Wanting Quotes

“People don’t fight because they want different things; they fight because mimetic desire causes them to want the same things.”
― Luke Burgis, Wanting: Mimetic Desire: How to Avoid Chasing Things You Don't Truly Want

“Girard discovered that most of what we desire is mimetic (mi-met-ik) or imitative, not intrinsic. Humans learn—through imitation—to want the same things other people want, just as they learn how to speak the same language and play by the same cultural rules. Imitation plays a far more pervasive role in our society than anyone had ever openly acknowledged.”
― Luke Burgis, Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life

“Human beings fight not because they are different, but because they are the same, and in their attempts to distinguish themselves have made themselves into enemy twins, human doubles in reciprocal violence.”
― Luke Burgis, Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life

“Italians have a way of saying “I love you” that is particularly instructive: Ti voglio bene, they say. It means “I want your good”—I want what’s best for you.”
― Luke Burgis, Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life

“We’re more threatened by people who want the same things as us than by those who don’t.”
― Luke Burgis, Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life

“Since modern man has no way of knowing what is going on beyond himself, since he cannot know everything, he would become lost in a world as vast and technically complex as ours, if he had really no one to guide him,” wrote Girard in his book Resurrection from the Underground: Feodor Dostoevsky. “He no longer relies on priests and philosophers, of course, but he must rely on people nevertheless, more than ever, as a matter of fact.” And who are these people? “They are the experts,” continues Girard, “the people more competent than we are in innumerable fields of endeavor.”
― Luke Burgis, Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life

“Silence is where we learn to be at peace with ourselves, where we learn the truth about who we are and what we want. If you’re not sure what you want, there’s no faster way to find out than to enter into complete silence for an extended period of time—not hours, but days.”
― Luke Burgis, Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life

“Desire doesn’t spread like information; it spreads like energy. It passes from person to person like the energy between people at a concert or political rally. This energy can lead to a cycle of positive desire, in which healthy desires gain momentum and lead to other healthy desires, uniting people in positive ways; or it can become a cycle of negative desire, in which mimetic rivalries lead to conflict and discord.”
― Luke Burgis, Wanting: Mimetic Desire: How to Avoid Chasing Things You Don't Truly Want

“It’s easy to be an armchair contrarian. It’s hard to take contrarian action: to question the dominant narrative, to be honest with yourself, to tell the truth even when the immediate outcome is pain”
― Luke Burgis, Wanting: Mimetic Desire: How to Avoid Chasing Things You Don't Truly Want

“engineering desire, is the approach of Silicon Valley, authoritarian governments, and the Cult of Experts. The first two use intelligence and data to centrally plan a system in which people want things that other people want them to want -- things that benefit a certain group of people. This approach poses a serious threat to human agency. It also lacks respect for the capability of people to freely desire what is best for themselves and for the people they love.”
― Luke Burgis, Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life

“While we fight for equality in the areas that do matter: for fundamental human and civil rights, or for the freedom for each person to pursue their thick desires (in the United States, this is called "the pursuit of happiness"); we also begin fighting for equality in areas that do not matter, our thing desires: to make as much money as someone else, to have the same number of Instagram followers, to have the same amount of status or respect or professional prestige as any one of the nearly eight billion models on the planet.”
― Luke Burgis, Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life

“Humans learn—through imitation—to want the same things other people want, just as they learn how to speak the same language and play by the same cultural rules.”
― Luke Burgis, Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life

“An unbelieved truth is often more dangerous than a lie. The lie in this case is the idea that I want things entirely on my own, uninfluenced by others, that I’m the sovereign king of deciding what is wantable and what is not. The truth is that my desires are derivative, mediated by others, and that I’m part of an ecology of desire that is bigger than I can fully understand. By embracing the lie of my independent desires, I deceive only myself. But by rejecting the truth, I deny the consequences that my desires have for other people and theirs for me.”
― Luke Burgis, Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life

“Third, I went from craving classical wisdom to consuming memes and tweets and tech news—which led to my imitating ideas without knowing it. I knew more about what blogger Gary Vaynerchuk had to say about happiness than Aristotle.”
― Luke Burgis, Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life

