This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Paramahansa Yogananda, born Mukunda Lal Ghosh
Fulfillment of a particular desire seems necessary only if one lacks conviction that he can find perfect fulfillment in God. One who is at peace in God is not tortured by unfulfilled earthly desires.
Desire | Fulfillment | God | Peace | God |
The 'refined', the 'rich', the 'professional do nothing', the 'distiller of quintessence' desire only the peculiar, and sensational, the eccentric, the scandalous in today's art. And I myself, since the advent of cubism, have fed these fellows what they wanted and satisfied these critics with all the ridiculous ideas that have passed through my head. The less they understood, the more they have admired me!
Death is afraid of such powerful brahmacharins who come of their own accord to his door. This stems from a very basic principle of nature. Whatever you treasure most, you love most, desire most in life, and would liike to have, would like to keep, you turn away from it a little, surrender it a little and it will remain yours. On the opposite hand, whatever you detest most in life, absolutely dislike, just turn to it a little and it will stay away from you. It is the principle of innoculation. It applies to all sciences. Poison is cured by poison. Everything is its own antidote. So life has death built into it. The only way to master death is not to run away from it, but to turn to it a little, recognize it daily.
Death | Desire | Life | Life | Little | Love | Surrender | Will | Afraid |
Rightly understood, the desire for sensation is the desire of being, the distortion of the soul’s eternal life. The lust of sensual stimulus and excitation rests on the longing to feel one’s life keenly, to gain the sense of being really alive. This sense of true life comes only with the coming of the soul, and the soul comes only in silence, after self-indulgence has been courageously and loyally stilled, through reverence before the coming soul.
Desire | Eternal | Life | Life | Longing | Lust | Reverence | Sense | Soul |
Paramahansa Yogananda, born Mukunda Lal Ghosh
Be afraid of nothing. Hating none, giving love to all, feeling the love of God, seeing His presence in everyone, and having but one desire - for His constant presence in the temple of your consciousness - that is the way to live in this world.
Consciousness | Desire | Giving | Love | Afraid |
Paramahansa Yogananda, born Mukunda Lal Ghosh
Desire is produced by indiscriminate contact with the objects of the senses. Expressing as the likes and dislikes of the ego, desire creeps into the consciousness of one who is not watchful enough in governing the reaction of his feelings to his various experiences in the world. It is a condition the ego imposes on itself, and is therefore detrimental to man's evenmindedness. Whatever has its origin in desire is a disturbing element, for desires are like stones pelted into the calm lake of consciousness. Attachment to pleasure or aversion to pain both destroy the equilibrium of the inner nature.
Consciousness | Desire | Destroy | Ego | Enough | Feelings | Pain | Pleasure |
Those who have died, entered the paradise between births, are in a condition resembling meditation without an external object. But in the fullness of time, the seeds of desire in them will spring up, and they will be born again into this world.
Desire | Meditation | Paradise | Will |
Paramahansa Yogananda, born Mukunda Lal Ghosh
I enjoy everything, but I have no desire for anything, so there is never any pain or disappointment from unfulfillment. Whatever I do, wherever I go, I enjoy myself.
P.T. Barnum, fully Phineas Taylor Barnum
Those who really desire to attain an independence, have only set their minds upon it, and adopt the proper means, as they do in regard to any other object which they wish to accomplish, and the thing is easily done.
Paramahansa Yogananda, born Mukunda Lal Ghosh
Knowledge of the scriptures is beneficial only when it stimulates a desire for practical realization; otherwise, theoretical knowledge gives one false conviction of wisdom.
Desire | Knowledge | Theoretical |
Paramahansa Yogananda, born Mukunda Lal Ghosh
The thoughts that predominate at the time of death can bring you either salvation — if your supreme desire is for God — or rebirth. If you are filled with worldly desires, those thoughts impinge themselves on the subtle body and bring the soul back into another earthly incarnation. The sum total of past actions and unfulfilled desires determines what kind of body you will have, and sets the general pattern of your new incarnation. Just as the form of a huge banyan tree lies hidden in a tiny seed, awaiting favorable conditions for germination; or as the sounds of a record are secreted in its grooves, waiting for the touch of the needle to bring them out, so the past-life tendencies carried in the subtle body become manifested through the medium of a new incarnation.
