Fear begins and ends with the desire to be secure; inward and outward security, with the desire to be certain, to have permanency. The continuity of permanence is sought in every direction, in virtue, in relationship, in action, in experience, in knowledge, in outward and inward things. To find security and be secure is the everlasting cry. It is this insistent demand that breeds fear.
Wealth is not an absolute. It is relative to desire. Every time we yearn for something we cannot afford, we grow poorer, whatever our resources. And every time we feel satisfied with what we have, we can be counted as rich, however little we may actually possess.
If, then, there is some end of the things we do, which we desire for its own sake (everything else being desired for the sake of this), and if we do not choose everything for the sake of something else (for at that rate the process would go on to infinity, so that our desire would be empty and vain), clearly this must be the good and the chief good.
[I]t is rather the case that we desire something because we believe it to be good than that we believe a thing to be good because we desire it. It is the thought that starts things off.
Macbeth's deed is done in horror, and without the faintest desire or sense of glory- done, one may almost say, as if it were an appalling duty; the instant it is finished, its futility is revealed to Macbeth as clearly as its vileness had been revealed beforehand
The desire to serve the common good must without fail be a requisite of the soul, a necessity for personal happiness; if it issuesnot from there, but from theoretical or other considerations, it is not at all the same thing.
Of course you want to be rich and famous. It's natural. Wealth and fame are what every man desires. The question is: What are you willing to trade for it?
Formerly, when I would feel a desire to understand someone, or myself, I would take into consideration not actions, in which everything is relative, but wishes. Tell me what you want and I'll tell you who you are.
We live alone in our cluttered psyches, possessed by our entrenched beliefs, our fatuous desires, our endless contradictions - and like it or not we have to put up with this in one another.
The notion of sitting down and conjuring up, not only words in which to clothe thoughts but thoughts worthy of being clothed--the whole thing was absurdly beyond his desires.
And that taught me you can't have anything, you can't have anything at all. Because desire just cheats you. It's like a sunbeam skipping here and there about a room. It stops and gilds some inconsequential object, and we poor fools try to grasp it - but when we do the sunbeam moves on to something else, and you've got the inconsequential part, but the glitter that made you want it is gone.