Longing Quotes - page 2

The feelings that hurt most, the emotions that sting most, are those that are absurd: the longing for impossible things, precisely because they are impossible; nostalgia for what never was; the desire for what could have been; regret over not being someone else; dissatisfaction with the world's existence. All these half-tones of the soul's consciousness create a raw landscape within us, a sun eternally setting on what we are. (Fernando Pessoa)
Nobody has seen the trekking birds take their way towards such warmer spheres as do not exist, or rivers break their course through rocks and plains to run into an ocean which is not to be found. For God does not create a longing or a hope without having a fulfilling reality ready for them. But our longing is our pledge, and blessed are the homesick, for they shall come home. View quote
Karen Blixen
I'm a man with a mission in two or three editions And I'm giving you a longing look Everyday, everyday, everyday I write the book. View quote
Elvis Costello
Entirety exists within me as exuberance in empty longing in the desire to burn with desire. View quote
Georges Bataille
The longing we have to communicate cleanly and directly with people is always obstructed by qualifications and often with concern about how our messages will be received. View quote
John le Carré
Sweet April-time - O cruel April-time! Year after year returning, with a brow Of promise, and red lips with longing paled, And backward-hidden hands that clutch the joys Of vanished springs, like flowers. View quote
Dinah Craik
Tired of myself longing for what I have not. View quote
Samuel Richardson
The only way to get rid of temptation is to yield to it. Resist it, and your soul grows sick with longing for the things it has forbidden to itself. View quote
Oscar Wilde
I think, then, that man, after having satisfied his first longing for facts, wanted something fuller - some grouping, some adaptation to his capacity and experience, of the links of this vast chain of events which his sight could not take in. View quote
Alfred de Vigny
Longing on a large scale makes history. View quote
Don DeLillo
For who to dumb Forgetfulness a prey, This pleasing anxious being e'er resigned, Left the warm precincts of the cheerful day, Nor cast one longing ling'ring look behind? (Thomas Gray)
The cosmos exploded, actualizing its potentiality of space and time. The centers of power, like fragments of a bursting bomb, were hurled apart. But each one retained in itself, as a memory and a longing, the single spirit of the whole; and each mirrored in itself aspects of all the others throughout all the cosmical space and time. View quote
Olaf Stapledon
What are the stars but points in the body of God where we insert the healing needles of our terror and longing? View quote
Thomas Pynchon
Could it be that sexual perversion and romanticism sprang from the same longing for distant horizons? View quote
Colin Wilson
There were profound reasons for his attachment to the sea: he loved it because as a hard-working artist he needed rest, needed to escape from the demanding complexity of phenomena and lie hidden on the bosom of the simple and tremendous; because of a forbidden longing deep within him that ran quite contrary to his life's task and was for that very reason seductive, a longing for the unarticulated and immeasurable, for eternity, for nothingness. To rest in the arms of perfection is the desire of any man intent upon creating excellence; and is not nothingness a form of perfection? View quote
Thomas Mann
Some people never say the words 'I love you'. It's not their style to be so bold. Some people never say those words 'I love you' But, like a child, they're longing to be told. View quote
Paul Simon
Devotion, fervor, longing! Those are my pillars. We have to be the bridge to the future. View quote
Joseph Goebbels
I want a heart which is split, part by part, because of the pain of separation from God, so that I might explain my longing and complaint to it. View quote
Rumi
That which they call love, it is nothing except the pain of longing. View quote
Walther von der Vogelweide
Things always seem fairer when we look back at them, and it is out of that inaccessible tower of the past that Longing leans and beckons. View quote
James Russell Lowell
Women have always been the strong ones of the world. The men are always seeking from women a little pillow to put their heads down on. They are always longing for the mother who held them as infants. (Coco Chanel)
What is becoming more interesting than the myths themselves has been the study of how the myths were constructed from sparse or unpromising facts indeed, sometimes from no facts in a kind of mute conspiracy of longing, very rarely under anybody's conscious control. View quote
Arthur C. Clarke
Your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself. They came through you but not from you and though they are with you yet they belong not to you. View quote
Kahlil Gibran
In spite of the pangs of travail, the longing for motherhood remains the most powerful instinct in woman. View quote
Joseph H. Hertz
Every natural longing has its natural satisfaction. If we thirst, God has created liquid to gratify thirst. If we are susceptible of attachment, there are beings to gratify that love. If we thirst for life and love eternal, it is likely there are an eternal life and an eternal love to satisfy that craving. View quote
Frederick William Robertson