It belongs to the imperfection of everything human that man can only attain his desire by passing through its opposite.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection.
So is man's heart. The desire to perform a work which will endure, which will survive him, is the origin of his superiority over all other living creatures here below. It is this which has established his dominion, and this it is which justifies it, over all the world.
Man does find in Nature deliverance from himself, oblivion of his past, with peace and purity!
Desire then is the invasion of the whole self by the wish, which, as it invades, sets going more and more of the psychical processes; but at the same time, so long as it remains desire, does not succeed in getting possession of the self.
The absolute yearning of one human body for another particular body and its indifference to substitutes is one of life's major mysteries.
In all worldly things that a man pursues with the greatest eagerness he finds not half the pleasure in the possession that he proposed to himself in the expectation.
It is in his pleasure that a man really lives; it is from his leisure that he constructs the true fabric of self.
Every intense desire is perhaps a desire to be different from what we are.
In opposition to this detachment, he finds an image of man which contains within itself man's dreams, man's illness, man's redemption from the misery of poverty - poverty which can no longer be for him a sign of the acceptance of life.
Desire creates its own object.