A Quote by Edgar Allan Poe

All suffering originates from craving, from attachment, from desire.

Edgar Allan Poe

Quote Topics

Attachment Craving Desire Suffering

Quote Author

Edgar Allan Poe
American - Poet
January 19, 1809 - October 7, 1849

It is attachment to desire, not desire itself, that is the underlying cause of practically all of our pain and suffering.

Rod Stryker

The principal cause of suffering is craving. Once craving is eliminated, much suffering will be eliminated. Still more suffering will be eliminated once ignorance is eliminated. Both craving and ignorance are equally powerful defilements that cause suffering.

Henepola Gunaratana

And yes, there definitely are many good desires. For example, without the desire for food we would not stay alive. It is when our desire becomes an unquenchable craving or obsession, or causes us to do harm to ourselves or others, that it creates suffering and unhappiness. If you have ever been hurt because you tied your happiness or well-being to a person, place, opinion, self-identity, behavior, or goal, then you have firsthand experience of desire.

Don Altman

The world is full of suffering. Birth is suffering, decre- pitude is suffering, sickness and death are sufferings. To face a man of hatred is suffering, to be separated from a beloved one is suffering, to be vainly struggling to satisfy one's needs is suffering. In fact, life that is not free from desire and passion is always involved with suffering.

Gautama Buddha

When there is time, there has to be suffering. Because in time there's desire and attachment and transition. This is the world of experience.

Frederick Lenz

Buddha's doctrine: Man suffers because of his craving to possess and keep forever things which are essentially impermanent...this frustration of the desire to possess is the immediate cause of suffering.

Alan Watts

Attachment has to do with suffering, so it's really close to Buddhism, because Buddhism wants to relieve you from suffering; you're supposed to escape from suffering.

Gerald Stern

People despise the lust for power that originates from a craving for homage and for the attributes of power.

Konstantin Ushinsky

Desire is suffering. A simple equation, and a nice catchphrase. But flipped around, it is more troubling: suffering is desire.

Charles Yu

The Buddha never intended to make desire itself the problem. When he said craving causes suffering, he was referring not to our natural inclination as living beings to have wants and needs, but to our habit of clinging to experience that must, by nature, pass away.

Tara Brach

In order to acquire anything in the physical universe, you have to relinquish your attachment to it. This doesn't mean you give up your intention to create your desire...and you don't give up the desire. You give up your attachment to the result.

Deepak Chopra

We are all going, I thought, and it applies to turtles and turtlenecks, Alaska the girl and Alaska the place, because nothing can last, not even the earth itself. The Buddha said that suffering was caused by desire, we'd learned, and that the cessation of desire meant the cessation of suffering. When you stopped wishing things wouldn't fall apart, you'd stop suffering when they did.

John Green

In a society that prates about, but seldom practices, communication, the craving to be listened to, heard, understood - which originates with the first terrified wail, the circling arms, the breast, the consolatory murmur - is hard to assuage.

Nancy Mairs

(The real brahmin is the one who:) ... has crossed beyond duality ...knows no this shore, other shore, or both ...(is) settled in mind ... without inflowing thoughts ...is without attachment ...endures undisturbed criticism, ill-treatment and bonds, (and is) strong in patience ...(is) without anger, devout, upright, free from craving, disciplined and in his last body ...has experienced the end of his suffering here in this life, who has set down the burden, freed!

Gautama Buddha

Desire is storm, greed is whirlpool, pride is precipice, attachment is avalanche, ego is volcano. Discard desire and you are liberated.