psychology of desire Quotes

Humans hardly know what they want, how they want it, or when they want it.

Where necessity ends, desire and curiosity begin; and no sooner are we supplied with everything nature can demand than we sit down to contrive artificial appetites.

Since desire always goes towards that which is our direct opposite, it forces us to love that which will make us suffer.

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

We create a product nobody needs but people want. You spend more for what you really want; some boring things you need: an ugly old car can wait, but if you have a new fashion item it cannot wait.

Tom said to himself that it was not such a hollow world, after all. He had discovered a great law of human action, without knowing it -- namely, that in order to make a man or a boy covet a thing, it is only necessary to make the thing difficult to attain.

We treat desire as a problem to be solved, address what desire is for and focus on that something and how to acquire it rather than on the nature and the sensation of desire, though often it is the desire between us and the object of desire that fills the space in between with the blue of longing.

We read advertisements... to discover and enlarge our desires.

It beats me how Freud could say "What do women want?" as if we all must want the same thing.

All desire springs from a lack, which it strives continually to fill.

It is desire that engenders belief and if we fail as a rule to take this into account, it is because most of the desires that create beliefs end only with our own life.

Curiosity, like all other desires, produces pain as well as pleasure.

Secrets are my currency: I deal in them for a living. The secrets of desire, of what people really want, and of what they fear the most. The secrets of why love is difficult, sex complicated, living painful and death so close and yet placed far away. Why are pleasure and punishment closely related? How do our bodies speak? Why do we make ourselves ill? Why do you want to fail? Why is pleasure hard to bear?