Top 100 Quotes About Longings
#1. He didn't lead anyone on, or make any promises. Instead he conveyed a sense of calm and equanimity, like a man who had banished from his life all superfluous sentiment, all longings and all patience for the nonessential. He was like Yoda, Buddha and the Gladiator all rolled into one.
Michael Robotham
#2. Human life without death would be something other than human; consciousness of mortality gives rise to our deepest longings and greatest accomplishments. - LEON KASS, CHAIR OF THE PRESIDENTIAL COMMISSION ON BIOETHICS, 2003
Ray Kurzweil
#3. When I was in my early twenties I didn't have a need to rub together, back when my life was a series of wants and whims. But recently I had felt overwhelmed by longings that seemed to lunge out of me in the most awkward situations.
Tyne O'Connell
#4. I know not what you believe of God, but I believe He gave yearnings and longings to be filled, and that He did not mean all our time should be devoted to feeding and clothing the body.
Lucy Stone
#5. We are most awake to the world and to our own longings and desires when we suffer.
Penny Reid
#6. My longings, my hopes, my dreams, and my every effort has been to live for Him who rescued me, to study for Him who gave me this mind, to serve Him who fashioned my will, and to speak for Him who gave me a voice.
Ravi Zacharias
#7. His mind, cool, alert, watched it sink there with a sort of vague concern at the absurdity of the occupation, till it rested at the bottom, deep down, where our unexpressed longings lie.
Joseph Conrad
#8. I believe in the immortality of the soul because I have within me immortal longings.
Helen Keller
#9. Whether you want to entertain or to provoke, to break hearts or reassure them, what you bring to your writing must consist of your longings and disappointments.
Rafael Yglesias
#10. Our deep longings remind us we have lost something vital and precious. Such yearnings are the stirring of hope. Of returning." "Returning where?" "To this garden.
William Paul Young
#11. I do not appeal to you to screw up your courage and sacrifice for Christ. I appeal to you to renounce all you have to obtain life that satisfies your deepest longings.
John Piper
#12. Your dreams are the product of your longings, a portrait of your potential, and a promise of your future.
Erwin McManus
#13. But I think I know so well the pain we children clutch to our chests, how it lasts our whole lifetime, with longings so large you can't even weep. We hold it tight, we do, with each seizure of the beating heart: This is mine, this is mine, this is mine.
Elizabeth Strout
#14. Sadly, the things that we have set out as being worth striving for are not ultimately the things that satisfy human longings. And why not? Because we are practically the ultimate paradox: the finite made for the infinite.
Desmond Tutu
#15. I never took amphetamines again - despite sometimes-intense longings for them (the brain of an addict or an alcoholic is changed for life; the possibility, the temptation, of regression never go away).
Oliver Sacks
#16. human society is a web of mistakes; nobody has the sense to do the right thing at the right time, and when the chance is gone we break our hearts over vain longings.
Rabindranath Tagore
#17. Spirituality is, ultimately, about what we do with that desire. What we do with our longings, both in terms of handling the pain and the hope they bring us, that is our spirituality.
Ronald Rolheiser
#18. The gilded spiral
Of longings within.
Our very own cathedral
That points persistently to heaven.
Scott Hastie
#19. If we didn't want anything, we would never get anything, good or bad. I think our longings are natural, and if we act as nature prompts us we can't go far wrong.
L. Frank Baum
#20. All his longings came out as a kind of disdain for what he longed for.
Alan Hollinghurst
#21. A king is he who has laid fear aside and the base longings of an evil heart; whom ambition unrestrained and the fickle favor of the reckless mob move not.
Seneca The Younger
#22. Thus we came to know Dill as a pocket Merlin, whose head teemed with eccentric plans, strange longings, and quaint fancies - Scout
Harper Lee
#23. Think of these pages as graffiti maybe, and where I have scratched up in a public place my longings and loves, my grievances and indecencies, be reminded in private of your own. In that way, at least, we can hold a kind of converse.
Frederick Buechner
#24. Many people turn to alcohol to try to drown the [cries] and longings of the soul. Others attempt to quiet the longings of their souls in other ways. Nothing but God ever completely satisfies, because the soul is made for God.
Billy Graham
#25. Your sexuality was never meant to be separate from your deepest spiritual and relational longings but to be an expression of them.
