Francois de La Rochefoucauld Quotes

There is no such thing as perpetual tranquillity of mind while we live here; because life itself is but motion, and can never be without desire, nor without fear, no more than without sense.

Melancholy is the nurse of frenzy.

You perhaps now know that desire reduces us to pulp.

Anger, lust and such other evil passions raging in the heart are the real untouchables.

The passion of vanity has its own depths in the spirit, and is powerfully militant.

Sometimes my feet are tired and my hands are quiet, but there is no quiet in my heart.

As I go clowning my sentimental way into eternity, wrestling with all my problems of estrangement and communion, sincerity and simulation, ambition and acquiescence, I shuttle between worrying whether I matter at all and whether anything else matters but me.

Looking out over the courtyard at the dirty walls, he realized he had no idea whether it was hysteria or love.

And they were quiet but their blood and nerves and butterflies were not—they were rampantly alive, rushing and thrumming in a wild and perfect melody, matched note for note.

So much wanting and longing, clutching, desiring, passion and hatred and terrible need. Here, death was suitable, there was room for it, the grip of life's relentless urges slackened, replaced by this icy simplicity. This wasnt her death. It was his. That was the sad and honest truth. Though it would stay with her, it would be more like a black onyx heart on a silver chain, worn privately, under her clothes, close to her body, all her life. The guilt, the beauty, everything. It wasnt over, it had only begun. Well ok then, Okay.

I am a jumble of passions, misgivings, and wants. It seems that I am always in a state of wishing and rarely in a state of contentment.

A man who has not passed through the inferno of his passions has never overcome them. They then dwell in the house next door, and at any moment a flame may dart out and set fire to his own house. Whenever we give up, leave behind, and forget too much, there is always the danger that the things we have neglected will return with added force.

In one moment I was feeling everything and I was feeling nothing.

You know why you hate me so much, Jeffery? Because I look the way you feel.

Fear ringed by doubt is my eternal moon.

What showers arise, blown with the windy tempest of my heart

While I was girl of the year and superstar and all that crap, everything I did was really...motivated by psychological disturbance.

I'm awaiting a lover. I have to be rent and pulled apart and live according to the demons and the imagination in me. I'm restless. Things are calling me away. My hair is being pulled by the stars again.

In suffocating the voice of conscience, passion carries with itself a restlessness of the body and the senses: it is the restlessness of the "external man." When the internal man has been reduced to silence, then passion, once it has been given freedom of action, so to speak, exhibits itself as an insistent tendency to satisfy the senses and the body.

It's the sort of subject that always interests me: jealousy and the language of suspicion and guilt. I think it interests people.

Olympia thinks often about desire - desire that stops the breath, that causes a preoccupied pause in the midst of uttering a sentence - and how it may upend a life and threaten to dissolve the soul.

Then I fall asleep with a stupid feeling of wishing to be different from what I am or from what I want to be; perhaps to behave differently from the way I want to behave or do behave.

I am overrun, infested with a menagerie of desires.

Sometimes suffering is a weird attraction.