Detail: Luxuria (Lust), in The Seven Deadly Sins and the Four Last Things, by Hieronymus Bosch

Lust is an intense desire or craving. It can take many forms, such as the lust for knowledge, the lust for sex or the lust for power.

Quotes

• The whole economic system of Capitalism is an offshoot of a devouring and overwhelming lust, of a kind that can hold sway only in a society that has deliberately renounced the Christian asceticism and turned away from Heaven to give itself over exclusively to earthly gratifications. ... It is the result of a secularization of economic life, and by it the hierarchical subordination of the material to the spiritual is inverted. The autonomy of economics has ended in their dominating the whole life of human societies: the worship of Mammon has become the determining force of the age. And the worst of it is that this undisguised “mammonism” is regarded as a very good thing, an attainment to the knowledge of truth and a release from illusions. Economic materialism formulates this to perfection when it brands the whole spiritual life of man as a deception and a dream.
  • Nikolai Berdyaev, The End of Our Time (1919), as translated by Donald Atwater (1933), p. 92

• Of woman's unnatural, insatiable lust, what country, what village doth not complain?
  • Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), Part. 3. Sec. 2.

• Neither do thou lust after that tawney weed tobacco.
  • Ben Jonson, Bartholomew Fair (1614), Act II, scene vi.

• They are only safe
  That know to soothe the prince's appetite,
  And serve his lusts.
  • Philip Massinger, The Roman Actor (1626), Act I, scene i.

• Lust is an arrogant and haughty beast and far from subtle.
  • Mervyn Peake, Titus Alone (1959), Chapter 42.

• Do not lust in your heart after her beauty or let her captivate you with her eyes, for the prostitute reduces you to a loaf of bread, and the adulteress preys upon your very life.
  • Proverbs 6:25-26 (NIV)

• Love is more cruel than lust.
  • Algernon Charles Swinburne, Dolores (1866), stanza 20.

• Ring out the narrowing lust of gold.
  • Alfred, Lord Tennyson, In Memoriam A.H.H. (1850), Canto CVI, stanza 7.

• Quid non mortalia pectora cogis,
  Auri sacra fames?
  • Fell lust of gold! abhorred, accurst!
    What will not men to slake such thirst?
  • Virgil, Aeneid (29–19 BC), Book III, lines 56-57 (translated by John Conington).

• Lust carries her sharp whip
  At her own girdle.
  • John Webster, The White Devil (1612), Act II, scene i.

• Whether we fall by ambition, blood, or lust,
  Like diamonds, we are cut with our own dust.
  • John Webster, Duchess of Malfi (1623), Act V, scene v.

• Natural freedoms are but just:
  There's something generous in mere lust.
  • John Wilmot, A Ramble in St. James' Park (1672).

"Lust is the offspring of a thousand sighs,

"Intrigue, deception, and as many lies;

"A strange compound of hidden, plotting ill,

"To fire with rage, to torture, or to kill"

• • John Lyon -Lust (1853)

See also

• Desire

External links