Longing Quotes - Page 13

• To a greater or lesser extent there goes on in every person a struggle between two forces: the longing for privacy and the urge to go places: the introversion, interest directed within oneself toward one's own inner life of vigorous thought and fancy; and extroversion, interest directed outward, toward the external world of people and tangible values.

  Vladimir Nabokov

  Struggle, Journey, Two

  Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov, Fredson Bowers (1981). “Lectures on Russian literature”, Harcourt

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• War is hell, but that's not the half of it, because war is also mystery and terror and adventure and courage and discovery and holiness and pity and despair and longing and love. War is nasty; war is fun. War is thrilling; war is drudgery. War makes you a man; war makes you dead.

  Tim O'Brien

  Love, Fun, War

  Tim O'Brien (2009). “The Things They Carried”, p.76, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• Adventure, with all its requisite danger and wildness, is a deeply spiritual longing written into the soul of man.

  John Eldredge

  Spiritual, Adventure, Men

  John Eldredge (2011). “Wild at Heart Revised and Updated: Discovering the Secret of a Man's Soul”, p.5, Thomas Nelson Inc

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• The deepest longing of the human heart is to know and enjoy the glory of God. We were made for this.

  John Piper

  Heart, Glory, Made

  John Piper (2016). “A Peculiar Glory: How the Christian Scriptures Reveal Their Complete Truthfulness”, p.150, SPCK

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• The knowledge of your destiny is available to you, well before
  it actually happens, as a message streaming continuously from
  your heart to your brain, written in the language of longing.

  Martha Beck

  Heart, Destiny, Brain

  Martha Beck (2008). “The Joy Diet: 10 Daily Practices for a Happier Life”, p.47, Harmony

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• For an entire populace, change, growth, and spontaneity were dangerous. Acting upon a personal desire, whispering a hidden longing, revealing your true feelings - all the human actions we think of as essential to a character - had be censored by the self lest they be punished by the state.

  Adam Johnson

  Character, Thinking, Self

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• 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.

  Jeremy Taylor

  Men, Liberty, Meat

  Jeremy Taylor, Thomas Smart Hughes (1831). “The Works of Jeremy Taylor”, p.97

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• 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

  Sacrifice, Screw Ups, Christ

  John Piper (2011). “Desiring God, Revised Edition: Meditations of a Christian Hedonist”, p.251, Multnomah

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

  Colin Wilson

  Horizon, Perversion, Romanticism

  Colin Wilson (1988). “The Misfits: A Study of Sexual Outsiders”

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• I think my mother became the muse because she had everything when she was in Hollywood: she had the marriage, the success, the money, all the films she wanted to do and yet even her, she had a longing and wanted to work with a film that had meaning, something more profound. And I think that was very touching to father.

  Isabella Rossellini

  Mother, Father, Thinking

  Source: www.theguardian.com

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• There is a human longing to go back to other times. We all know how when we were children we asked our parents, "What was it like when you were a kid?" I think it probably has something to do with our survival as a species.

  David McCullough

  Children, Kids, Thinking

  Source: www.neh.gov

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• 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.

  Bodhidharma

  Wise, People, Sublime

  Bodhidharma (2009). “The Zen Teaching of Bodhidharma”, p.5, Macmillan

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• Only a handful of Germans in the Reich had the slightest conception of the eternal and merciless struggle for the German language, German schools, and a German way of life. Only today, when the same deplorable misery is forced on many millions of Germans from the Reich, who under foreign rule dream of their common fatherland and strive, amid their longing, at least to preserve their holy right to their mother tongue, do wider circles understand what it means to be forced to fight for one's nationality.

  Adolf Hitler

  Mother, Dream, Struggle

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• A longing for the dance stirs in the buried life.

  Stanley Kunitz

  Buried

  "The Gardener" by Dana Goodyear, www.newyorker.com. September 1, 2003.

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• Your body is the ground metaphor of your life, the expression of your existence... So many of us are not in our bodies, really at home and vibrantly present there. Nor are we in touch with the basic rhythms that constitute our bodily life. We live outside ourselves - in our heads, our memories, our longings - absentee landlords of our own estate. My way back into life was ecstatic dance. I reentered my body by learning to move my self, to dance my own dance from the inside out, not the outside in.

  Gabrielle Roth

  Memories, Moving, Home

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• Do not cut lose from your longings - for what are we without our longings?

  Amos Oz

  Cutting, Loses

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• Longing becomes more poignant if in the distance you can't tell whether your friend is going away or coming back. The pushing away pulls you in.

  Coleman Barks

  Distance, Going Away, Pushing Away

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• Without the instruments and accumulated knowledge of the natural sciences... humans are trapped in a cognitive prison. They are like intelligent fish born in a deep shallowed pool. Wondering and restless, longing to reach out, they think about the world outside. They invent ingenious speculations and myths about the origin of the confining waters, of the sun and the sky and the stars above , and the meaning of their own existence. But they are wrong, always wrong because the world is too remote from ordinary experience to be merely imagined.

  E. O. Wilson

  Stars, Intelligent, Thinking

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• 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

  Facts, Different, Way

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• Many grievers experience intense yearning or longing after a death - more than they experience, say, denial.

  Meghan O'Rourke

  Denial, Intense, Yearning

  "Ask the Author Live: Meghan O'Rourke on Grief". Live chat, www.newyorker.com. March 2, 2011.

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• While I did a lot of research, I ended up feeling that the best way to write about grief was to describe it from the inside out - the show the strange intensities that come along with it, the peculiar thoughts, the longing for that past - all the strange moments of thinking you glimpse the dead person on the street, or in your dreams.

  Meghan O'Rourke

  Dream, Grief, Writing

  "Ask the Author Live: Meghan O'Rourke on Grief". Live chat, www.newyorker.com. March 2, 2011.

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• Spirituality is man's conscious longing for God. Spirituality tells us that God, who is unknowable today, will tomorrow become knowable and, the day after, will become totally known.

  Sri Chinmoy

  Men, Today, Spirituality

  Sri Chinmoy (2014). “The Oneness of the Eastern Heart and the Western Mind: An Introduction to Eastern Philosophy and Yoga”, p.1095, Aum Publications

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• 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.

  Stefan Heym

  Sacrifice, People, Promise

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• These glorious things-words-are man's right alone...Without words we should know no more of each other's hearts and thoughts than the dog knows of his fellow dog....for, if you will consider, you always think to yourself in words, though you do not speak them aloud; and without them all our thoughts would be mere blind longings, feelings which we could not understand ourselves.

  Charles Kingsley

  Dog, Heart, Men

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• The sovereign quality of wilderness is the same wherever encountered.... Each manifestation has an unshackled quality-each stirs untapped longings-each gives a fillip to living-each has an unsurpassed lilt which bursts from the deepest wellsprings of life. These are the realities found in the wilderness of the Great Smoky Mountains.

  Harvey Broome

  Reality, Giving, Quality

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