"We always long for the forbidden things, and desire what is denied us"
About this Quote
Rabelais nails a perversely modern truth: desire is rarely a simple appetite; it is a reaction shot. Put a fence around something and the fence becomes part of the seduction. The line isn’t romantic, it’s diagnostic. It treats longing as a byproduct of prohibition, a reflex that turns denial into fuel.
Coming from a clergyman who wrote bawdy, riotous satire, the subtext is almost a wink. Rabelais lived inside institutions that specialized in drawing bright moral borders, then wondered why people kept pressing their faces to the glass. His world was thick with fasts, censures, and doctrinal gatekeeping, and his work repeatedly mocks the idea that virtue can be engineered by restriction. The quote exposes the unintended consequence: rules don’t just restrain behavior; they manufacture fascination. The “forbidden” is not necessarily better, but it’s charged with narrative. It promises intensity, transgression, a private self that the public self isn’t allowed to be.
The rhetoric is simple and totalizing - “always,” “forbidden,” “denied” - because it’s aiming at human psychology, not a case-by-case moral argument. It also slyly shifts blame. If people “desire what is denied,” then authorities who deny are co-authors of the very cravings they condemn. That’s the bite: a clergyman pointing out that repression can be a kind of marketing, and that the holier the wall, the more interesting the door.
Coming from a clergyman who wrote bawdy, riotous satire, the subtext is almost a wink. Rabelais lived inside institutions that specialized in drawing bright moral borders, then wondered why people kept pressing their faces to the glass. His world was thick with fasts, censures, and doctrinal gatekeeping, and his work repeatedly mocks the idea that virtue can be engineered by restriction. The quote exposes the unintended consequence: rules don’t just restrain behavior; they manufacture fascination. The “forbidden” is not necessarily better, but it’s charged with narrative. It promises intensity, transgression, a private self that the public self isn’t allowed to be.
The rhetoric is simple and totalizing - “always,” “forbidden,” “denied” - because it’s aiming at human psychology, not a case-by-case moral argument. It also slyly shifts blame. If people “desire what is denied,” then authorities who deny are co-authors of the very cravings they condemn. That’s the bite: a clergyman pointing out that repression can be a kind of marketing, and that the holier the wall, the more interesting the door.
Quote Details
| Topic | Wisdom |
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