Quotes About Longing

#1. It's complicated. On the one hand we're killer apes, and on the other hand we have this metaphysical longing.

Simon Critchley

#2. Longing hearts could only stand so much longing.

Margaret Mitchell

#3. If some longing goes unmet, don't be astonished. We call that Life.

Anna Freud

#4. My reading was always a kind of living," he explained later, "a longing to know some man or men stronger, braver, wiser, wittier, more amusing, or more desperately wicked, than I was, whom I could come to know well and sometimes be friends with.

Doris Kearns Goodwin

#5. That distant longing and determination, that knowledge that he was born for something greater than his small past or his sleepy present.

Leon Logothetis

#6. Never feel ashamed of your longing for happiness.

Sharon Salzberg

#7. I shook so that it was some time before I realized that he was shaking too, and for the same reason. I don't know how long we sat there on the dusty floor, crying in each others arms with the longing of twenty years spilling down our faces.

Diana Gabaldon

#8. It was such a spring day as breathes into a man an ineffable yearning, a painful sweetness, a longing that makes him stand motionless, looking at the leaves or grass, and fling out his arms to embrace he knows not what.

John Galsworthy

#9. I want to be there when every one suddenly understands what it has all been for. All the religions of the world are built by this longing, and I am a believer.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

#10. God's reality is displayed to us in His Word or His world and we do not then feel in our heart any grief or longing or hope or fear or awe or joy or gratitude or confidence, then we may dutifully sing and pray and recite and gesture as much as we like, but it will not be real worship.

John Piper

#11. I'm not adopted. But that longing and that sense of absence ... are perhaps other ways of expressing the actualities of my family. Different facts, same emotions.

Andrea Barrett

#12. When you see a beautiful woman in the street, don't look at her hatefully as if you're about to kill her and don't exhibit excessive longing either; just give her a little smile, avert your eyes, and walk on [1974]. Taking

Orhan Pamuk

#13. Of all the passions that inspire a man in a battle, none, we have to admit, is so powerful and so constant as the longing for honor and reknown.

Carl Von Clausewitz

#14. It is said that he was the first of Men to reach the Great Sea, and that none, save the Eldar, have ever felt more deeply the longing that it brings.

J.R.R. Tolkien

#15. Oh longing for places that were not Cherished enough in that fleeting hour How I long to make good from afar The forgotten gesture, the additional act.

Rainer Maria Rilke

#16. But the only thing of value the church has to offer is the gospel. I believe that one result of the emerging Experience Economy will be a longing for authenticity. To the extent that the church stages worldly experiences, it will lose its effectiveness.

Skye Jethani

#17. Gansey had always felt as if there were two of him: the Gansey who was in control, able to handle any situation, able to talk to anyone, and then, the other, more fragile Gansey, strung out and unsure, embarrassingly earnest, driven by naive longing.

Maggie Stiefvater

#18. Feelings such as loneliness, longing or love are sometimes hard to put into words; maybe that's why we all love music, because it resonates with something we can't share.

Agnes Obel

#19. She loved them so much that she felt a kind of hollowness on the inner surface of her arms whenever she looked at them-an ache of longing to pull them close and hold them tight against her.

Anne Tyler

#20. Desire is an appetite, quickly sated. Longing is a wound, an opening in the heart or the spirit. Whatever the cause, whatever the duration, it almost always leaves a scar.

Philip Sington

#21. Follow your heart. Then root its longing with the facts.

Gina Greenlee

#22. Desire for normality; a longing to adapt to some recognized and general rule; a wish to be like everyone else, from the moment that being different meant being guilty.

Alberto Moravia

#23. It occurred to me that more than loss, it was the longing that hurt the most.

Samantha Young

#24. Nostalgia is a longing for home," Svedana Boym writes, "that no longer exists or has never existed." In the 20th century, that longing, she adds, quoting historians Jean Starobinski and Michael Roth, had "shrunk to the longing for one's childhood.

