Longing famous quotes
05-20-2025
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...all his longings came out as a kind of disdain for what he longed for.
-- Alan Hollinghurst -
Feeling and longing are the motive forces behind all human endeavor and human creations.
-- Albert Einstein -
It is my inner conviction that the development of science seeks in the main to satisfy the longing for pure knowledge.
-- Albert Einstein -
It (taking photographs) is all about longingwithout longing-no pictures at all.
-- Anders Petersen -
Art is born and takes hold wherever there is a timeless and insatiable longing for the spiritual.
-- Andrei Tarkovsky -
If some longing goes unmet, don't be astonished. We call that Life.
-- Anna Freud -
Even a painful longing is some form of presence.
-- Anna Kamienska -
Longing and desire goes further than instant satisfaction. That's human nature.
-- Anna Sui -
Art is longing. You never arrive, but you keep going in the hope that you will.
-- Anselm Kiefer -
I don't have a vast longing for the stage.
-- Anthony Hopkins -
I never found beauty in longing for the impossible and never found the possible to be beyond my reach.
-- Ayn Rand -
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 -
That hunger of the flesh, that longing for ease, that terror of incarceration, that insistence on tribal honour being obeyed: all of that exists, and it exists everywhere.
-- Ben Kingsley -
Down inside we have a longing for God-what Pascal called "the vacuum which God left behind.
-- Billy Graham -
People of this world are deluded. They're always longing for something - always, in a word, seeking.
-- Bodhidharma -
Death is the great hope of all life; the desire to expend itself; to be used and consumed by its own longing for itself.
-- Bryant H. McGill -
The longing for light is the longing for consciousness.
-- Carl Jung -
The sea always filled her with longing, though for what she was never sure.
-- Cornelia Funke -
I still believe that many Americans have a deep longing for that glorious moment when a sermon is more Biblical than American.
-- Criss Jami -
Envy is a sign of insecurity, yes; but so is longing to be envied.
-- Criss Jami -
We all have a relentless yearning to attach and connect, to love and be loved. This relationship hunger is the fiercest longing of the human soul.
-- Dave Earley -
Ardent love or desire introduced, as passionately longing to please and glorify the Divine Being, to be in every respect conformed to him, and in that way to enjoy him.
-- David Brainerd -
People are better inside in your head. When you're longing for them, they're perfect.
-- Donal Ryan -
Longing, the hope for fulfillment, is the one unwavering passion of the world's commerce.
-- E. L. Doctorow -
For the body at best Is a bundle of aches, Longing for rest; It cries when it wakes.
-- Edna St. Vincent Millay -
Longing alone is singer to the lute.
-- Edna St. Vincent Millay -
I'm afraid many women do choose the wedding over the marriage. It seems a steep price to pay, but it comes from a place of deep, sad longing to be loved and to have it proven that you are of value.
-- Elizabeth Gilbert -
Of one thing alone I am very sure: it is a law of our nature that the memory of longing should survive the more fugitive memory of fulfillment.
-- Ellen Glasgow -
Only the tame birds have a longing. The wild ones fly
-- Elmer Diktonius -
Deeper than our instinct to live is our longing to be alive.
-- Erwin McManus -
Sometimes it has to do with other longings that are much more existential. Sometimes you go elsewhere not because you are not liking the one you are with; you are not liking the person you have become.
-- Esther Perel -
Mysticism is the passionate longing of the soul for God ...
-- Evelyn Underhill -
Ah, it's my longing for whom I might have been that distracts and torments me!
-- Fernando Pessoa -
I have learned that my quenchless longing for life is, after all, unconsciously, a secret, unutterable yearning after God; for how can you conceive of life apart from Him?
-- Frank W. Boreham -
I am constantly trying to communicate something incommunicable, to explain something inexplicable, to tell about something I only feel in my bones and which can only be experienced in those bones. Basically it is nothing other than this fear we have so often talked about, but fear spread to everything, fear of the greatest as of the smallest, fear, paralyzing fear of pronouncing a word, although this fear may not only be fear but also a longing for something greater than all that is fearful.
-- Franz Kafka -
She was lost in her longing to understand.
-- Gabriel Garcia Marquez -
The act of longing for something will always be more intense than the requiting of it.
-- Gail Godwin -
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.
-- George Santayana -
Entirety exists within me as exuberance ... in empty longing ... in ... the desire to burn with desire.
-- Georges Bataille -
My longing to improve my looks via The Body Shop is being replaced by my longing to improve my looks via Photoshop.
-- Gina Barreca -
Down deep in every soul has a hidden longing, impulse, and ambition to do something fine and enduring...If you are willing, great things are possible to you.
-- Grenville Kleiser -
Is there anything better than to be longing for something, when you know it is within reach?
-- Greta Garbo -
I lose hope when the desire for life awakens within me; but I regain it whenever the longing for death comes upon me.
-- Gustaw Herling-Grudzinski -
Words were power, words tried to change you, to shape bridges of longing that no one could ever really cross.
-- Guy Gavriel Kay -
The human longing for story is so powerful, so primitive, that it seems like something not learned, but locked into our genes.
-- Helen Dunmore -
Try claiming God's blessings instead of merely longing for them.
-- Henry Jacobsen -
A book is good company. It is full of conversation without loquacity. It comes to your longing with full instruction, but pursues you never.
