Their poverty secured their freedom, since our desires and our possessions are the strongest fetters of despotism.
Edward Gibbon

There are people who possess not so much genius as a certain talent for perceiving the desires of the century, or even of the decade, before it has done so itself.
Georg C. Lichtenberg

There is no easy walk to freedom anywhere, and many of us will have to pass through the valley of the shadow of death again and again before we reach the mountaintop of our desires.
Nelson Mandela

There is no man who desires as passionately as a Russian. If we could imprison a Russian desire beneath a fortress, that fortress would explode.
Joseph De Maistre

There is pleasure when a sore is scratched, But to be without sores is more pleasurable still. Just so, there are pleasures in worldly desires, But to be without desires is more pleasurable still.
Nagarjuna

They who overcome their desires once can overcome them always.
Pierre Corneille

This bored fantastic woman, with her animal nature, giving herself the pleasure of seeing her enemy struck down, not a particularly keen one for her because she is so weary of having all her desires satisfied.
Gustave Moreau

Those who forget good and evil and seek only to know the facts are more likely to achieve good than those who view the world through the distorting medium of their own desires.
Bertrand Russell

Those who restrain their desires, do so because theirs is weak enough to be restrained.
William Blake

Those who speak of our culture as dead or dying have a quarrel with life, and I think they cannot understand its terms, but must endlessly repeat the projection of their own desires.
Muriel Rukeyser

To educate the intelligence is to expand the horizon of its wants and desires.
James Russell Lowell

To fall in love is easy, even to remain in it is not difficult; our human loneliness is cause enough. But it is a hard quest worth making to find a comrade through whose steady presence one becomes steadily the person one desires to be.
Anna Louise Strong

To manifest your hearts desires you must BE what your heart desires.
Joy Page

To me that's what art is about - when you don't really have any control over your desires to do it.
Noah Taylor

To me, Shakespeare uses the supernatural elements to reveal his character's inner desires and fears.
John Foster

To the totality of purposes of the perfect Law there belong the abandonment, depreciation, and restraint of desires in so far as possible.
Maimonides

Uncontrolled, the hunger and thirst after God may become an obstacle, cutting off the soul from what it desires. If a man would travel far along the mystic road, he must learn to desire God intensely but in stillness, passively and yet with all his heart and mind and strength.
Aldous Huxley

Unfortunately, however, I have too many desires to make a good Buddhist.
Jim Coleman

Walking is the natural recreation for a man who desires not absolutely to suppress his intellect but to turn it out to play for a season. All great men of letters have therefore been enthusiastic walkers.
Leslie Stephen

We all have different desires and needs, but if we don't discover what we want from ourselves and what we stand for, we will live passively and unfulfilled.
Bill Watterson