Juli Slattery
#26. Man is a tragic animal. Not because of his smallness, but because he is too well endowed. Man has longings and spiritual demands that reality cannot fulfill. We have expectations of a just and moral world. Man requires meaning in a meaningless world.
Peter Wessel Zapffe
#27. Reagan's emotional intelligence, his ability to suss out people's longings and to channel them for political purposes, was better than just about any human being that ever lived.
Rick Perlstein
#28. I have laughter and amazement, not search results. I have unexpected longings, not hierarchical ratings.
D. Travers Scott
#29. How difficult it is for those of us preoccupied with the humdrum concerns of adulthood to recall how forcefully we were once buffeted by the passions and longings of youth ... 'The older person does not realize the soul-flights of the adolescent ... ' (pg. 185)
Jon Krakauer
#30. In a world of tangled want, individual longings are often co-opted by more powerful interests. Satisfied desire in one sphere means loss in another.
Anonymous
#33. The only duration of family life that satisfies the loftiest longings of the human soul is forever.
Russell M. Nelson
#34. Take man's most fantastic invention- God. Man invents God in the image of his longings, in the image of what he wants to be, then proceeds to imitate that image, vie with it, and strive to overcome it.
Eric Hoffer
#35. The men who seem to know most of God's power have had great, unspeakable longings, at times, for a fresh consciousness of that power.
S.D. Gordon
#36. The human soul is like a bird that is born in a cage. Nothing can deprive it of its natural longings, or obliterate the mysterious remembrance of its heritage.
Epes Sargent
#37. The right brain is future oriented. It's where our aspirations, our dreams, our longings reside. It's where creativity is born. This is the part of your brain that doesn't care that you haven't done it before - in fact it's energized by newness and bored by routine.
M.J. Ryan
#38. We are the total of our longings, he had written. But Kevin was a song-writer, not a poet, and he never did use it.
Guy Gavriel Kay
#39. Increasingly, during those classes, longings had seized me, foreign, torrential aches that overran my heart. I wanted to know things, to become someone.
Sue Monk Kidd
#40. You will find what you are looking for when you realize God has placed those longings in your heart as a divine desire; your hunger is a gift from God to draw you to Him. It's a holy want with a holy fulfillment. Everything you really need and want is offered by and found in Him.
Mike Bickle
#41. That our pains and longings are thousandfold and can be anesthetized in a thousand different ways is as commonplace a truth as that, in the end, they are all one, and can only be overcome in one way. What you most need is to feel ...
Dag Hammarskjold
#42. You can never get rich, or start the creative power into action, by sending out unformed longings and vague desires.
Wallace D. Wattles
#43. People sometimes strive after and think they will find deep satisfaction for their psyches in wealth, sex or drugs, but then find that ultimately these things do not satisfy human longings.
Desmond Tutu
#44. Strive to see God in all things without exception. Do not smother yourself ... If you start smothering yourself with a host of cares and longings and wishes ... you will be disabling yourself from serving God with all your heart.
Saint Francis De Sales
#45. The human body represents to me the same universal innocence, timelessness and purity of all seed pods, suggesting the mother as well as the child, the parental as well as the descendant, conceived according to nature's longings.
Ruth Bernhard
#46. In the process of trying to steady my gait in a life that shook with
uncertainty, I learned to make peace with the present by unknowingly
breaking love lines to the past. Growing up in a landscape of
improvised dreams and abstract national longings, everything felt
temporary to me.
Susan Abulhawa
#47. There is no man on the face of the earth who can satisfy the deepest longings of a woman's heart
God made us in such a way that we can never be truly satisfied with anything or anyone less than Himself
Nancy Leigh DeMoss
#48. The sight of a child ... will arouse certain longings in adult, civilized persons - longings which relate to the unfulfilled desires and needs of those parts of the personality which have been blotted out of the total picture in favor of the adapted persona.
Carl Jung
#49. Who succeeds in forming and leading a Great Group? He or she is almost always a pragmatic dreamer. They are people who get things done, but they are people with immortal longings. Often, they are scientifically minded people with poetry in their souls.
Warren G. Bennis
#50. These characters cannot truly reciprocate, but can only hold a mirror up to us and our longings.
