Longing Quotes - Page 23

• The pangs of pain, of failure, in this mortal lot, are the birth-throes of transition to better things. We are separated for a time by the indifference of space and our blindness which particularizes and isolates us. But in us is a longing for unity.

  John Elof Boodin

  Pain, Space, Unity

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• 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.

  Gerhard Richter

  Religious, Art, Believe

  Gerhard Richter, Dietmar Elger, Hans-Ulrich Obrist (2009). “Gerhard Richter: writings 1961-2007”, Distributed Art Pub Inc

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• Sacrifice is a state of mind in which our thoughts turn with longing [toward Heaven, the Ancestors], It is the supreme expression of loyalty, love, and respect.

  Xunzi

  Loyalty, Sacrifice, Expression

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• We all start out with the same alphabet. We are all unique. Talent is not the most important thing --- discipline and dedication are. Craft can be learned but desire and longing are innate. Despite the demands of school and just being young, try to write SOMETHING every day --- a description, a captured emotion, a simile, a metaphor. Read, for crying out loud! A writer must read the way a ball player must go to the ballfield every day to practice. Everything is possible in this world of ours--- and so's publication.

  Robert Cormier

  Writing, School, Unique

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• People want the right to die at a time of their own choosing. Too many families have watched helplessly as a relative dies slowly, longing for death.

  Polly Toynbee

  People, Want, Right To Die

  "Cardinals, bishops and doctors must not deny us our last rights" by Polly Toynbee, www.theguardian.com. May 11, 2006.

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• Sometimes I read a biography of some tempestuous artist and find myself longing for fireworks! booze! bloody fights!; I do think that life must be so much more thrilling when you're actively miserable.

  Lauren Groff

  Fighting, Artist, Thinking

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• I was five years old when I wrote my first song. It was out of longing for my father that I wrote it.

  Shmuel Yosef Agnon

  Song, Father, Years

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• Writers are greatly respected. The intelligent public is wonderfully patient with them, continues to read them, and endures disappointment after disappointment, waiting to hear from art what it does not hear from theology, philosophy, social theory, and what it cannot hear from pure science. Out of the struggle at the center has come an immense, painful longing for a broader, more flexible, fuller, more coherent, more comprehensive account of what we human beings are, who we are and what this life is for.

  Saul Bellow

  Art, Disappointment, Philosophy

  Saul Bellow (2015). “There Is Simply Too Much to Think About: Collected Nonfiction”, p.216, Penguin

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• That powers my desire to write: the sense of how quickly everything on the surface of life can be cut away and you can suddenly be inside the most inner part of the most inner life of a person. What does it feel like there, and what are the regrets and sensations and longings, and what is the music of it?

  Nicole Krauss

  Regret, Writing, Cutting

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• Caught between the longing for love, and the struggle for the legal tender, where the sirens sing and the church bells ring, and the junk man pounds his fender. Where the veterans dream of the fight, fast asleep at the traffic light, and the children solemnly wait for the ice cream vendor.

  Jackson Browne

  Dream, Children, Struggle

  Song: The Pretender, Album: The Pretender, 1976

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• The human longings that are deep inside of us never go away. They exist across cultures; they exist throughout life. When people were first made, our deepest longing was to know and be known. And after the Fall, when we all got weird, it's still our deepest longing - but it's now also our deepest fear.

  John Ortberg

  Fall, People, Going Away

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• I've spoken with friends who are rabbis and priests and we've agreed that most people have an emotional attachment to their faith, a desire to fulfill their spiritual longings, but they are not experts in understanding the history of their religion.

  Feisal Abdul Rauf

  Spiritual, Emotional, Attachment

  "Q&A with Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf". Religion News Service Interview, www.washingtonpost.com. August 29, 2012.

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• I have an unquenchable desire to slow down and find my life going deeper in my walk with Christ. I want to meet him in the depths of my soul, away from the stress and press of everything on top. A relationship with Christ is the key to fulfilling our deepest longings. All of life is about filling the void that sin and separation from him have created within. Filling the emptiness with piles of things, earthly friendships, satisfying experiences, and sensual encounters ultimately proves to achieve less than what we had hoped for. Christ is the only one who fits.

  Joseph Stowell

  Stress, Keys, Soul

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• Don't Wait! Start on your dreams, your impulses, your longings, your special occasions today. Because this is your moment.

  Mary Anne Radmacher

  Motivational, Dream, Waiting

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• I hear many people talk about their longing for a balanced life. What I think they are really expressing is a desire for a life with less pressure.

  Mary Anne Radmacher

  Stress, Thinking, People

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• When a man's intellect is constantly with God, his desire grows beyond all measure into an intense longing for God and his incensiveness is completely transformed into divine love. For by continual participation in the divine radiance his intellect becomes totally filled with light; and when it has reintegrated its passible aspect, it redirects this aspect towards God, filling it with an incomprehensible and intense longing for Him and with unceasing love, thus drawing it entirely away from worldly things to the divine.

  Maximus the Confessor

  Christian, Men, Drawing

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• People are fretful about lifestyle retailing because the idea that anyone's immortal soul and deepest longings can be quite so readily anticipated and consolidated with several hundred thousand other like-minded types is worrying.

  Peter York

  Ideas, Worry, People

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• Prayers prayed in the Spirit never die until they accomplish God's intended purpose. His answer may not be what we expected, or when we expected it, but God often provides much more abundantly than we could think or ask. He interprets our intent and either answers or stores up our prayers. Sincere prayers are never lost. Energy, time, love, and longing can be endowments that will never be wasted or go unrewarded.

  Wesley L Duewel

  Prayer, Thinking, Energy

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• The time will soon be here when my grandchild will long for the cry of a loon, the flash of a salmon, the whisper of spruce needles, or the screech of an eagle. But he will not make friends with any of these creatures and when his heart aches with longing, he will curse me. Have I done all to keep the air fresh? Have I cared enough about the water? Have I left the eagle to soar in freedom? Have I done everything I could to earn my grandchild's fondness?

  Chief Dan George

  Native American, Heart, Grandchildren

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• The Holy Spirit, out of compassion for our weakness, comes to us even when we are impure. And if He finds our intellect truly praying to Him, He enters it and puts to flight the whole array of thoughts and ideas circling within it, and He arouses it to a longing for spiritual prayer.

  Evagrius Ponticus

  Christian, Spiritual, Prayer

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• Water and petrol both come from the earth, and though they seem to be alike and even the same, they are in nature and purpose exact opposites, for the one extinguishes fire and the other adds fuel to it. So also the world and its treasures, the heart and its thirst for God are alike His creation. Now the result of the attempt to satisfy the heart with the wealth and pride and honours of this world is the same as if one tried to put out a fire with petrol, for the heart can only find ease and satisfaction in Him who created both it and the longing desire of which it is conscious.

  Sadhu Sundar Singh

  Heart, Pride, Fire

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• You don't know why, but you know you have to go home. It's an eternal longing. It's Marvell's drop of dew wanting to go back to the sky. We're drawn by a force we don't understand, through worlds, through experience.

  Frederick Lenz

  Home, Sky, Suffering

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• A man's soul is pierced as it were with holes, and as his longings flow through each they are transmuted into something specific.

  Eric Hoffer

  Men, Soul, Flow

  Eric Hoffer (1982). “Between the Devil and the Dragon: The Best Essays and Aphorisms of Eric Hoffer”, HarperCollins Publishers

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• 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

  Men, Overcoming, Want

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• Oh longing for places that were not Cherished enough in that fleeting hour How I long to make good from afar The forgotten gesture, the additional act.

  Rainer Maria Rilke

  Long, Fleeting, Gestures

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