Desire

There are two tragedies in life. One is not to get your heart's desire. The other is to get it.

I can resist everything except temptation.

Our life on earth is, and ought to be, material and carnal. But we have not yet learned to manage our materialism and carnality properly; they are still .entangled with the desire for ownership.

Da mi basia mille.

 

Love’s pleasure lasts but a moment;

 

Equal to the gods seems to me that man who sits facing you and hears you nearby sweetly speaking and softly laughing. This sets my heart to fluttering in my breast, for when I look on you a moment, then can I speak no more, but my tongue falls silent, and at once a delicate flame courses beneath my skin, and with my eyes I see nothing, and my ears hum, and a cold sweat bathes me, and a trembling seizes me all over, and I am paler than grass, and I feel that I am near to death.

Eros will have naked bodies; Friendship naked personalities.

The truly erotic sensibility, in evoking the image of woman, never omits to clothe it. The robing and disrobing: that is the true traffic of love.

I hate and I love. Perhaps you ask why I do so. I do not know, but I feel it, and am in agony.

Aesthetic emotion puts man in a state favorable to the reception of erotic emotion. Art is the accomplice of love.

And this gray spirit yearning in desire

 

Sex is just another form of talk, where you act the words instead of saying them.

The tragedy is when you’ve got sex in the head instead of down where it belongs.

Love is the flower of life, and blossoms unexpectedly and without law, and must be plucked where it is found, and enjoyed for the brief hour of its duration.

Love is and was my lord and king.

 

Without passion man is a mere latent force and possibility, like the flint which awaits the shock of the iron before it can give forth its spark.

The untold want by life and land ne’er granted,

[ Of a girl before marriage :] As an apple reddens on the high bough; high atop the highest bough the apple pickers passed it by—no, not passed it by, but they could not reach it.

[ Gollum speaking of the Ring :] Where iss it? Where iss it? . . . Losst it is, my precious, lost, lost! Curse us and crush us, my precious is lost!

 

If a woman hasn’t got a tiny streak of a harlot in her, she’s a dry stick as a rule.

Man may escape from rope and gun; Nay, some have outliv’d the doctor’s pill: Who takes a woman must be undone, That basilisk is sure to kill. The fly that sips treacle is lost in the sweets, So he that tastes woman, woman, woman, He that tastes woman, ruin meets.

And this gray spirit yearning in desire To follow knowledge like a sinking star, Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.

 

Spend all you have for loveliness, / Buy it and never count the cost; / For one white singing hour of peace / Count many a year of strife well lost, / And for a breath of ecstasy / Give all you have been, or could be.

The other day we had a long discourse with[Lady Orkney] about love; and she told us asaying . . . which I thought excellent, that inmen, desire begets love ; and in women, love begetsdesire .