“If individuals are naturally inclined to desire what their neighbors possess, or to desire what their neighbors even simply desire, this means that rivalry exists at the very heart of human social relations. This rivalry, if not thwarted, would permanently endanger harmony and even the survival of all human communities. —René Girard”
― Luke Burgis, Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life

“It brought you a sense of fulfillment. Your action brought you a deep sense of fulfillment, maybe even joy. Not the fleeting, temporary kind, like an endorphin rush. Fulfillment: you woke up the next morning and felt a sense of satisfaction about it. You still do. Just thinking about it brings some of it back.”
― Luke Burgis, Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life

“The American author and educator Parker Palmer writes, “Before I can tell my life what I want to do with it, I must listen to my life telling me who I am.”7”
― Luke Burgis, Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life

“else. They lose self-possession and freedom. The prolific letter-writer and Trappist monk Thomas Merton noticed this was happening to him during his college years at Columbia University. Later in life, he wrote: “The true inner self must be drawn up like a jewel from the bottom of the sea, rescued from confusion, from indistinction, from immersion in the common, the nondescript, the trivial, the sordid, the evanescent.”3”
― Luke Burgis, Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life

“rivalry is a function of proximity.”
― Luke Burgis, Wanting: Mimetic Desire: How to Avoid Chasing Things You Don't Truly Want

“It’s not enough to know what is good and true. Goodness and truth need to be attractive—in other words, desirable.”
― Luke Burgis, Wanting: Mimetic Desire: How to Avoid Chasing Things You Don't Truly Want

“Tony didn’t look like a guy who had millions. He had sold the first company he co-founded, LinkExchange, to Microsoft for $265 million in 1998 at the age of twenty-four. But he dressed in plain jeans and a Zappos T-shirt and drove a dirty Mazda 6. Within a few weeks of hanging out with him, I ditched my True Religions (I know) and started shopping at the Gap. I began to wonder if I should drive an older and dirtier car.”
― Luke Burgis, Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life

“Many books have been written about improving one’s ability to discern well. Here is a distillation of some key points: (1) pay attention to the interior movements of the heart when contemplating different desires—which give a fleeting feeling of satisfaction and which give satisfaction that endures? (2) ask yourself which desire is more generous and loving; (3) put yourself on your deathbed in your mind’s eye and ask yourself which desire you would be more at peace with having followed; (4) finally, and most importantly, ask yourself where a given desire comes from.”
― Luke Burgis, Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life

“If only it were all so simple!" he wrote. "If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”
― Luke Burgis, Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire, and How to Want What You Need

“Aristotle invented the word “entelechy” to refer to a thing that has its own principle of development within it, a vital force that propels it forward to become fully what it is. A human embryo, while dependent on others (especially the mother), already has within it a road map to develop into a fully formed human and the self-organization to get there, provided the embryo receives what it needs to support its growth. A standard computer doesn’t possess entelechy: it has to be assembled and programmed. It can’t assemble its own component parts and grow into a fully developed version of itself the way a sapling becomes a sequoia.”
― Luke Burgis, Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life

“Scientism fools people because it is a mimetic game dressed up as science. The key is carefully curating our sources of knowledge so that we are able to get down to what is true regardless of how many other people want to believe it. And that means doing the work.”
― Luke Burgis, Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life

“If my friend is more on top of global affairs, urbanism, culture, and design than I am, it’s because he has a Monocle subscription.”
― Luke Burgis, Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life

“When the desire for equality is hijacked by mimetic desire, the only things we see are imaginary or superficial differences.”
― Luke Burgis, Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life

“Thin mimetic desires abound. They’re peddled to us every minute of the day. We can nip at them, maybe even sink our teeth into them, but they won’t take us where we want to go. Our choice is between living an unintentionally mimetic life or doing the hard work of cultivating thick desires. The latter may require us to suffer from the fear of missing out on the shiny mimetic objects that surround us.”
― Luke Burgis, Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life

“My definition of an entrepreneur is simple. One hundred people look at the same herd of goats. Ninety-nine see goats. One sees a cashmere sweater. And the alertness of the one isn’t due to data analytics. It stems from a willingness and ability to look beyond and to see something more than meets the eye, and then to do something about it.”
― Luke Burgis, Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life

“Parker Palmer writes, “Before I can tell my life what I want to do with it, I must listen to my life telling me who I am.”7”
― Luke Burgis, Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life