Body | Death | Desire | God | Past | Salvation | Soul | Time | Waiting | Will | God |
Paramahansa Yogananda, born Mukunda Lal Ghosh
The world ends for us when we are free from desires. I enjoy everything, but I have no desire for anything, so there is never any pain or disappointment from unfulfillment. Whatever I do, wherever I go, I enjoy myself.
Paramahansa Yogananda, born Mukunda Lal Ghosh
In the name and guise of fulfilling one's needs, ego lures man to continuous seeking of self-satisfaction, resulting in suffering and vexation. What would content the soul is forgotten, and the ego goes on endlessly trying to satisfy its insatiable desires. Kama (lust) is therefore the compelling desire to indulge in sensory temptations. Coercive materialistic desire is the instigator of man's wrong thoughts and actions.
Paramahansa Yogananda, born Mukunda Lal Ghosh
Lust applies to the abuse of any or all of the senses in the pursuit of pleasure or gratification. Through the sense of sight man may lust after material objects; through the sense of hearing, he craves the sweet, slow poison of flattery, and vibratory sounds as of voices and music that rouse his material nature; through the lustful pleasure of smell he is enticed toward wrong environments and actions; lust for food and drink causes him to please his taste at the expense of health; through the sense of touch he lusts after inordinate physical comfort and abuses the creative sex impulse. Lust also seeks gratification in wealth, status, power, domination—all that satisfies the "I, me, mine" in the egotistical man. Lustful desire is egotism, the lowest rung of the ladder of human character evolution. By the force of its insatiable passion, karma loves to destroy one's happiness, health, brain power, clarity of thought, memory, and discriminative judgment.
Abuse | Character | Comfort | Desire | Destroy | Force | Lust | Man | Music | Pleasure | Sense | Taste | Wrong |
Paramahansa Yogananda, born Mukunda Lal Ghosh
You waste precious time each day. Every little moment you spent with God will be spent to your best advantage; and whatever you achieve with the desire to please God in your heart will stand unto eternity.
Patti Smith, fully Patricia Lee "Patti" Smith
For life is the best thing we have in this existence. And if we should desire to believe in something, it should be a beacon within. This beacon being the sun, sea, and sky, our children, our work, our companions and, most simply put, the embodiment of love.
A burning desire is the greatest motivator of every human action. The desire for success implants success consciousness which, in turn, creates a vigorous and ever-increasing habit of success.
Consciousness | Desire | Habit | Success |
It isn't what you did in the past that will affect the present. It's what you do in the present that will redeem the past and thereby change the future… It isn't expectations that carry us forward; it's our desire to go on… It is not the life that matters, but the journey… Paradise is being able to say at that (second before our death) moment: I made some mistakes, but I wasn't a coward. I lived life and did what I had to do… People are afraid to pursue their most important dreams, because they feel that they don’t deserve them, or that they’ll be unable to achieve them. We, their hearts, become fearful just thinking of loved ones who go away forever, or of moments that could have been good but weren’t, or of treasures that might have been found but were forever hidden in the sands. Because, when these things happen, we suffer terribly.
Change | Desire | Good | Important | Life | Life | Paradise | Past | People | Present | Thinking | Will | Afraid |
Each human being is unique, each with their own qualities, instincts, forms of pleasure, and desire for adventure. However, society always imposes on us a collective ways of behaving, and people never stop to wonder why they should behave like that. They just accept it the way typists accepted the fact that the QWERTY keyboard was the best possible one. Have you ever met anyone is your entire life who asked why the hands of a clock should go in one particular direction and not the other?... Each of us carries within it something unknown. But, when it floats to the surface, be capable of miracles... Each of us is unique, has special qualities, and his instincts, and the kinds of pleasure to enjoy, and a desire to run adventures. Is that society imposes on us always in the way of collective behavior, does not stop people asking them to behave in this way.
Desire | Life | Life | People | Pleasure | Society | Wonder | Society |
The Marquis De Sade said that the most important experiences a man can have are those that take him to the very limit; that is the only way we learn, because it requires all our courage. When a boss humiliates an employee, or a man humiliates his wife, he is merely being cowardly or taking his revenge on life, they are people who have never dared to look into the depths of their soul, never attempted to know the origin of that desire to unleash the wild beast, or to understand that sex, pain and love are all extreme experiences. Only those who know those frontiers know life; everything else is just passing the time, repeating the same tasks, growing old and dying without ever having discovered what we are doing here.
Desire | Extreme | Important | Love | Man | Pain | People | Revenge | Old | Understand |