Quotes About Longing

As I got older, I discovered that nothing within me cried out for a baby. My womb did not seem to have come equipped with that famously ticking clock. Unlike so many of my friends, I did not ache with longing whenever I saw an infant. (Though I did ache with longing, it is true, whenever I saw a good used-book shop)

The methods and technologies of how to experience that which is beyond the physical is what is known as the science of yoga is a longing. Only when your longing is cranked up to peak intensity, knowing becomes a possibility.

There is a longing among all people and creatures to have a sense of purpose and worth. To satisfy that common longing in all of us we must respect each other.

For the 99 percent of the time we've been on Earth, we were hunter and gatherers, our lives dependent on knowing the fine, small details of our world. Deep inside, we still have a longing to be reconnected with the nature that shaped our imagination, our language, our song and dance, our sense of the divine.

To be perpetually longing and impatiently desirous of anything, so that a man cannot abstain from it, is to lose a man's liberty, and to become a servant of meat and drink, or smoke.

The way I miss my daughter Esme is to worry about her. It is not a pleasurable longing. It contorts my body and scrambles my brain, makes me stop breathing, clench my jaw and my fists, it makes me frown, and makes me blind and deaf, in fact entirely without sensory perception.

We knew our Father. There was no need for persuasion. Would not His Fatherliness be longing to give us our hearts' desire (if I may put it so)? How could we press Him as though He were not our own most loving Father?

You're always trying to balance your understanding of who you are and what you need, and your longing and imaginings of freedom.

My love is as a fever, longing still.

Our holiday food splurge was a small crate of tangerines, which we found ridiculously thrilling after an eight-month abstinence from citrus.... Lily hugged each one to her chest before undressing it as gently as a doll. Watching her do that as she sat cross-legged on the floor one morning in pink pajamas, with bliss lighting her cheeks, I thought: Lucky is the world, to receive this grateful child. Value is not made of money, but a tender balance of expectation and longing.

What is vanity but the longing to survive?

Lord Jesu, I ask Thee, give unto me movement in Thy love withouten measure; desire withouten limit; longing withouten order; burning without discretion. Truly the better the love of Thee is, the greedier it is; for neither by reason is it restrained, nor by dread distressed, nor by doom tempted.

The shimmering, lucid tones and silver melancholy of I'll Be Right There give readers a South Korea peopled with citizens fighting for honor and intellectual freedom, and longing for love and solace. Kyung-Sook Shin's characters have unforgettable voices-it's no wonder she has so many fans.

When meditation makes you realize that you have so many limitations of your own and they are all created by you, the longing to break them will come.

In fact her maturity and blood kinship converted her passion to fever, so it was more affliction than affection. It literally knocked her down at night, and raised her up in the morning, for when she dragged herself off to bed, having spent another day without his presence, her heart beat like a gloved fist against her ribs. And in the morning, long before she was fully awake, she felt a longing so bitter and tight it yanked her out of a sleep swept clean of dreams.

It is our genetic nature as a species to believe as young children that our parents and elders are right. We watch them to see what's what. Later on we can judge for ourselves and rebel if need be, but when we're just months old, or a year or two, and a parent looks at us with impatience, or disgust, or disdain, or just leaves us there to cry and doesn't answer us even though we're longing to be embraced and nurtured, we assume that something must be wrong with us. Unfortunately, at that age it's impossible to think there might be something wrong with them.

Myth and poetry represent a reservoir of vertical thinking, which we could also call longing and gratitude to ancestors. We need that gratitude desperately.

Okay, if this is what falling in love feels like, someone please kill me now. (Not literally, overzealous readers.) But it was all too much - too much emotion, too much happiness, too much longing, perhaps too much ice cream.

That is the basic pattern of this kind of meditation, which is based on three fundamental factors: first, not centralizing inward; second, not having any longing to become higher; and third, becoming completely identified with here and now.

At least since Darwin's day, we have known that all of us originally emerged from the sea. That fact may account for our abiding fascination with it, our longing to return there, whether to sail the main or merely contemplate its restless enormity.

There are times when personal experience keeps us from reaching the mountain top and so we let it go because the weight of it is too heavy. And sometimes the mountain top is difficult to reach with all our resources, factual and confessional, so we are just there, collectively grasping, feeling the limitations of knowledge, longing together, yearning for a way to reach that highest point. Even this yearning is a way to know.

At the heart of the matter of masculine excess is a great longing for the love and approval of a father, a man who can tell another man that his masculinity is splendid enough and he can now relax.

Disability strips away complacency. Affliction is brutal, but it can also push vital questions to the fore. The afflicted body becomes a site of otherness, confusion, isolation, watchfulness, longing. One becomes keenly aware of the impersonality of brute matter, but at the same time there is often a raw, mistrustful desire for gentleness, connection.

