Quotes About Longing

The sweetest thing in all my life has been the longing — to reach the Mountain, to find the place where all the beauty came from — my country, the place where I ought to have been born. Do you think it all meant nothing, all the longing? The longing for home? For indeed it now feels not like going, but like going back.

I realized that the longing for art, like the longing for love, is a malady that blinds us, and makes us forget the things we already know, obscuring reality.

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

There is so much deep contradiction in my soul. Such deep longing for God - so deep that it is painful - a suffering continual - and yet not wanted by God - repulsed - empty - no faith - no love - no zeal. Souls hold no attraction - Heaven means nothing - to me it looks like an empty place - the thought of it means nothing to me and yet this torturing longing for God. Pray for me please that I keep smiling at Him in spite of everything. For I am only His - so He has every right over me. I am perfectly happy to be nobody even to God. . . . Your devoted child in J.C. M. Teresa

Thinking of objects, attachment to them is formed in a man. From attachment longing, and from longing anger grows.

Im so fascinated by the human longing for meaning. The way we relate romantically to each other is so much to do with our longing for meaning as well.

Vlad had found himself longing to encounter those of his own kind, to travel to the streets of Elysia-that far away world, but after a while it seemed more of a fairy tale than anything else. Like Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy, only with fangs.

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.

We treat desire as a problem to be solved, address what desire is for and focus on that something and how to acquire it rather than on the nature and the sensation of desire, though often it is the desire between us and the object of desire that fills the space in between with the blue of longing.

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.

For this is what we do. Put one foot forward and then the other. Lift our eyes to the snarl and smile of the world once more. Think. Act. Feel. Add our little consequence to the tides of good and evil that flood and drain the world. Drag our shadowed crosses into the hope of another night. Push our brave hearts into the promise of a new day. With love; the passionate search for truth other than our own. With longing; the pure, ineffable yearning to be saved. For so long as fate keeps waiting, we live on.

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

The human longing for story is so powerful, so primitive, that it seems like something not learned, but locked into our genes.

Resistance is a powerful motivator precisely because it enables us to fulfill our longing to achieve our goals while letting us boldly recognize and name the obstacles to those achievements.

God speaks to each of us as he makes us, then walks with us silently out of the night. These are the words we dimly hear: You, sent out beyond your recall, go to the limits of your longing. Embody me. Flare up like a flame and make big shadows I can move in. Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final. Don't let yourself lose me. Nearby is the country they call life. You will know it by its seriousness. Give me your hand.

The muffled syllables that Nature speaks Fill us with deeper longing for her word; She hides a meaning that the spirit seeks, She makes a sweeter music than is heard.

I believe that there is a longing in my soul that searches the whole world.

People are people, whatever age they're living in. The circumstances may have changed - we go to war with planes instead of chariots - but experiences of grief, longing, rage and love remain the same.

Men in long-term relationships, we all know how they lose their mojo, they just completely fall apart. They feel like they're not even a man anymore, and they get kind of feminized and weird and they have this longing for this animal, brutal part of themselves to come back. Love does something to men.

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.

Deep within each of us is a longing for home. We yearn for a place of comfort where we can be ourselves, where we can realize our dreams.

I have not lost my fascination with death. I have not become a noticeably less intense person. I have not, nor will I ever, completely lose the longing for that something, that thing that I believe will fill an emptiness inside me. I do believe that the emptiness was made greater by the things that I did to myself.

By the time they were pulling into the parking lot of the A&P, the mood was fading, the moment gone. Amy could feel it go. Perhaps it was nothing more than the two doughnuts expanding in her stomach full of milk, but Amy felt a heaviness begin, a familiar turning of some inward tide. As they drove over the bridge the sun seemed to move from a cheerful daytime yellow to an early-evening gold; painful how the gold light hit the riverbanks, rich and sorrowful, drawing from Amy some longing, a craving for joy.

Whenever a man has cast a longing eye on offices, a rottenness begins in his conduct.

Every year we celebrate the holy season of Advent, O God. Every year we pray those beautiful prayers of longing and waiting, and sing those lovely songs of hope and promise.

My soul is full of longing for the secret of the sea, and the heart of the great ocean sends a thrilling pulse through me.

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

All of that loneliness and longing in my heart got transferred into the book Because of Winn-Dixie, I guess.

Art is born and takes hold wherever there is a timeless and insatiable longing for the spiritual...

Angels are unsatisfiable in their longing to do by all means all manner of good unto all the creatures, ...especially the children of men.

I've often thought, I'm nobody. Why would God answer my prayer? But God's not impressed by eloquence; he's impressed by our longing for him.

She was lost in her longing to understand.

I never found beauty in longing for the impossible and never found the possible to be beyond my reach.

But when a man draws a lifeless thing into his passionate longing for dialogue, lending it independence and as it were a soul, then there may dawn in him the presentiment of a world-wide dialogue with the world-happening that steps up to him even in his environment, which consists partially of things. Or do you seriously think that the giving and taking of signs halts on the threshold of that business where an honest and open spirit is found?

We need to surrender our attachments to government in every aspect of life. We need to give up our dependencies on the state, materially and spiritually. We should not look to the state to provide us financially or psychologically. 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.

Prayer is not asking. It is a longing of the soul.

Every person has a longing to be significant; to make a contribution; to be a part of something noble and purposeful.

Purring is not so different from praying. To a tree, a cat's purr is one of the purest of all prayers, for in it lies a whole mixture of gratitude and longing, the twin ingredients of every prayer.

Art is the pure realization of religious feeling, capacity for faith, longing for God. ... The ability to believe is our outstanding quality, and only art adequately translates it into reality. But when we assuage our need for faith with an ideology we court disaster.

People of this world are deluded. They're always longing for something, always, in a word, seeking. But the wise wake up. They choose reason over custom. They fix their minds on the sublime and let their bodies change with the seasons.

All your desires, whatever they may be, are expressions of your longing for happiness. Basically, you wish yourself well.

Colombe Josse is the older Jesse daughter. Colombe Jesse is also a sort of tall blonde leek who dresses like a penniless Bohemian. If there is one thing I despise, it is the perverse affectation of rich people who go around dressing as if they were poor, in second-hand clothes, ill-fitting gray bonnets, socks full of holes, and flowered shirts under threadbare sweaters. Not only is it ugly, it is also insulting: nothing is more despicable than a rich man's scorn for a poor man's longing.

But words are vain; reject them all— They utter but a feeble part: Hear thou the depths from which they call, The voiceless longing of my heart.

The deepest longing in the human breast is the desire for appreciation.

Something went klunk. Like a nickel dropping in a soda machine. One of those small insights that explains everything. This was puberty for these boys. Adolescence. The first date, the first kiss, the first chance to hold hands with someone special. Delayed, postponed, a decade's worth of longing--while everybody around you celebrates life, you pretend, suppress, inhibit, deprive yourself of you own joy--but finally ultimately, eventually, you find a place where you can have a taste of everything denied.

The engaged mind, illuminated by truth, awakens awareness; the engaged heart, affected by love, awakens passion. May I say once more - this essential energy of the soul is not an ecstatic trance, high emotion or a sanguine stance toward life: It is a fierce longing for God, an unyielding resolve to live in and out of our belovedness. - pg. 152

I think that's really the kind of exponential factor in being in a punk-rock band or making music videos and movies -pirates and rock 'n' roll go hand in hand. There is a `question authority,' `don't be afraid to break the rules' quality that whether you're a 4-year-old bouncing on your bed as your parents are trying to stop it or an adult longing for that feeling, there's something inside all of us that piracy speaks to. I'm going to do what I want to do and I don't care what you think.

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.