#desire

Needs cause motivation. Deep-rooted desires for esteem, affection, belonging, achievement, self-actualization, power, and control motivate us to push for what we want and need in our lives. ↗

— Lorii Myers

#affection #desire #esteem #make-it-happen #motivation

We mistakenly assume that bodily survival has a higher precedence than ego survival. This is simply not generally true. Ego will happily destroy the body for its own sake. Look at overweight executives headed for heart attacks on the way to getting their pictures in Fortune or anorexic models suffering slow starvation on their way to getting their pictures in Vogue. Protecting ego is the general case. ↗

— Karl Marlantes

#ego #motivation #motivational

We are drawn towards a thing, either because there is some good we are seeking from it, or because we cannot do without it. Sometimes the two motives coincide. Often however they do not. Each is distinct and quite independent. We eat distasteful food, if we have nothing else, because we cannot do otherwise. A moderately greedy man looks out for delicacies, but he can easily do without them. If we have no air we are suffocated, we struggle to get it, not because we expect to get some advantage from it but because we need it. We go in search of sea air without being driven by any necessity, because we like it. In time it often comes about automatically that the second motive takes the place of the first. This is one of the great misfortunes of our race. A man spokes opium in order to attain to a special condition, which he thinks superior; often, as time goes on, the opium reduces him to a miserable condition which he feels to be degrading; but he is no longer able to do without it. ↗

— Simone Weil

#idolatry #motivational

[L]ife is a phenomenon in need of criticism, for we are, as fallen creatures, in permanent danger of worshipping false gods, of failing to understand ourselves and misinterpreting the behaviour of others, of growing unproductively anxious or desirous, and of losing ourselves to vanity and error. Surreptitiously and beguilingly, then, with humour or gravity, works of art--novels, poems, plays, paintings or films--can function as vehicles to explain our condition to us. They may act as guides to a truer, more judicious, more intelligent understanding of the world. ↗

— Alain de Botton

#art #criticism #desire #films #gravity

When you were a wandering desire in the mist, I too was there, a wandering desire. Then we sought one another, and out of our eagerness dreams were born. And dreams were time limitless, and dreams were space without measure. ↗

— Kahlil Gibran

#dreams #love #dreams

You need to know it's your actions that will make you a good person, not desire. ↗

— Matthew Quick

#desire #good #action

The way to gain a good reputation is to endeavor to be what you desire to appear. ↗

— Socrates

#desire #endeavor #gain #good #good reputation

It does not take much strength to do things, but it requires a great deal of strength to decide what to do. ↗

— Elbert Hubbard

#desired-outcomes #projects #decisions

This is desire, daughter, the endless piercing that informs the universe throughout eternity, ↗

— John Speed

#eternity #universe #india

She knew what it felt like to tremble like that before touching someone-desire so acute that it became despair. ↗

— Holly Black

#kaye #despair