I have heard what poets write about women. They rhyme and rhapsodize and lie. I have watched sailors on the shore stare mutely at the slow-rolling swell of the sea. I have watched old soldiers with hearts like leather grow teary-eyed at their king's colors stretched against the wind. Listen to me: these men know nothing of love. You will not find it in the words of poets or the longing eyes of sailors. If you want to know of love, look to a trouper's hands as he makes his music. A trouper knows.

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.

People in the East looked toward the West with longing. They would have liked to have the same comforts, the same goods, the same chances. They saw a system that demanded of them sacrifices with nothing but promises for the future.

From an evolutionary point of view, most emotions - fear, desire, anger - serve some practical purpose, but nostalgia is a useless, futile thing because it is a longing for something that is permanently lost . . . .

She couldn’t read his expression. As he started toward her, she recalled the way he’d seemed to glide through the sand the first time she’d ever seen him; she remembered their kiss on the boat dock the night of his sister’s wedding. And she heard again the words she’d said to him on the day they’d said good-bye. She was besieged by a storm of conflicting emotions—desire, regret, longing, fear, grief, love. There was so much to say, yet what could they really begin to say in this awkward setting and with so much time already passed?

It must be so,-Plato, thou reasonest well! Else whence this pleasing hope, this fond desire, This longing after immortality? Or whence this secret dread and inward horror Of falling into naught? Why shrinks the soul Back on herself, and startles at destruction? 'T is the divinity that stirs within us; 'T is Heaven itself that points out an hereafter, And intimates eternity to man. Eternity! thou pleasing, dreadful thought!

Yet, though it is like this, simply, flowers fall amid our longing and weeds spring up amid our antipathy.

Strangely enough, this is the past that somebody in the future is longing to go back to.

All human eyes have longing in them.

And we'd look at each other the way you do when you see someone on the street you think you recognize, but not quite. Someone you wish with all your heart were there but who is actually just a stranger. And you feel a kind of deep longing that hurts like a huge gash and your inability to fix it leaves you frustrated and angry and bone-deep lonely.

They carried all the emotional baggage of men who might die. Grief, terror, love, longing--these were intangibles, but the intangibles had their own mass and specific gravity, they had tangible weight. They carried shameful memories. They carried the common secret of cowardice.... Men killed, and died, because they were embarrassed not to.

I did not grow up in poverty. But I did grow up with a poor boy's sense of longing, in my case not for what my family had never had, but for what we had had and lost.

Who is God? Who are we? What is our purpose? All these questions remain unanswered. I want to reach the genuine seeker of spiritual well-being. My goal is to satisfy the hunger and longing for those who are seeking the truth.

Description of man: dependence, longing for independence, need.

And only the enlightened can recall their former lives; for the rest of us, the memories of past existences are but glints of light, twinges of longing, passing shadows, disturbingly familiar, that are gone before they can be grasped, like the passage of that silver bird on Dhaulagiri.

The longing to behold this pre-established harmony [of phenomena and theoretical principles] is the source of the inexhaustible patience and perseverance with which Planck has devoted himself ... The state of mind which enables a man to do work of this kind is akin to that of the religious worshiper or the lover; the daily effort comes from no deliberate intention or program, but straight from the heart.

But often, in the world’s most crowded streets, But often, in the din of strife, There rises an unspeakable desire After the knowledge of our buried life; A thirst to spend our fire and restless force In tracking out our true, original course; A longing to inquire Into the mystery of this heart which beats So wild, so deep in us—to know Whence our lives come and where they go.

Original love never appears in pure form, but in manifold veils and shapes, such as confidence, humility, reverence, serenity, asfaithfulness and modesty, as gratefulness; but primarily as longing and wistful melancholy.

And let to-day embrace the past with remembrance and the future with longing.

Just as sure as the days go by, Jesus will come to us, looking for fruit; and He will come in personal hunger, needing and longing for the fruit which we might have ready for Him.

The historic period in which we live is a period of reawakening to a commitment of higher values, a reawakening of individual purpose, and a reawakening of the longing to fulfill that purpose in life.

Desire can't be sated, because if it is, the longing disappears and then we've failed, because desire is the state we seek.

They asked him for help rebuilding the farm, but e only shook his head with a pang of longing in his heart. I'm tracking your killers",he whispered to his uncle.-Eragon

I have a longing for wilderness and for greenness. I wish I were a person who longed for animals, but I'm not.

Give to God just one thought of sincere love and longing and He responds: 'My child, one silent call from the depths of your soul, and I am there in an instant.'