A man who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself.
It is not because men's desires are strong that they act ill; it is because their consciences are weak.
- Topic: Desire, Thinking
- Photo: Jeffrey Benjamin
More Quotes from John Stuart Mill
In this age, the man who dares to think for himself and to act independently does a service to his race.
He who lets the world, or his own portion of it, choose his plan of life for him, has no need of any other faculty than the ape-like one of imitation.
The creed which accepts as the foundation of morals Utility, or the Greatest Happiness Principle, holds that actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness, wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness.
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Plant the seed of desire in your mind and it forms a nucleus with power to attract to itself everything needed for its fulfillment.
I have a deeply hidden and inarticulate desire for something beyond the daily life.
No matter who you are or what your position you must keeping fighting for whatever it is you desire to achieve.
All cravings are the mind seeking salvation or fulfillment in external things and in the future as a substitute for the joy of Being.
To be happy at home is the ultimate result of all ambition, the end to which every enterprise and labor tends, and of which every desire prompts prosecution.
Your radiance shines in every atom of creation yet our petty desires keep it hidden.
There are two ways to get enough: One is to continue to accumulate more and more. The other is to desire less.
The free flow of conflicting ideas and feelings is critical for creative thinking, for discovering new solutions no one individual would have come to on his own.
Much of the evil in the world is due to the fact that man in general is hopelessly unconscious.
Men who reject the responsibility of thought and reason can only exist as parasites on the thinking of others.
If you spend too much time thinking about a thing, you'll never get it done.
There are only two kinds of people, those who accept dogmas and know it, and those who accept dogmas and don't know it.
New opinions are always suspected, and usually opposed, without any other reason but because they are not already common.
I have no desire to suffer twice, in reality and then in retrospect.