Dan LeRoy

#25. We ain't popular
we sit in corners and look like mutes who are longing for a funeral.

Virginia Woolf

#26. The mark which has dominated all my work is this longing for life, this sense of exclusion, which doesn't lessen but augments this love of life.

Pier Paolo Pasolini

#27. How many times we have picked up in the streets human beings who had been living like animals and were longing to die like angels!

Mother Teresa

#28. The Music of Negro religion is that plaintive rhythmic melody, with its touching minor cadences, which, despite caricature and defilement, still remains the most original and beautiful expression of human life and longing yet born on American soil.

W.E.B. Du Bois

#29. There is nothing on earth that can satisfy our deepest longing. We long to see God. The leaves of life are rustling with the rumor that we will - and we won't be satisfied until we do.

Max Lucado

#30. Just a month from this day, on the twentieth of September, 1850, I shall be sitting in this chair, in this study, at ten o' clock at night, longing to die, weary of incessant insight and foresight, without delusions and without hope.

George Eliot

#31. But the longing was the phantom ache of an amputated limb. It was part of her, and most of the time she didn't notice. But certain moments were like reaching for something with a hand that wasn't there.

Carrie Vaughn

#32. I don't love you," he said. And he pulled her into his arms and kissed her, a kiss of passion and desperation, a kiss of deep
currents and longing. "I don't love you," he said again.
"Of course you don't," she murmured happily. And she followed him out the door, into the lion's den.

Anne Stuart

#33. The longing for order is at the same time a longing for death, because life is an incessant disruption of order.

Milan Kundera

#34. As females in a patriarchal culture, we were not slaves of love; most of us were and are slaves of longing
yearning for a master who will set us free and claim us because we cannot claim ourselves

Bell Hooks

#35. Dimitri always left my heart full of pain and longing, but I still wanted Adrian in my life.

Richelle Mead

#36. Reality is perhaps not at all what I imagine. Perhaps it doesn't exist, in fact. Perhaps it only exists as a longing.

Ingmar Bergman

#37. His guitar bore his longing up into the darkness like sparks, a music profound in its objectless desire, beautiful beyond solace or solution

Janet Fitch

#38. She had a passionate longing for the garden, the darkness, the pure sky, the stars.

Anton Chekhov

#39. The novel ... creates a bemusing effect. The short story, on the other hand wakes the reader up. Not only that, it answers the primitive craving for art, the wit, paradox and beauty of shape, the longing to see a dramatic pattern and significance in our experience.

V.S. Pritchett

#40. Maybe it's the instinct of every immigrant, born of necessity or of longing: Someplace else will be better than here. And the condition: if only I can get to that place.

Cristina Henriquez

#41. In the three minutes it takes the song to play I'm caught in a magic world of harmony and joy, a truly ecstatic joy, where the aching longing to be somewhere else, out of this city, out of this country, out of this body and out of this life, is kept at bay.

Christos Tsiolkas

#42. We [humans] are the only creatures who are in-between. We're of the earth, but don't belong to it, because we strain after the heavens; and yet the heavens aren't full in us. So this wonderful, restless, eternal longing in us has us always on a quest.

John O'Donohue

#43. And the black box in her arms whimpered itself to sleep with longing to be a normal person who is chosen, not a special person who is discovered. To be the kind of duck who gets included by wild swans

Nell Zink

#44. I would be in Italy working on a film, longing for something simple - like, God, I would just kill to be sitting at a barbecue having a beer right now.

Chris O'Donnell

#45. The idea [of therapy] isn't to give people answers, or lead their bark of longing into a safe, dull, protected harbor, but to make people aware of the depths of possibility in their hearts and lives; help them remove the barriers that keep them from being the people they were meant to be.

John O'Donohue

#46. Deep down within all of us is a longing to work out what life is all about and what we're meant to be doing.

Alister E. McGrath

#47. I think spring is inside me. I feel spring awakening, I feel it in my entire body and soul. I have to force myself to act normally. I'm in a state of utter confusion, don't know what to read, what to write, what to do. I only know that I'm longing for something ...

