Nature doesn't ask your permission; it doesn't care about your wishes, or whether you like its laws or not. You're obliged to accept it as it is, and consequently all its results as well.
Desire is happiness: satisfaction as happiness is merely the ultimate moment of desire. To be wish and wish alone is happiness, and a new wish over and over again.
There seems almost a general wish of descrying the capacity and undervaluing the labour of the novelist, and of slighting the performances which have only genius, wit, and taste to recommend them.
We do not understand that life is paradise, for it suffices only to wish to understand it, and at once paradise will appear in front of us in its beauty.
You have, let us say, a promising politician, a rising artist that you wish to destroy. Dagger or bomb are archaic, clumsy and unreliable - but teach him, inoculate him with chess.
That single thought is enough. The impulse increases to a wish, the wish to a desire, the desire to an uncontrollable longing, and the longing (to the deep regret and mortification of the speaker, and in defiance of all consequences,) is indulged.
People are only influenced in the direction in which they want to go, and influence consists largely in making them conscious of their wishes to proceed in that direction.