Le de¤ s ir de la prie'  re est de¤ j a'   une prie'  re. The wish for prayer is already a prayer.

-Bernanos, Georges
  Le Journal d'un cure¤   de campagne, ch.2 (translated by P Morris as Diary of a Country Priest,1937).

The wish to spread those opinions that we hold conducive to our own welfare is so deeply rooted in the English character that few of us can escape its influence.

-Butler, Samuel
  Erewhon.

He was killed by theusual cabal: by himself, first of all; by the womanhe knew; by the womanhe did not know; by the man who granted his inmost wish; and by the inevitable fifth, who was keeper of his conscience and keeper of the stone.

-Davies, Robertson
  Fifth Business, pt.6, ch.8.

I strongly wish for what I faintly hope: Like the day-dreams of melancholy men, I think and thinkon things impossible, Yet love to wander in that golden maze.

-Dryden,John
  The Rival Ladies, act 3, sc.1.

Nothing is so common-place as to wish to be remarkable.

-Holmes, Oliver Wendell
^8  The Autocrat of the Breakfast  Table, ch.12.

Every man has a lurking wish to appear considerable in his native place.

-Johnson, Samuel known as Dr Johnson
  Letter to Sir  Joshua Reynolds,17  Jul. Quoted in  James Boswell The Life of Samuel Johnson (1791), vol.2.

To charge all unmerited praise with the guilt of flattery, and to suppose that the encomiast always knows and feels the falsehood of his assertions, issurely to discover great ignorance of human nature and human life. In determinations depending not on rules, but on experience and comparison, judgement is always to some degree subject to affection.Very near to admiration is the wish to admire.

-Johnson, Samuel known as Dr Johnson
^81 Lives of the English Poets,'Halifax'.

Difficult do you call it, Sir? I wish it were impossible.

-Johnson, Samuel known as Dr Johnson
Of the playing of a famous violinist. Quoted in G B Hill Johnsonian Miscellanies, vol.2 (1784).

Justice is the constant and perpetual wish to render to every one his due.

-Justinian I
AD 533  Institutiones, pt.1.

Am sitting in the last row.Wish you were here.

-Kaufman, George S(imon)
   Telegram sent during a performance of Of  Thee I Sing to the actor William Gaxton, who was taking various liberties with Kaufman's lines while playing the leading role.

Whatever isfunny issubversive, every joke isultimatelya custard pie† A dirty joke is not, of course, a serious attack uponmorality, but it is a sort of mental rebellion, a momentary wish that things were otherwise.

-Orwell, George pseudonym of  Eric Arthur Blair
  'The  Art of Donald McGill'.

Dickens was not the first or the last novelist to find virtue more difficult to portray than the wish for it.

-Pritchett, Sir V(ictor) S(awdon)
  'OliverTwist', collected in Books in General (1981).

The skin and shell of things Though fair are not Thy wish nor prayer but got My meer despair of wings.

-Vaughan, Henry
  Silex Scintillans,'The Search'.

Since thou wouldst needs, bewitched with some ill charms, Be buried in those monumental arms: As we can wish, is, may that earth lie light Upon thy tender limbs, and so good night.

-Waller, Edmund
  'To One Married to an Old Man'.