From Andre Gide's Journals

25 July 

When desire subsides so does my whole being. 

When beauty no longer excites in us any need of approach, of 
contact, and of embracing, the state of calm that you were fool enough 
to long for at a time when an excess of desires tormented you, that 
state no longer seems to you anything but apathy and deserves to be 
praised only because, perhaps, it makes the idea of death less atro- 
cious, by taming you to it. 

found here