“Everything in human beings and in every living creature is self-love.”

Original: Tutto è amor proprio nell’uomo e in qualunque vivente. — A central principle in Leopardi's psychology, treating self-love as a fundamental impulse of living beings. · Zibaldone, entry 508, 15 January 1821 (Italian)

• Desire
• Humanity
• Instinct

“Death is not an evil, because it frees a person from all evils and, together with life's good things, takes away desires.”

Original: La morte non è un male: perché libera l’uomo da tutti i mali, e insieme coi beni gli toglie i desiderii. — Leopardi's stark philosophical view of death as the ending not only of suffering but also of desire. · Pensieri, VI, published posthumously in 1845 (Italian)

• Death
• Desire
• Suffering

“An enormous amount of the best poetry is erotic.”

Suggesting that erotic feeling and creative expression are deeply intertwined. · Essay, The Way of Sublimation

• Creativity
• Desire
• Poetry

“Other desires perish in their gratification, but the desire of knowledge never.”

Contrasting intellectual curiosity with appetites exhausted by satisfaction · Introductory Lecture, University College London, 1892

• Desire
• Knowledge
• Learning

“I am thirsty, so thirsty.”

Original: J’ai soif, si soif! — Physical thirst becomes an intense expression of spiritual and existential longing. · A Season in Hell, Night in Hell, 1873 (French)

• Desire
• Longing
• Suffering

“We are only permitted to desire life, and all the rest should be our complaints or our praise of that exacting mistress.”

Imagining life as the demanding source of both artistic praise and complaint · Essay, The Tree of Life

• Desire
• Life
• Writing

“Passion is waste — takes away from a man's stability, his self-centralization: its action on general culture, aestheticism, philosophy, manysidedness, all that makes life endurable, is ruinous.”

A strikingly severe youthful judgement on passion and its power to disturb intellectual self-possession · Marginalia on Olive Schreiner's The Story of an African Farm, c. 1889

• Desire
• Emotion
• Thought

“Curiosity is the appetite of the mind; it must be satisfied, or the mind will starve.”

Highlighting the necessity of intellectual nourishment for human growth · Prose essay / collection of thoughts

• Desire
• Learning
• Mind

“The best in what is new is what answers an old desire.”

Original: Ce qui est le meilleur dans le nouveau est ce qui répond à un désir ancien. — Novelty becomes meaningful when it fulfils a deep and enduring human need. · Littérature (French)

• Creativity
• Desire
• Novelty

“We never do what we wish when we wish it, and when we desire a thing earnestly, and it does arrive, that or we are changed.”

Reflecting on the strange distance between desire, fulfilment and the changing self. · Selected letters of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

• Change
• Desire
• Expectations

“Once a pleasure is attained, the soul does not cease desiring pleasure, just as it never ceases to think.”

Original: Conseguito un piacere, l’anima non cessa di desiderare il piacere, come non cessa mai di pensare. — Pleasure cannot finally satisfy desire because desire itself is continuous and inseparable from conscious life. · Zibaldone, entry 183, July 1820 (Italian)

• Desire
• Happiness
• Mind

“Countée Cullen's chief problem has been that of reconciling a Christian upbringing with a pagan inclination. His life so far has not convinced him that the problem is insoluble.”

A wry self-portrait of faith set against appetite and classical feeling · Third-person biographical note, Caroling Dusk, 1927

• Desire
• Faith
• Self Knowledge

“The desires of man increase with his acquisitions; every step which he advances brings something within his view, which he did not see before, and which, as soon as he sees it, he begins to want.”

Describing desire as something that expands with possession · Idler No. 30

• Desire
• Time

“A man may long for water in Sahara, but he doesn't always get it.”

A concise rebuttal of the idea that human longing proves the existence of what is longed for · Marginalia on Olive Schreiner's The Story of an African Farm, c. 1889

• Belief
• Desire
• Reason

“The pride of the peacock is the glory of God. The lust of the goat is the bounty of God. The wrath of the lion is the wisdom of God.”

Energies branded sinful are recast as divine abundance · Proverbs of Hell, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

• Desire
• Gods
• Nature

“Where necessity ends, curiosity begins; and no sooner are we supplied with every thing that nature can demand, than we sit down to contrive artificial appetites.”

Showing how abundance creates new wants beyond basic need · Idler No. 30

• Desire
• Nature

“He who desires but acts not, breeds pestilence.”

Unused longing turns poisonous · Proverbs of Hell, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

• Action
• Consequences
• Desire

“There is no deeper desire than the Desire of being revealed. We all want the little light in us be Taken from under the bushel.”

The hunger to be known rather than hidden · Letter to Mary Haskell, 10 November 1911

• Desire
• Expression
• Self

“The incessant and persistent demand of our hearts and minds MUST be granted.”

Expressing her strong belief in the eventual power of persistent aspiration · Essay, Invincibility

• Desire
• Hope
• Persistence

“The very intensity of her desire to seize life at all points seems to defeat itself.”

Observing how the hunger to possess every experience can become self-defeating · Introduction to The Journal of Marie Bashkirtseff (1890)

• Desire
• Time

“Patience is a heavy burden when the soul is on fire.”

Original: Geduld ist eine schwere Last, wenn die Seele brennt. — Conveys the strain between inner intensity and waiting · Letter to Ludwig von Ficker, 1913 (German)

• Desire
• Patience
• Soul

“Boredom is, in a way, the most sublime of human feelings.”

Original: La noia è in qualche modo il più sublime dei sentimenti umani. — Leopardi sees profound boredom as evidence that human desire can imagine more than the world can supply. · Pensieri, LXVIII, published posthumously in 1845 (Italian)

• Desire
• Emotion
• Humanity

“Love is only a dirty trick played on us to achieve continuation of the species.”

A sardonic view of romantic love as an instinctive biological strategy · Novel, Death of a Hero

• Cynicism
• Desire
• Love

“I cannot get enough of books. I may already have more than I need, yet with books, as with other things, success in finding them only whets the desire for more.”

Original: Libris satiari nequeo. Et habeo plures forte quam oportet; sed sicut in ceteris rebus, sic et in libris accidit: querendi successus avaritie calcar est. — A humanist confession of bibliophilia that treats books as living companions rather than ornaments. · Letter to Giovanni Anchiseo, Familiares III, 18 (Latin)

• Books
• Desire
• Learning