Anne Frank

#48. The phrase "Old Soul" is the closest many can come to describing those who feel like they have seen and done it all before, who can see through the lies and illusions of existence, and who experience a tired longing to "return home.

Aletheia Luna

#49. We all go about longing for love: it is the first need of our natures, the loudest cry of our hearts.

George Bernard Shaw

#50. Let us give up our longing for welfare, our love of war, and our desire to see the government control and shape our fellow citizens. We must come to imagine liberty again, and believe that it can be a reality. We must recapture what it means to be free.

Ron Paul

#51. There must, I think, be a great many people who go around just longing to be baffled ...

John Wyndham

#52. I felt very awkward and out of place in school. Not popular, not attractive, not special in any way and I was longing for love and approval from someone.

Madonna Ciccone

#53. If there was a God, he'd guide the winds, let them blow for me so that, with a tug of my string, I'd cut loose my pain, my longing.

Khaled Hosseini

#54. I don't remember my mother. She died when I was one year old. My distracted and callous sensibility comes from the lack of that warmth and from my useless longing after kisses I don't remember.

Fernando Pessoa

#55. When we slow down, quiet the mind, and allow ourselves to feel hungry for something that we do not understand, we are dipping into the abundant well of spiritual longing.

Elizabeth Lesser

#56. The gesture of the amorous embrace seems to fulfill, for a time, the subject's dream of total union with the loved being: The longing for consummation with the other ...

Roland Barthes

#57. The longing and impatience of boyhood give way to the longing and discontent of manhood, and the future you anticipate is still just around the corner.

Morgan Llywelyn

#58. A poet laureate of adolescent sexuality and middle-age longing.

William A. Henry III

#59. Every gain made by individuals or societies is almost instantly taken for granted. The luminous ceiling toward which we raise our longing eyes becomes, when we have climbed to the next floor, a stretch of disregarded linoleum beneath our feet.

Aldous Huxley

#60. Most people are blind to magic. They move through a blank and empty world. They're bored with their lives, and there's nothing they can do about it. They're eaten alive by longing, and they're dead before they die.

Lev Grossman

#61. But the fact is, things always seem to come slowly when you are longing for them.

Teresa Of Avila

#62. We are all the same ... all the same ...
longing to find our way back ...
back to the One ... back to the Only One!

Rumi

#63. And the river's voice was full of longing, full of smarting woe, full of insatiable desire.

Hermann Hesse

#64. The Holy Spirit will not allow you to live satisfied on the rubbish heap; he will nurture a longing for the City of God to beat in your heart.

Gloria Furman

#65. I missed Ash, and the longing was ripping my stomach to pieces, but I also wanted Puck to come back and kiss me some more Meghan Chase

Julie Kagawa

#66. Have gentle utterances that will inspire a superior longing for all time ...

Philip The Apostle

#67. The sensation I
had experienced vanished like smoke from a snuffed candle, leaving behind wisps of nameless
longing.

Julianne Donaldson

#68. When you were little, what did you want to be when you grew up?" ( ... )
A sigh of longing. "To be honest, I wanted to be ruler of the entire world. Or the ruler's trophy wife.

Gena Showalter

#69. When you lose a child in an accident as I did, it's final - you're not caught in this longing for him, to search for him, knowing he's out there some place.

Lois Lowry

#70. Could it be that sexual perversion and romanticism sprang from the same longing for distant horizons?

Colin Wilson

#71. Now that he was navigating, his celestial mood was shattered. Wild, animal thirst for life, mixed with homesick longing for the free airs and the sights and smells of earth-for grass and meat and beer and tea and the human voice-awoke in him.

C.S. Lewis

#72. Longing, felt fully, carries us to belonging.

Tara Brach

#73. A girl who would surrender every inhibition to her at night, yet still refused to become a dependant. Andria was more than erotic satisfaction, she filled the soul's longing.