Katherine Isbister
#51. We will never be happy until we make God the source of our fulfillment and the answer to our longings. He is the only one who should have power over our souls.
Stormie O'martian
#52. For this decision, too, he had submitted to the overwhelming force of Sharon's personality, whose longings and needs seemed inalienable rights, whereas Marcus's were merely whims.
Panio Gianopoulos
#53. The rosary in the hand, repentance on the lips, and the heart full of sinful longings-sin itself laughs at our repentance!
Saib Tabrizi
#54. Sleep is a form of nostalgia. It evaluates you for the kind of longings you possess. And for the people in exile, it is the only place where home is not away, where the origin is not detached, where love is reciprocated and memory is not a mere object of refuge.
Ashfaq Saraf
#55. That is part of the beauty of all literature. You discover that your longings are universal longings, that you're not lonely and isolated from anyone. You belong.
F Scott Fitzgerald
#56. As we learn to embrace our authentic longings and feelings - and cultivate self-empathy and the corresponding compassion toward others - our society will gradually evolve in a direction that is more tolerant, humane, and enlightened.
John Amodeo
#57. I must teach you to long for something better...For my uncontrollable longings for this man, Lord --- Your strength.
Elisabeth Elliot
#58. Does tension exist between our perfect longings and the imperfect world?
Terrence Real
#59. One of the deepest of all human longings is the longing to belong, to be a part of things, to be invited in. We want to be part of the fellowship. Where did that come from?
John Eldredge
#60. Lewis began to realize that atheism did not - and could not - satisfy the deepest longings of his heart or his intuition that there was more to life than what was seen on the surface.
Alister E. McGrath
#61. In spite of what we say, we don't want happiness. It's simply not enough to satisfy our deepest longings. We are looking for something more, something transcendent - a reason to be happy.
Jeff Goins
#62. You see, every man is a safe, a vault of secrets and longings. Now, there are those who take the brute's way, but I prefer a gentler approach- the right pressure applied at the right moment, in the right place. It's a delicate thing.
Leigh Bardugo
#63. Meg learned to love her husband better for his poverty, because it seem to have made a man of him, giving him the strength and courage to fight his own way, and taught him a tender patience with which to bear and comfort the natural longings and failures of those he loved.
Louisa May Alcott
#64. It goes without saying that any persons may attempt to unite kindred spirits, but, whatever their hopes and longings, none have the right to impose their vision of unity upon the rest.
Robert Nozick
#65. The life of woman is full of woe,
Toiling on and on and on,
With breaking heart, and tearful eyes,
The secret longings that arise,
Which this world never satisfies!
Some more, some less, but of the whole
Not one quite happy, no, not one!
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
#66. Brought with it amorphous longings, shapeless desires, brief imaginary glints of other lives she could be living,
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
#67. In our deepest longings we hear echoes of God's longing for us. And the more we can follow these deep-down desires, those that God places within us for our happiness, the more joyful we will find ourselves.
James Martin
#68. The yogi offers his labyrinthine human longings to a monotheistic bonfire dedicated to the unparalleled God. This is indeed the true yogic fire ceremony, in which all past and present desires are fuel consumed by love divine.
Paramahansa Yogananda
#69. The familiar mood that awaits the sensitive young who are poor and dispossessed is a mood of sharp and painful inferiority, of violently angry tensions, of desperate and overwhelming longings.
Peter Abrahams
#70. She was strange now, erratic, sometimes needing my friendship, trusting me with her dangerous longings for freedom, her wild plans to run away again; and sometimes hating me, blaming me for her trouble. One
Octavia E. Butler
#71. I take no joy in mead nor meat, and song and laughter have become suspicious strangers to me. I am a creature of grief and dust and bitter longings. There is an empty place within me where my heart was once.
George R R Martin
#72. Love is not a state, a feeling, a disposition, but an exchange, uneven, fraught with history, with ghosts, with longings that are more or less legible to those who try to see one another with their own faulty vision.
Judith Butler
#73. What this stranger - Jesus - did for them, He will do for us. He takes no dreams from us He does not return; He raises no hopes He does not fulfill; He gives us no longings that shall not be satisfied. The answer He gave these discouraged disciples becomes our answer too.
Erwin W. Lutzer
#74. Into the novel goes such taste as I have for rational behaviour and social portraiture. The short story, as I see it to be, allows for what is crazy about humanity: obstinacies, inordinate heroisms, immortal longings.
