Wallace Stevens Quotes

If you desire, you are restless.

This is the way the mind functions: its whole interest is in that which you have not got.

There can be no peace of mind in love, since the advantage one has secured is never anything but a fresh starting-point for future desires.

We are perverse creatures and never satisfied.

Ambition is so powerful a passion in the human breast, that however high we reach we are never satisfied.

Perhaps the thing that makes humans truly unique on Earth is that we are never satisfied with our situation; maybe that is what's taken us so far.

Everyone wants, wants, wants... and when they have, they feel desperate.

I felt incomplete. I was always happy but I felt incomplete and that I needed to be pushing through.

It is that of an unsatisfied desire which is itself more desirable than any other satisfaction.

It doesn't matter how much you get; you are left wanting more.

No one is contented in this world, I believe. There is always something left to desire, and the last thing longed for always seems the most necessary to happiness.

It is of the nature of desire not to be satisfied, and most men live only for the gratification of it.

The more desires you have, the more misery you will create for yourself. Misery is a consequence of desiring - and you go on desiring. In fact, you think that if your desires are fulfilled your miseries will disappear. In the first place they are never fulfilled; in the second place, if they are fulfilled, nothing is fulfilled by their fulfillment. You remain as empty as you have always been - or even more, because up to now you were occupied with a certain desire; now even that is fulfilled. A deep deep emptiness comes to you.

Desire is wakeful; satisfaction dozes.

The mind always hankers for more and more. If you have money, it hankers for more money; if you have prestige, it hankers for more prestige; if you have knowledge, it hankers for more knowledge. Mind lives in the 'more.'

You only want everything you don't have.

You can never get enough of what you don't want.

Boredom: the desire for desires.

Such is the state of life, that none are happy but by the anticipation of change: the change itself is nothing; when we have made it, the next wish is to change again.

I suppose I was always very greedy. I was never happy with what we had, and I was always looking for new opportunities.

Where does discontent start? You are warm enough, but you shiver. You are fed, yet hunger gnaws you. You have been loved, but your yearning wanders in new fields. And to prod all these there's time, the Bastard Time.

I dream of you to wake; would that I might Dream of you and not wake but slumber on.

I always wanted more - more of everything.

I'm as hungry as ever.

With me, satisfaction is always very fleeting with our work. I always get a little restless with it.