-- Henry Ward Beecher -
Like billowing clouds, Like the incessant gurgle of the brook The longing of the spirit can never be stilled.
-- Hildegard of Bingen -
But for my sighs, I should be drowned by my tears; and but for my tears, I should be burned by my sighs.
-- Ibn al-Farid -
There's a somebody I'm longing to see, I hope that he, turns out to be, someone to watch over me.
-- Ira Gershwin -
It got to a point of where it was ruining my health and I just hated it. I hated doing it and I couldn't stop without some kind of help to get the longing for it out of my system.
-- Irene Cara -
Writing is a constant exercise in longing.
-- Isabel Allende -
our longing is our pledge, and blessed are the homesick, for they shall come home.
-- Isak Dinesen -
In love longing I listen to the monk's bell. I will never forget you even for an interval short as those between the bell notes.
-- Izumi Shikibu -
He who is too well off is always longing for something new.
-- Jacob Grimm -
Longing for something that you once had is a mistake because the pictures in your mind are never the same as whatever it is you are longing for.
-- Jane Urquhart -
How many precious things do we not already possess which others have not - have hardly an idea of! Let us enjoy these, then, and bless God that we are permitted to enjoy them, rather than importune His goodness with vain longings for more.
-- Jane Welsh Carlyle -
The tales of Elfland do not stand or fall on their actuality but on their truthfulness, their speaking to the human condition, the longings we all have for the Faerie Other.
-- Jane Yolen -
She had left me thirsty and all my life would be thirst and longing for what I had lost before I found it.
-- Jean Rhys -
How wonderful," he purred. "I've been longing to speak to you for days, Princess Cecelia." "And I've been wanting to kick you in the shin for days.
-- Jessica Day George -
Let not our longing slay the appetite of our living.
-- Jim Elliot -
Every person has a longing to be significant; to make a contribution; to be a part of something noble and purposeful.
-- John C. Maxwell -
The novel remains for me one of the few forms where we can record man's complexity and the strength and decency of his longings.
-- John Cheever -
The older I get, the more I feel like an exile, that I don't belong here. And I don't. I was made for heaven, and my heart is longing for it.
-- John Corapi -
The distant soul can shake the distant friend's soul and make the longing felt, over untold miles.
-- John Masefield -
My longings are best met when, in prayer, I simply let my heart beat in time with the Lord's.
-- Joni Eareckson Tada -
Wonder is defined by Thomas [Aquinas] in the Summa Theologiae [I-II, Q. 32, a. 8], as the desiderium sciendi, the desire for knowledge, active longing to know.
-- Josef Pieper -
Devotion, fervor, longing! Those are my pillars. We have to be the bridge to the future.
-- Joseph Goebbels -
God too longs; and because the Absolute Life itself, which dwells in our life, and inspires these very longings, possesses the true world, and is that world.
-- Josiah Royce -
There is no past that we can bring back by longing for it.
-- Judi Dench -
I longed to arrest all beauty that came before me, and at length the longing has been satisfied.
-- Julia Margaret Cameron -
I've always been in this sort of perpetual state of existential longing. I feel like something's missing.
-- Juliana Hatfield -
Me? I had no dreams. No longings. Dreams only set you up for disappointment. Plus, you had to have a life to have dreams of a better life.
-- Julie Anne Peters -
Even the most pragmatic person fell victim at times to a longing for something other.
-- Kate Morton -
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.
-- Kimbra -
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 -
Whatever you want, at any moment, someone else is getting it. Whatever you have, someone else is longing for.
-- Laura Lippman -
Fulfillment leaves an empty space where longing used to be.
-- Laurie Colwin -
Of course there must be the urge, the indefinable longing to get something through into terms of plastic presentation, but results are nearly always unpredictable.
-- Lawren Harris -
How do you stop longing for what you absolutely know you can't get? Which really means: How do you absolutely know you can't-and won't-get it, not ever? How do you pinch out that wisp of feeble, ruthless hope?
-- Leigh Newman -
Could it be in longing we are most ourselves?
-- Li-Young Lee -
What stays with me most is a general sense of loss, unease, and longing for the past that cannot be relieved.
-- Lisa See -
Veils of love which was only hate petrified by longing--that was me.
-- Louise Erdrich -
The very people you trusted most could become like strangers in their longing...
-- Lynne Reid Banks -
The ***** has replaced the Cross as the focus of longing and the image of fulfillment.
-- Malcolm Muggeridge -
Longing not so much to change things as to overturn them.
-- Marcus Tullius Cicero -
The longing for sweets is really a yearning for love or 'sweetness.
-- Marion Woodman -
I think there is a longing in everyone for a personal relationship with God.
-- Martha McSally -
And now the question: what do we do with the longing for what can destroy us?
-- Mary Jo Bang -
It’s Fitzgerald’s thin-but-durable urge to affirm that finally makes Gatsby worthy of being our Great American Novel. Its soaring conclusion tells us that, even though Gatsby dies and the small and corrupt survive, his longing was nonetheless magnificent.
-- Maureen Corrigan -
The restlessness and the longing, like the longing that is in the whistle of a faraway train. Except that the longing isn't really in the whistle—it is in you.
-- Meindert DeJong -
Love is the longing for the half of ourselves we have lost.
-- Milan Kundera