Elizabeth Bowen
#75. How terrible it is to have no cares, no longings. I do not fit. I feel too deeply and want too much. As cages go, it is a gilded one, but I shall not live well in it or any cage for that matter.
Libba Bray
#76. A lot of friendship is about practice, that's something I've learned as I've gotten older. It's not simply some spiritual soul-bond of memories and longings, it's really about having coffee every week, or talking on the phone every day or every other day - whatever suits you.
Ann Brashares
#77. Language is not subtle enough, tender enough, to express all that we feel; and when language fails, the highest and deepest longings are translated into music. Music is the sunshine - the climate - of the soul, and it floods the heart with a perfect June.
Robert Green Ingersoll
#78. Oh FUCK the longings and agonies of youth.
John Irving
#79. You stand next to the sea and you're in touch with all your longings and all your losses.
Elizabeth Hay
#80. None but God can satisfy the longings of an immortal soul; that as the heart was made for Him, so He only can fill it.
Richard Chenevix Trench
#81. In such uncommon longings, hidden in plain sight in our lives, does God call us.
James Martin
#82. Callings are deep longings to bring more of SOMETHING into your life.
Kami Guildner
#83. All our longings for what is loving and true reach out into heaven. They put us in touch with angels who are feeling the same way and unite us with them.
Emanuel Swedenborg
#84. Family traditions are more than arguments with the dead, more than collections of family letters you try to decipher. A tradition is also a channel of memory through which fierce and unrequited longings surge, longings that define and shape a whole life.
Michael Ignatieff
#85. I am hardly a technophobe. But we will get the best of these technologies only if we don't let them distract us from making these deep human connections, addressing these deep human longings, and inspiring these deep human energies.
Thomas L. Friedman
#87. ...I told myself that, after all, life was like that for most of us - the small unpleasantness rather than the great tragedies; the little useless longings rather than the great renunciations and dramatic love affairs of history or fiction.
Barbara Pym
#88. We will never be completely satisfied by our achievements, skills, wealth, fame, pleasures, or possessions. Why? Because the human heart was created to need more than what is available to us in the natural realm. Only the eternal, supernatural God can fill our longings.
Mike Bickle
#89. Old longings nomadic leap, Chafing at custom's chain; Again from its brumal sleep Wakens the ferine strain.
Jack London
#90. The greatest tales, well told, awaken the fears and longings of the listeners. Each man hears a different story. Each is touched by it according to his inner self. The words go to the ear, but the true message travels straight to the spirit.
Juliet Marillier
#92. The two most important phrases in the human language are "If only" and "Maybe someday". Our past mistakes and our unrequited longings. The things we regret and the things we yearn for. That's what makes us who we are.
Will Ferguson
#93. If you are like me, you may have strong longings from time to time for the mighty working of the holy Spirit in your life...But what I have found most often in my own life is the failure to open myself to the full measure of the Spirit's work by believing the promises of God.
John Piper
#94. I don't know if there's a healthier way for two people to stay in love than to stop using each other to resolve their unfulfilled longings and, instead, start holding each other closely as they experience them.
Donald Miller
#95. At the first kiss I felt something melt inside me that hurt in an exquisite way. All my longings, all my dreams and sweet anguish, All the secrets that slept deep within me came awake, Everything was transformed and enchanted, everything made sense.
Hermann Hesse
#96. I remember having crushes and longings, but there were all these missed opportunities or things that seemed like such a big deal, but you really don't understand what the other person is going through.
Gia Coppola
#97. One of the oldest longings of all people of mystical sensibility is to be rid of disguises to the point of becoming naked.
Dorothee Solle
#98. I had two longings and one was fighting the other. I wanted to be loved and I wanted to be always alone.
Jean Rhys
#99. Through words we come to know the other person
and to be known. This knowing is at the heart of our deepest longings for intimacy and connection with others. How relationships unfold with the most important people in our lives depends on courage and clarity in finding voice.
Harriet Lerner
#100. Don't deny the dreams. They're a gift given to make your life full. Accept them. Reach for them. We are not here just to endure hard times until we die. We are here to live, to serve, to trust, and to create out of our longings.
Jane Kirkpatrick