Anonymous

#74. You must be a poet,
a lady of evil luck
desiring to be what you are not,
longing to be
what you can only visit.

Anne Sexton

#75. One's longing is not so much there for sense-gratification, profit and self-preservation, instead one's karma is there for no other purpose than inquiring after the Absolute Truth.

Ramesh Menon

#76. Our deepest fear is judgment. Our deepest longing is love. The gospel of grace removes the one and provides the other.

Tullian Tchividjian

#77. Sometimes, language is the sound of longing

Simon Van Booy

#78. He invaded my consciousness in the same way the ocean washes up on the beach, with sweeping tides of longing and regret, and with such power and raw force, I often woke with the taste of salt from my tears clinging to my skin. Joanna about Ben

Vicki Pettersson

#79. Longing performs all things

Mary Renault

#80. I have a desperate longing to have a desperate longing

Joss Whedon

#81. Freedom - or mukti or moksha - is seen as the natural longing in every human being and our ultimate destination.

Sadhguru

#82. There's a taste in the air, sweet and vaguely antiseptic, that reminds him of his teenage years in these streets, and of a general state of longing, a hunger for life to begin that from this distance seems like happiness.

Ian McEwan

#83. Feeling secure regarding their happiness and welfare, she did not miss them except with an occasional, intense longing.

Kate Chopin

#84. The spirit longs for the world of light from which it came. That longing causes something to happen. It causes the being to grow into light.

Frederick Lenz

#85. Longing not so much to change things as to overturn them.

Marcus Tullius Cicero

#86. Some people never say the words 'I love you', for like a child they're longing to be told.

Paul Simon

#87. THE CURE FOR EXHAUSTION
Sometimes, exhausted
with toil and endeavour,
I wish I could sleep
for ever and ever;
but then this reflection
my longing allays:
I shall be doing it
one of these days.

Piet Hein

#88. Love ... was part imagination, its web spun as much in the dark lonely separated evenings of longing as in the shared times together.

Niall Williams

#89. Beguiling, without doubt; the month of May scatters flowers - electrifying attributes, demanding and longing for the smell of love.

Kristian Goldmund Aumann

#90. What I love about the stories of the Great Migration is that this is not ancient history; this is living history. Most people of color can find someone in their own family who had experienced a migration of some kind, knowing the sense of dislocation, longing and fortitude.

Isabel Wilkerson

#91. The heartbeat of God burns with longing for the redemption of every individual

Sunday Adelaja

#92. Religiously, we longed for the lively life in Christ, but we did not fully see that we were equally longing for the lively life of the mind - the delights of conversation at once serious and gay, which is, whatever its subject, Christ or poetry or history, the ultimately civilized thing.

Sheldon Vanauken

#93. I think, then, that man, after having satisfied his first longing for facts, wanted something fuller - some grouping, some adaptation to his capacity and experience, of the links of this vast chain of events which his sight could not take in.

Alfred De Vigny

#94. Human Language is like a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, when all the time we are longing to move the stars to pity.

Gustave Flaubert

#95. It (taking photographs) is all about longingwithout longing-no pictures at all.

Anders Petersen

#96. What is the gospel according to Jesus? Simply this: that the love we all long for in our innermost heart is already present, beyond longing.

Stephen Mitchell

#97. There are people all over the world who carry the mermaid inside them, that otherworldly beauty and longing and desire that made her reach for heaven when she lived in the darkness of the sea.

Carolyn Turgeon

#98. It is awareness of both our shared pain and our longing for happiness that links us to other people and helps us to turn toward them with compassion.

Sharon Salzberg

#99. Got something to do with guilt,' Toro said. 'Her mother,neh?'
'Guilt. Longing. Got something to do with all of us.

Kiana Davenport

#100. It is natural that people do not want to be involved with us too much. There is no problem down to the smallest egotistical longing which the Gestapo cannot solve. Regarded in this way we are, if a joke is permitted, looked upon as a cross between a general maid and the dustbin of the Reich.

Reinhard Heydrich