of things and... he has a desire, of which he is conscious, to seek that which is profitable to him... The attempt, however, to show that nature does nothing in vain (that is to say, nothing which is not profitable to man), seems to end in showing that nature, the gods, and man are alike mad." -
"The desire of knowledge, like the thirst of riches, increases ever with the acquisition of it." - Lawrence Sterne, alternatively Laurence Sterne
"When we desire or solicit any thing, our minds run wholly on the good side or circumstances of it; when it is obtained, our minds run wholly on the bad ones." - Jonathan Swift, pen names, M.B. Drapier, Lemuel Gulliver, Isaac Bickerstaff
"We can look upon a road from two different points of view. One regards it as dividing us from the object of desire; in that case we count every step of our journey over it as something attained by force in the face of obstruction. The other sees it as the road which leads us to our destination; and as such is part of our goal. It is already the beginning of our attainment, and by journeying over it we can only gain that which in itself it offers to us." -